Love Is All Around You

There's a radio station in Colorado called "Jack FM 105.5" which is an all encompessing, "play what we want" type of station. And they, quite literally do play whatever one can think of. I've heard everything from 60's & 70's arena rock, classic rock, 80's/90's everything and even some more recent hip hop and pop classics from the past 8 years. I love it, I feel like I can almost always find something on that station if I've grown tired of everything else and my iPod is at home charging.

Today on that station, I heard "Love Song" by Tesla and my eyes welled up instantly.

I first heard this song on ZRock in 1990 I want to say, or there abouts. It was this horrible quality AM station that you could only listen to between the hours of 10 PM and 6 AM, I could also only get reception if my radio was in the farthest corner of my room, next to the window. I listened religiously, loosing lots of sleep just waiting to hear what was going on in the rock scene. The first time I heard bands like GNR, Metallica, Slayer (ick) and Motley Crue were on that station and I was hooked immediately. They also played all the old Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin from back in the day so that was a bonus since I was into all that then too. The hair bands hadn't quite been accepted at that point into this more hard core metal, so Poison and the likes were kind of shunned and made fun of. "POSERS!" sigh. That makes me laugh to even say that now. However, someone on that station must've seen some value in Tesla's music, even though they were considerably softer and being played on standard radio pretty regularly. And one night, they played the entire "The Great Radio Controversy" at about 2 in the morning and I recorded it on cassette tape. The sound quality was atrocious, wickedly bad, but it became my tape of the hour and it was in my walkman for quite some time after that first night.

Fast forward about a year, Kristen and I become good friends instantly and music was a way in which we bonded. One night, a little drunk and being bad (sorry whomever is reading this might be offended by that) we went down in her mom's basement and drank and started going through all of our collective tapes. We had at least 10 of the same tapes, including the original "Purple Rain" by Prince and "She Bop" by Cindy Lauper, which by then we'd been hiding from our friends and boyfriends, because that was too uncool at that point. Tesla's "Love Song" came on ZRock at exactly the right moment and we both (again, pretty drunk by this point) began singing this at the top of our lungs. The bond was sealed forever more :)

Ever since, I can tell you that when I hear it I smile. And cry also. Because the irony of this song is that it's one that holds a message I could relate to at 15 years old and again at 20 something and again now at 32. At 15, it was that I was getting over whatever boy at the time I'd decided wasn't cool enough to hang out with "us" then (we were SO shallow it's embarrassing now) at 20 something it just reminded me of that night with Kristen and how much I cherish it and her and now, it's hard for me to ignore this very universal message:

"Love is all around you"
"Love will find it's way back to you"

It's hard for me not to cry over the simplicity of that and how good it feels to hear those words again. I thought I'd lost them. I thought I'd lost that part of me that practically worships the idea of universal love and compassion. Thank you Jack FM! You made my whole day.

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