If I were to describe myself and the passion I have for a certain kind of music, I would have to describe me as a “die-hard” fan. Most of us know there is a Die-Hard® battery in the US but I wonder how many of you out there really understand what the phrase ‘die-hard’ means. I’m going to dedicate this piece to the meaning of die-hard and how it may apply to you and to me. Buckle your seat belts, hang on to the guy in front of you and don’t open the windows in excess of 200 darlis (fast) per hour. We’re going to speed back and forth through time and get a picture of ‘die-hard.’

The dictionary defines die-hard as “strongly or fanatically determined (like a die-hard fan); something that strongly resists change (like some people in the US).” Many young people (ages 10 to 17) and many young adults (18 to 29) are fanatics about music. No, I’m not leaving out the remnants of the ‘hippie’ age or even the leftover ‘beatniks.’ I realize there are many objects for us as people to become fanatical about but this paper is just about music.

Many of you readers will remember when Elvis Presley hit the music scene around 1952 or 3 and what he did to the music industry. He literally turned it upside down. His music was almost always at the top end of the music charts. When many of the young people I went to school with back then would hear his music, they would always scream and yell and girls were fainting in the school yards. Die-hard fans. Nothing would deter them from the object of their passions. Elvis was the coolest to ever walk or wriggle, whether it was on earth or in outer space. His movies had the young girls swooning, screaming and making it so that the older folks (35 to 60) could not hear anything in the theater. Die-hard fans. The boys wanted to join the girls but boys don’t do those kinds of things (in public).

Then came Bobby Dylan. This is where music hit me right between the running lights. I memorized every song of Bobby’s that hit the charts. I even have some now that were never released back then; they were released, recently, on a special CD. Among other college people, we were the die-hard fans; the ones who swooned in our own way, not like the teenaged girls. We had a secret code of what ‘turned us on’ and off, and only the “in-crowd” knew what was going down at that time. Bobby was the craze; Bobby had something to say about the age in which we lived. But as you all know, just before Mr. Dylan rose to fame, the Beatles were already migrating from Liverpool to the United States.

If you thought there were die-hard fans for Elvis, they were sand-box toys compared to what the Beatles engendered. My goodness. I read testimony after testimony of young girls who were close enough to their favorite Beatle to touch him… just touch him and that brief event turned their young lives around in amazing ways. These lucky girls would sit down with pen in hand and write a letter to the newspaper in their home town, describing the feeling of ‘touching’ their favorite Beatle. If I had been the father of a teenage girl back then, I honestly don’t know what I would have done with my daughter. Die-hard fans. And you know that the music from all these people and many others, is still here with us, today. But where does this take you to know about what my special music is. Talk about a die-hard fan… hmmm… I swoon, I yell and scream but I don’t try to get close enough to my favorite artists to turn my life around with just one touch. However, there is an ecstasy into which I enter when I listen to the Moody Blues.
I have just recently learned that this group of guys is on YouTube. I think I have watched all of their videos, singing most of the songs I love so much. What fascinates me is to watch Justin Hayward make the sounds on his guitar that have rattled my senses since 1967. To watch these guys performing, I need to be alone. I try to do this when my wife is not in the house. Why? I’m a crybaby. And when I hear the MB, I cry, instantly. There is no pre-empting of emotions; nothing that warns me; if I hear their music, I cry. The two events unmistakably follow like day after night, like 2 after 1. Moody Blues=tears. Die-hard fan? You better believe it. And I’m proud of it.

I don’t have MB posters up in my study; I don’t have autographed photos hanging on my walls, I have memories. I know where I was when each of their songs came out. I remember how carried away with emotion I was when I listened to them at school (yes, I was on a college campus in 1967). I cried, even then. Nothing could stop the tears from flowing. I don’t know what it was that caused this reaction in me at the sound of their music. But I loved them then, and I love them now. It’s just one more than 40 years since I heard them the first time. But they do not look the same now as they did then in those days. They look so much older than me… but if I don’t see them and just listen, there is no difference. A die-hard fan? Cast in concrete!!

Whether it’s batteries or music lovers, there have been, there are now and I have no doubt that there always will be die-hards: fans of anything that turns people on and pumps up the emotions that takes them on a whirlwind flight through time and space, whether it’s soccer in Brazil or the Moody Blues in the US. There is nothing wrong with die-hard fans. It’s just the mess they leave behind after the show is over, that someone else has to clean up.