Somewhere Back in Time: Redux

The other day, my friend Ned posted on Facebook that it was evidently the 30th anniversary of the release of Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden. I dutifully replied that I vividly remembered purchasing the LP in question at a long-since-defunct record shop in Westhampton Beach, L.I. and blasting the paint off the house my parents had rented that summer with round-the-clock airings of “Flight of Icarus,” “Die With Your Boots On” and -- wait for it -- “The Trooper.” Good times.

As it happened, however, I’d managed to fail geometry that previous semester in high school. Bad times. As a result, I was forced to attend summer school. For that, I was shipped off to Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island for a month or two. Back in 2008, I wrote a much more detailed post about that whole experience, including how my ardent love for both Iron Maiden and – with arguably incongruity – Devo helped get me through it all. Read that post here.

In any case, in a weird moment of synchronicity, Ned’s note had me dialing up a selection of Iron Maiden on my iTunes while I was thumbing through one of the last few piles of random photographs prized from my since-closed storage space. In doing so, I came across the shot below. While not a notable photograph out of context, this photo of my dorm room at Portsmouth Abbey that summer handily encapsulates my frame of mind at the time. The poster that came with Devo’s New Traditionalists is out of shot, but I’m quite fond of the dot matrix banner spelling out DEVO that I hung over the poster of the Sex Pistols, flanked by the obligatory `Maiden poster.