Battalion Of Saints

In an important attempt to place a time on just what it was that pushed my friend Jack and I across the tracks to bad-assville, it could only have been the photographs. And I think a good guess would be photos we ogled in Spin magazine.
Why Spin? Well, for that answer, I've got to back track a little.

Rolling Stone was my mainline through- out much if not all of the 70s. Creem was important too but in more of a comic book sort of way. And here it was a Detroit publication. You'd think, being from Michigan, I'd show a little solidarity. But in fact, in the late seventies, it was probably Creem that somehow led me to Trouser Press, which at the time, I thought was much darker in tone with all this hoopla over the "punk" movement in London and New York. Scary, disenchanting stuff for a young buck in his early 20s from a farm town of 3,000. But, like a car wreck, I still looked.

For me, in the early 80s, Rolling Stone had lost much of it's luster, but not enough to stop picking it up twice a month.
Then, in 1985, Spin magazine announced itself to the masses. I have to admit, I wasn't quite ready to have this shiney new rag from the son of the vice president of soft porn knock Jann Wenner off the porcelain lounger. But it was good, in many different ways it was good. And like the music scene at the time, it was transformative. Punk, new wave(punk light), country, hip hop, jazz and folk all mixed and siphoned through college radio. At that time, Spin was commercially expanding on reems and reems of what Rolling Stone wasn't. And the Photos....

My long winded point here are the photographs. The photos more than likely from Spin magazine are what drove Jack and I to buy our first Schott Perfecto, motorcycle leathers, long before we were aware of Schott's relevance in the leather jacket pantheon. This was in the mid 80s when we bought them from an unlikely men's store in a mall in Tragic City, Michigan.

So just what the hell was all this about? Well, after some 25 years, I now work for Schott.
Funny isn't it...kind of? No?