Power Chord by Thomas Scott McKenzie

Author:Thomas Scott McKenzie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

GLENN TIPTON SAID you should play guitar from the heart. So I plugged in my B.C. Rich Warlock, the most aggressive and mean looking of my instruments, cycled through the available tones on the amplifier until I reached the setting marked “80s: Brkn the Law” and tried to get pissed the fuck off.

As I got settled, the sounds that came out of the guitar were loud and distorted, like most of heavy metal. But what characterized the Judas Priest tone was—and there’s simply no other way of describing it—a metallic quality. There’s a cold and smooth sheen to the guitars, like a coating of aluminum foil over top of the chords. It’s as if you dipped the strings of a guitar into surgical grade stainless steel.

“Breaking The Law” was about disillusionment, frustration, and a feeling of being trapped. The tune speaks to the economic realities of people who have gotten the degree, or put in the time at the factory, only to discover there’s nothing waiting. The narrator of the song turns to criminal activity, both for illicit thrills as well as expression of a certain class anger. My own criminal history was pretty lackluster, aside from some petty teenage shenanigans stealing road signs. So I had nothing from the police blotter to use as reference.

However, I had plenty of class rage to draw on.

As a child, my family occupied a murky financial borderland between the haves and the have-nots. Horse racing is a rich man’s sport. So the fact that my father worked in that business placed us in certain mint julep circles. But the fact that we had a small farm with no employees and we shoveled shit all day put us into the category of blue-collar workers who remove their stinking shirt at the end of a sweaty day and drive home in a primered El Camino with the windows down and Merle Haggard on the radio.

As a result, I attended cotillions and debutante-type functions but had to bag groceries to pay for my outfits. And in college and graduate school, I maintained a jam-packed schedule of jobs to pay for tuition and rent. One of the more infuriating gigs—but at the same time, hilarious—was my job as a humanities tutor for a highly successful firm in Oxford, Mississippi.

This was before the Internet and before the large chain tutoring companies like Kaplan. A man in his fifties named J. J. Jones had previously been employed at the university before offering ACT and SAT test prep to high schools throughout North and Central Mississippi. And tutoring college kids was a brisk enterprise as well.

J. J. accomplished two major breakthroughs that ensured his tutoring business would succeed. First, he generated enough cash flow so he didn’t need students to pay when the tutoring session was complete. Instead, they could sling a signature on a piece of paper and the bill would go home to Mom and Dad. The students would frequently lose track of their total account and wealthy families throughout the South bragged about little Jenny’s hard work in chemistry.

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