A long-haired poseur who sang in a local group held court in the Bethel High School cafeteria, acting every part the leading light on all things contemporary rock. He asked me what bands I liked. Everyone in his clique had agreed to worship Yes, the British prog-rock messiahs.

My feelings about Yes were decidedly mixed. I had bought the three-disc live album Yessongs, and I recognized the mastery of songcraft evinced by these musos in capes. But too much of the playing was endless guitar-scale noodle-core for my tastes.

“They’re all right, I suppose …”

—I said, my true feelings evident in my voice.

I had attended my very first proper concert in early 1974 at New Haven Coliseum, where I witnessed Yes’s keyboard maestro, Rick Wakeman, perform his recent album Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I had been excited to hear him play, but I found the concert interminably dull.

I didn’t relate this to my classmates.

“I’m more into theater rock”

—I said. The Yes lovers looked perplexed.

“You know … people like Alice Cooper, David Bowie … and Kiss.”

Silence.

Followed by a palpable distaste.

The Rick Wakeman show hadn’t put me off arena concerts. Soon after, I went to see Peter Frampton, supported by the J. Geils Band, whose singer Peter Wolf bounded onstage proclaiming—

“We’re gonna play ’em allllll tonight!”

This was excellent news. I had a few J. Geils Band records and had convinced myself that they were pretty damn hot. But the group played only thirty-five minutes—hardly allllll their tunes.

Kiss, on the other hand, delivered the rock ’n’ roll goods. Their self-titled debut album had showcased bucketloads of high-energy hooks, all the more evident when slotted next to whatever else was being played on the radio in the mid-1970s: the pablum of Seals & Crofts, Anne Murray, Lobo. Kiss constructed short, sharp, hard-rocking tune-grenades primarily focused on booze and sex. They looked amazing too, throwing comic-book kicks and sporting trash heaps of New York City grit and glitter.

Harold and I scored a couple of spare tickets to see Kiss an hour and a half north in Springfield, Massachusetts, hitching a ride from some high school heads we knew. White Crosses were proffered—basically prescription-grade Dexedrine—and we gobbled them down in preparation for some ripping rock ’n’ roll rambunction.

Blessed by the parking gods, we scored a space directly in front of the venue. We sat in the car smoking joints, eyeballing an increasingly lengthy queue of teenage animals awaiting entry into the arena. Suddenly, a few feet from where our car was parked, a row of side doors to the arena opened up, and all the teens who had been queuing up on the hill realized they were in the wrong place. They began to run, leaping and whooping down the lawn to the just-opened doors.

We didn’t hesitate. Dousing our doobies, we sprang from the car, running at full steam and beating the crazed horde. We became the first ticket holders to enter the building. Once inside and patted down by security, we raced at full sprint toward the massive stage, then stopped, astounded: front row center.

As Kiss was preparing to fry our brains, Harold and I got crushed ever harder up against the guardrails by the army of rabid, heaving youth behind us. It became so intense that we expected to either suffer cracked ribs, lose consciousness, or simply die. Harold looked at me in terror; he was going under, sure to be trampled or suffocated. I reached out and locked my arms under his, trying to ward off the barrage of teenage meat and bone.

Kiss finally arrived onstage, and from the outset they scorched our minds to smithereens. Bassist Gene Simmons was surrounded by flash pots that shot volcanic bursts of fire to the rafters. Close as we were, the heat singed us. It must have been even worse for Simmons, as he pummeled his monster bass. I couldn’t figure out how he endured it, his body clad in leather, streams of sweat dripping from his brow onto his Kabuki-painted cheeks. I soon deduced that it wasn’t actually sweat dripping. He seemed to have some mechanism in his ratted man bun that squirted cooling water down his face, relieving the scorch.

That—along with the huge metal wheels latched to the rafters, grinding unending reams of glitter onto our heads—made for a spectacular impression. Kiss gave everything they had, delivering a supersonic rock ’n’ roll circus to us eighteen-year-old school haters. We hung around after the show, dazed and high, as the concert hall emptied and the stage crew began to broom away the mountains of shredded glitter. A teenage girl yelled up to one of the stagehands that she had tossed a bracelet up there and that she really wanted to make sure it got to the right place—which obviously meant one of the boys in the band.

“Sure thing, sweetheart”

—he said, clearly humoring her.

Soon we were told to clear out of the venue. On the ride home I imagined the stagehand locating the girl’s bracelet in the debris and personally delivering it to Gene, Paul, Ace, or Peter. The next time they came to play Springfield, Massachusetts, that band member would yell out—

“Hey, which one of you lovely ladies threw this bracelet onstage last time we were here?”

And the teen babe, climbing onto her soon-to-be-former boyfriend’s shoulders, would scream—

“Me! It was me!”

—then get pulled up onto the stage, asked to wait by the monitor board while the band continued to shred. Afterward she would race off with them, running and laughing, hopping into their stretch limousine, which would take them to their private Kiss jet, where tall cans of ice-cold Coors flowed like holy water, and away they would fly, instantly married forever in hot rock ’n’ roll Kiss-tasy.

Going to see Blue Öyster Cult in Rockland County, New York, later that year would prove not to be so transformative. The band soldiered through their set, pulling all their classic moves—guitars held high, necks crossed in a heavy metal X. But the show was held in an open-pit venue, where teenage douchebags spat Boone’s Farm wine on each other and threw lit M-80 fireworks randomly into the air. Stoned and drunken fistfights broke out, the slobbering ding-dongs approaching Harold and me—

“The fuck you fags looking at?”

We eventually got the hell out of there, shell-shocked and dismayed.

On Friday, March 19, 1976, three months before I was to graduate high school, Harold zoomed over to me in the school parking lot as the day’s classes came to an end. He was already laughing, knowing I was the only other person in town who could understand his enthusiasm—

“Patti Smith is playing in Westport tonight!”

Now was the time.

Since her first poetry reading in 1971 at the Poetry Project in New York City, opening for Gerard Malanga (Velvet Underground whip dancer, Andy Warhol silk-screener, photographer, and poet), Patti Smith had become the gateway drug into everything punk rock promised: an alternative state of creative consciousness. Her performances, accompanied by rock writer and guitarist Lenny Kaye, on bills with the New York Dolls at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center, and her downtown theater appearances with radical playwright Sam Shepard, had her name on everyone’s lips.

Patti had organically made manifest the persona of whatever punk was going to be. Her appearance was androgynous, and she stripped rock ’n’ roll down to its essence, a movement of pure poetry and passion, taking risks, defying expectations, resisting stereotypes, exalting spirituality—and asking no one’s permission to do so.

Her journalism in music magazines, her books of small press poetry, her black-and-white countenance among the peacocks of glam rock—all spoke to a new heart for an intellectually charged subculture. Patti Smith exemplified punk rock as art, both beautiful and ugly, a timeless expression of convulsive energy.

There was no way I was going to miss this concert.

I was able to corral a few other teens looking for something—anything—to do. We crammed into one of their cars and proceeded to careen at high speed for forty-five white-knuckle minutes through winding single-lane Connecticut roads to reach the Westport Country Playhouse.

Patti strolled out in a black leather jacket, which she tore off and tossed onto the drum riser. The group leaped into the Velvet Underground’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” in homage to the coolest underground rock ’n’ roll band of all time. Pumping her skinny porcelain-white fists into the air, she exclaimed her version of Lou Reed’s ode to rock ’n’ roll love—