When Sam Philips was a kid, he’d dreamed of being a rock star, playing guitar in a rock band like Dokken, Mötley Crüe, or Guns N’ Roses. Those awesome bands he’d seen on MTV, on Headbanger’s Ball, those heavy metal icons he idolized.
It was all he could imagine being. All he wanted since he could remember. His very first memory being him seeing an Ozzy Osbourne video on MTV. His face glued curiously to the TV, he’d gazed at the screen in awe, mesmerized by Randy Rhoades’ guitar playing, and he knew, that was it. That’s what he wanted to be.
He’d watch MTV, every day, and he danced, headbanged and sang along to the hits and strummed a broomstick, pretending it was a Les Paul, and banged on pots and pans, pretending he was Tommy Lee.
Later, at age 11, he saved up his allowance and cash from his paper route and bought a candy apple green BC Rich guitar and a crappy amp and distortion pedal from a pawnshop.
Then he spent hours in his tiny bedroom, perfecting his licks, reading tablature from guitar magazines, and he was soon composing his own metal tunes, his own anthems, songs that’d one day be massive hits. His signature tune being “Rock N’
Roll Bitch.”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer He’d chased the dream for years. His garage bands in high school and college had sent off demos to record labels, but, alas, they’d never gone anywhere, didn’t even garner any rejection letters from most of the labels, except for one from TVT
Records, that’d had his band’s name misspelled.
With his last band in college, they thought maybe their big break would arrive when their drummer handed the band’s demo to rock legend Axl Rose. Axl had been staying at their city’s local luxury hotel, where Sam’s drummer worked as a bellboy.
Axl was alone and was dressed in a baggy Public Enemy shirt and tight-fitting leather pants and was sitting down to eat brunch in the hotel’s restaurant.
The drummer tiptoed up to Axl’s table and adoringly lifted his head up to Axl, in reverence, like it was Jesus Himself. The drummer, smiling widely, and with his hands shaking, his voice cracking, then nervously introduced his band and handed the demo tape to the rock god.
But Axl didn’t share any smiles. Instead, Axl jarred to his feet, sneered and growled, let loose a barrage of curse words and invective and snatched and threw the demo tape to the restaurant’s marble floor and stomped on the tape with his snakeskin boot, bashed it to bits and loudly suggested the drummer to “fuck off!”
and then sat down and coolly ate his brunch in solitude.
Nearby diners gawked, pointed, and gasped in horror, murmured. A snooty manager in a tuxedo swiftly swooped in and led the drummer away, roughly, by the arm and the drummer was immediately fired from his job at the hotel.
By the end of Sam’s college days, his band was going nowhere. They’d been playing crappy half-empty dive bars and dead parties, often getting booed off stage.
Everyone wanted to hear rap, it’d seemed. That’s where popular music was going.
It’d been shifting directions, towards rap and away from rock for a while.
Sam was up to his eyeballs in student loans, too. But, fortunately for him, numbers and math had always come easily to him, and he’d cruised through accounting classes with ease, had taken up the subject as his major. After graduating college, with a degree in accounting, he made the most difficult decision of his young life.
He decided to sell out. Join the rat race. Do what he never wanted.
He abandoned his dreams of being a rock star, got a haircut, and joined the corporate world after receiving a generous, 70k per year job offer from a major accounting firm.
Sam bought a set of three-piece suits, loafers, and neckties and began his 9–5, cubicle job. Soon after, he found a wife, a petite, attractive blond who’d been a secretary at his office.
He worked his way up the rungs of the corporate ladder and lived a conventional upper-middle class American existence.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer He wore cufflinks. He bought a big house in the suburbs. He got a purebred dog.
He got a bright red BMW 5 Series.
Sam had friends he’d play poker with every Saturday night. Sam even built a stereotypical man cave in an addition to the house. It had rock and sports memorabilia, a big screen TV, comfy massage chairs, a pool table, Pac-Man arcade game, foosball, all the necessary accoutrements…