Rage and Melody

Excerpt from Bob Mould's See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody (2011):

As a child in rural northern New York State, I had a number of interests and hobbies, but only two passions:  music and professional wrestling.  I discovered wrestling at an early age, and once I saw it, I was hooked.  Some kids had Batman, others had the Lone Ranger, but pro wrestling was my action-adventure series.  My first exposure to it was when I was eleven, through Montreal TV stations, and I've followed it ever since.

As a youngster, I was drawn to it for the obvious reasons:  the drama spoke to the young man growing inside of me, waiting to be released.  Not unlike most school sports, pro wrestling spoke to the desire to have contact and intimacy with others, not necessarily in a sexual sense, but in a healthy, competitive manner.  Pro wrestling has always been predicated on good versus evil.  The wrestlers on TV were larger than life, pitching and catching heated threats of destruction, humiliation, and retribution.  Sometimes it was simply about who was the better man, other times it might involve a piece of stolen or destroyed personal property, and, on rare occasions, it was about the betrayal of a best friend.

I used to buy wrestling magazines at the neighborhood pharmacy, and every few months my father would drive me to the matches at the Montreal Forum, an hour and a half away, with our usual stop for hot dogs and poutine.   If there was wrestling anywhere within fifty miles of Malone, I would ask to go.  I studied wrestling like other kids study baseball cards--immersing myself as deep as I could, gathering as much information as I could find.   Some of the wrestling magazines focused heavily on match results, and I would read these results over and over until I memorized them--much as I'd done with the label copy on seven-inch singles.