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feel bad about.
    And let me take this a step further: if you want to know what people were thinking and feeling and dreaming in 1981, if you’re curious about the emotional tenor of that particular slice of our history,
PT
is much more useful than any of the enduring LPs of that time,
Sandinista!
by the Clash, for instance, or U2’s
October
. That’s what makes it a classic. I still feel good when I listen to
Paradise Theater
. I feel I have, in some obscure manner, grappled with civilization and its discontents. I have registered my protest to the unkind march of time and danced the robot while doing so.
    Critics never had much patience for Styx. They were the
apotheosis of late seventies prog-pop mediocrity
, and so forth. Nor has history been kind. Styx has become the mullet of bands. The band’s real crime is not that they were too eager to please—though they were certainlythat—but that they were too effective at pleasing. They got people to sing along. We all have a Styx in our closet, at least one. (Supertramp, anyone? Hootie & the Blowfish?) They’re reminders of who we used to be, as surely as the feathered hair and Lycra bodysuits that haunt our old photo albums.
    But my larger point is that there’s no angle in hating on a particular song or band or genre. Our species is adaptable. That’s our evolutionary trump card. If the human ear is given a chance, not cowed into snobbery, it can find rewards in almost any form of music. I think here of a line by Robert Christgau, who for many years represented the gold standard of rock critic snark. Assessing the work of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s
Brain Salad Surgery
, he wrote, “The sound is so crystalline you can hear the gism as it drips off the microphone.” The line is funny, an appropriate epitaph for a trio that was Spinal Tappish in its pretense. But when I think about that album what I remember is sitting around with my pal Dale McCourt, listening to the endless onanistic glissandos and howled couplets of “Karn Evil 9” (“Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends!”). We loved that song. And there’s no arguing with joy.

Moving in Stereo
    In 1984, I left California for Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, ready to embrace the incredibly exciting musical options available to nascent Fanatics. Such as, for instance, Wang Chung and Wham! and Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias and all the girls that Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias had loved before, though presumably not at the same time. Madonna’s undergarments were on MTV. Michael Jackson’s head was on fire. Corey Hart was wearing his sunglasses at night. It was a confusing time.
    I immediately fell in with the most confused guys on my freshman hall. Eric was a ska/punk aficionado (a skunker?) who tromped about in trench coat and porkpie hat, simmering with vaguely proletarian indignation. His favorite band was an obscure quartet called the Reducers, coastal Connecticut’s answer to the Ramones. Davey was a math geek from central Jersey, with all the charisma that description implies. His hero was Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel (also known as You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath). Industrial music, it was called.
    We were all desperate for a show on the college station, WESU, but the orientation session was presided over by a cabal of pimpledupperclassmen who gave precedence to nubile frosh. Davey knew somebody who knew somebody, so he got a gig subbing on the overnight shift. I joined him in-studio, though he never let me talk into the mic, a foul-smelling lead device that hung pornishly over the soundboard. I was there to fetch him records, a pointless task given that all he ever played was Foetus, along with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s amphetamized cover of “Born to Run,” which we both adored.
    I can’t remember a single class I took my first two years of college, let alone the ideas I was supposed to be absorbing. But I can remember with piercing aural precision my