Terrible Teen Tees

When I was a teenager, my favourite clothes to wear were my band shirts and tour shirts. I had a small collection of them, and they represented my favourite musicians at the time. Most were harmless enough, but I had a few that raised eyebrows in my home. It was mostly my dad who narrowed his eyes at me whenever I appeared wearing one of my metal tees. The objections weren't always voiced but they were implicit as he exhaled deeply through his nostrils, clenched his jaws, and glared at me. Fair enough. 

My t-shirts back in the day - I'm talking late 70's and early-to-mid-80's - included a few Rush tees, a Triumph tour shirt, and Iron Maiden and Scorpions half-sleeves. Those half-sleeves were all the rage around that time, and it's kind of cool to see the style has come back.

I declared my allegiance to Rush by wearing a tee like this back in high school...

classmates either loved it or hated it (the same way they either loved or hated Rush)

A few of my Rush shirts were bootlegs, one of which I picked up just down the street from Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, where I had just seen the band perform... um, this was early 80's, by the way. The design was eye-catching - the prog-rock trio in action - and the price felt easier on my wallet. I also had a 2112 album cover design (band name plus the 2112 numerals above the shimmering red star) shirt and a snappy "man in the star" shirt. I got those from a funky below-street-level Toronto shop called Flash Jacks... a fave haunt of mine whenever I visited the big city. I wore all of those tees on a regular basis until I finally bought myself an official tour shirt when I saw Rush at their Grace Under Pressure show in T.O. The slick, abstract image from that GUP album cover was striking, and that tee became my favourite. All those shirts were retired as I grew out of them. Hey, I was a tall teen with some growing to do still. 

Of those Rush shirts, I think only the "starman" one got some stares from the father unit. After all, there's a naked guy standing there with his butt in full view. Any parent would question why their son would want to wear such a thing. But the folks saw this picture with no context to help explain its meaning; the image, of course represented the oppressed hero of the 2112 epic tale. I never bothered to enlighten them about this. They didn't ask... and probably just raised an eyebrow behind my back.

My Triumph shirt was from the Allied Forces tour... my very first large venue concert ever. I was a huge Triumph fan, almost as avid about them as I was for Rush. So a tour shirt was a given, as was a tour program and a button. I seem to recall that shirt didn't weather the laundry washings very well and didn't last me nearly as long as I would have liked. Anyway, its glistening chrome-like Flying V guitar image was far from controversial. A nice, safe rock shirt.

The Iron Maiden shirt I owned was another story... the brightly rendered painting of a giant grinning, re-animated corpse (Maiden's mascot Eddie, of course) hovering over a naked, red-skinned devil (could it be... Satan?) was a bit much for the Dadster. My memory is foggy on how it went down when the old man first saw this shirt, but I'd wager he eyeballed it with disgust, sighed in exasperation, and muttered something some expletive under his breath. No big confrontation; just bewilderment and disappointment in his first born. Fair enough. I simply made a point of not wearing that tee around the old fellah, just to save him some grief from my garish and ghoulish clothing choices. 

My Maiden baseball (or half-sleeve) style Number of the Beast

shirt back in the early 80's looked something like this. A fine

addition to any metalhead's wardrobe..

My Scorpions tee sported the big, bold graphic from the cover of their Blackout album: a mustachioed and bandaged man (a self-portrait of the artist, actually) screaming behind a sheet of shattering glass... oh, and he's got forks bent around his head so that the points go into his eyes. Lovely! I really liked that shirt... it was imperative that I display my loyalty to this German metal band. I was a big fan of their heavier late-70's-through-mid-80's music, and it wasn't until the late 80's that I grew unhappy with their new tunes. Anyway, again, the imagery on this band shirt was shocking enough that the head of the household disapproved... very obviously, if not loudly. 

My tastes in music never really led me to wear T-shirts any more outrageous than those couple, though. At the time, I wasn't into the more extreme metal. Not yet. No disturbing satanic graphics like those of Slayer... or worse. It wasn't until years later, when I was out living on my own, that I did get myself Metallica, Megadeth, and Black Sabbath tees. And even those were rather restrained. The older I get, the less ghoulish I want my band tees - I prefer something clean and simple, like a band logo, and not much else.