Ah, high school. For me, it was 1976 - 1979, in Golden, Colorado. I started at Wheatridge High but transferred as a Junior to Golden; I was living in an unincorporated area of Jefferson County and we could choose which school we wanted to go to. I liked the laid-back Golden attitude better..
I had a 1972 Chevy Vega which I bought with the money I earned working at a gas station; I had a full-time job since I was 15; working nights and weekends while going to school. It only burned about a quart of oil a week! Gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon.
It was during high school that my musical tastes went wonky. I used to listen to the popular FM stations of the time, and Top-40 was what we all liked. But driving back and forth to school in the mornings, I discovered a small pirate radio station that played 'strange' music. Different things. I heard punk for the first time, and ska and lots of other types of music that I had never heard before. The station had an advertiser; Wax Trax records in Denver on Pearl street. It was run by a couple of ladies and their cats, and it was incredible. It was what we would today call a hipster scene, but back then, without irony. These were truly hip people, playing truly hip music. I was soon into everything from Blues to Bluegrass, Ska to Punk, New Age to New Wave. Electronica, Prog Rock (little-known bands, not just the popular ones) and wild instrumentalists too. Lots of cut-outs and radio-station promos that had been tossed out - bands that just didn't make it, but many of them were still cool.
Maybe because of that, I went off the charts at high school. My dad bought me an old pawn-shop Canon SLR camera and I spent my days taking photos, working in the school darkroom, doing more or less whatever I wanted. My senior year, I more or less quit going to classes. I signed up, and showed up once in a while, but I didn't take tests, do homework, attend lectures, or much of anything. My teachers would scold me, but they never flunked me. My GPA dropped from a straight A to all C's, but it was good enough to graduate (no chance of a college scholarship, though).
I wasn't part of any of the cliques. We had the cowboys ('goat ropers' as we called them then), the jocks, the straights, and the freaks ('dope smokers'). I wasn't part of any of those, but I hung out with the freaks and the straights sometimes.
The cowboys drove pickup trucks with rifle racks in the back windows and rifles, shotguns, and bows and crossbows in them in plain sight. Back then, nobody would freak out when seeing them, and people didn't break into trucks and steal them where I lived.
The freaks hung out in the 'smoking pit' and smoked cigarettes all day, and most of them had long hair and we assumed the probably smoked a lot of dope.
The jocks lifted weights and played football. There was no other sport. And they all wanted to be part of the 'Demon 300' club and get a jacket - it meant they could bench-press 300 pounds. And freshmen.
The straights went to class, I guess. Weird.
A couple of my friends and I were old-enough looking to pass for 18, and the drinking age for 3.2% beer was 18 in Colorado at the time, so we often had a six-pack in the back seat cooler of my car; at lunch we'd get buzzed before heading back to class (or just hanging around taking photos, as I did).
The popular kids used to party up in the mountains at Tunnel 1 or Tunnel 2, which were tunnels carved through the mountains between Golden and Central City (an old mining town, now a casino town). I went one once, it wasn't much fun and I saw a couple cowboys fighting each other and my friends and I left. One of the popular cowboys in an auto shop class I was in rolled his pickup truck coming down the mountain from one of the parties and was killed; that kind of put a damper on the parties anyway.
In the summer time, my friends and I went to the downtown Denver Ogden Theater and watched Rocky Horror Picture show at midnight ever single Saturday night for three straight years. I know all the words and all the audience participation lines. I even dressed up as Eddie (Meatloaf) once or twice.
I saw Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, and lots of other live acts at the McNichols Auditorium in Denver (Big Mac as they called it) years before they tore it down. People used to be so stoned at those concerts that I swear you could get a contact high from being in the cheap seats; nobody cared if you were smoking dope, and lots of people were passing joints to total strangers just to be friendly. Some of the joints were laced with something; sometimes you'd see a line of people where a joint had been passed that were all passed out and could not move after the show was over and the lights came on. My ears usually rang for three days after a concert; they didn't have rules on decibel levels then.
For hobbies, I liked working on my car, trying to improve the stereo system in it (I had no money and some odd ideas about what sounded good), photography, and my home home stereo system, which consisted of cheap parts I had pieced together. I had a used harman/kardon 50+ quadraphonic receiver, an Akai cassette deck, a Toshiba belt-drive turntable, and a pair of Sonic (cheap house-brand, said to be Pioneer) speakers. I later worked at Radio Shack and bought a pair of the Minimus 7 speakers on special there; they sounded better than the Sonic brand bigger speakers! I even used Minimus 7 speakers on the back deck of my car as rear speakers; they worked well. Over the years, I kept coming back to that solution, by the way. Different cars, but always with a set of Minimus 7's in the back deck. I finally quit doing that when my cars started getting broken into all the time.
I didn't know many people at school. Never went to a reunion, and I only had a few good friends; most of whom I keep in touch with even today. Oddly enough, one of them is a monster audio and DIY guy and recently built his own TT and he builds tube amps all the time. He's like Kegger only he lives in Colorado.
Graduation I barely remember. I was drunk on a bottle of vodka. The next week, I joined the US Marine Corps and shortly after that, I shipped off to boot camp. That was it.
but that don't help you much. I graduated HS in Mississippi in the late 80's, the drinking age was still 18, I had a 74' BMW 2002, two great friends, and no real curfew to speak of. Good times, good times.
