You can check out anytime you like… but you can never leave…
Sunday school was scheduled for Monday evenings when I was a kid, possibly to give moms a break on laundry day. For whatever reason, I went to CCD—which stands for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (thanks, Google!)—on Monday nights during the school year and for a few weeks every summer.
Not much sunk in, of course.
Except for one lifelong lesson. If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it taboo. Not only socially taboo, but bad for your mental and physical health, soul, and reputation. Friends, you know what I’m talking about: That taboo was rock ‘n roll.
During the most profound CCD lesson of my life—I’m not overstating this—an earnest teenager with an acoustic guitar came in to warn us of the grave danger posed by The Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Now, I was just a kid, but I knew this radio-friendly hit wasn’t the work of the devil. Yes, Joe Walsh played like a demon, and looked like he was possessed by one, too. Yes, the whole thing was creepy, but it was creepy in a good way. “Hotel California” wasn’t even raunchy and creepy, like Jimmy Page at times, or campy and creepy, like KISS or Alice Cooper. “Hotel California” was sleek and aspirational, sexy and beguiling. Maybe that was the danger it posed.
Back to the CCD classroom. The earnest teenager was too terrified to strum a few chords of the devil-infused “Hotel California” on his acoustic six-string. He didn’t need to, because most of us knew the song by heart, and those who didn’t were hopeless. The teen warned us to shun the song when we heard it. Just listening to it could invite the devil into our lives. Not just the devil, but sex and drugs, too.
Mind you, he was talking to a room of eight-year-olds!
So of course I went home and pulled the album from my brother’s record collection. My palms didn’t singe on contact with the cardboard and vinyl, nor did froth appear on my lips. My head stayed firmly screwed onto my neck. I didn’t know how to make the turntable spin backwards, but even if I did I doubted that Don Henley would have said anything more sinister than “Buy this album.” Frankly, “The Planet of the Apes” was far more terrifying, and you could find those images plastered on lunchboxes and T-shirts.
Suddenly, a song that seemed pretty and slick on the radio among other pretty and slick radio hits turned into something much more powerful and subversive now that it was taboo and sinful. And I liked it.