Forgotten Classic Rock and Cheap Wine

Thanks to PJ Lifestyle readers and friends in general for all the positive comments received about this new series. Now I am really feeling the pressure to solidify the “brand,” so here goes.

But first, if you missed the inaugural post and are curious about my classic rock credentials, click here, but come back immediately or we will begin without you.

While we are waiting for the newcomers, here is the background regarding my second “forgotten” classic rock album recommendation.

It was the fall of 1972 and I was a wild-child 17 year old from Needham, Massachusetts, a close-in suburb of Boston. My senior year at Needham High had just begun when my college-bound girlfriends and I collectively declared ourselves “to cool” for the boys in our class.

This attitude led us to nearby Boston College, where on Saturday nights we would wander the dorms in search of on-going hall parties. (Harmless fun then, but I would strongly warn any school girls against doing this today.)

It was on one of those excursions I met Chuck from Ohio. Chuck was a musically hip freshman who invited me on a future date to see what he could only describe as a “new band from England.”

Little did I know I had accepted an offer to witness what I still consider to be the most profound concert experience of my entire life — David Bowie’s performance of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOPLt_m5o-0&feature=related

The colors, lights, costumes, make-up and hair, combined with the most captivating music I had ever heard, from the wildest, most spell-binding performer I had ever seen, transported me from my seat in that small theater to an interplanetary excursion.

The next day, still dazed from the experience, I marched into my local record store, bought the album and then spent countless hours in my room listening to it on the little portable record player I had won in a sewing contest. (Anyone who knows me is now howling with laughter asking, Myra, YOU won a sewing contest???)

Now for the benefit of the young’uns among us, the album’s full name was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It featured several Bowie hits like Moonage Daydream, Starman, Ziggy Stardust, and Suffragette City but to my impressionable ears every song on this album was a heavenly inspired cosmic composition because my brain was still orbiting Mars after that life-altering concert.

David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust has largely been forgotten in the age of Lady Gaga except by those corporate music chieftains at EMI/Virgin who, in June of this year, released a re-mastered “40 Anniversary Edition”  in an attempt to squeeze new revenue out of old gold.

OMG, has it really been 40 years since I saw that concert? Am I that old? Now I am really depressed and in need of some “cheap wine” to help me contemplate the fact that my life is more than half over.

A glass of Prosecco to the rescue!

This light, crisp, white Italian bubbly is the perfect prescription for my “Ziggy turns 40” induced middle-age crisis. If you have never heard of Prosecco, let me be the first to introduce you to my latest obsession.

Prosecco is an Italian sparkling wine that has become a popular alternative to the more expensive French champagnes and here is an easy way to explain the difference. If you are a wine drinker but also imbibe European sparkling mineral waters and prefer the Italian San Pellegrino to French Perrier than pick up a bottle of Prosecco during your next grocery store visit.

You can begin by trying Lunetta although I find virtually all brands of Prosecco pleasing to the taste (and to my husband’s as well.) Prices per bottle are usually $15.00 and below.

So now it is time for a “shout-out” to friends Nancy and Larry, a couple of real wine connoisseurs, (not imposters like me) who years ago brought me my first bottle of Prosecco as party gift. Immediately I asked them the same question you might have just asked, “What the heck is Prosecco?”

You will know the answer after drinking a few glasses while listening to the new 40^th anniversary edition of Ziggy Stardust. This giddy 21^st century combination is a first-class ticket on a spaceship destined for your own middle-aged “Moonage Daydream”.