I remember myself playing with soccer action figures ripped away from several birthday cakes, on a blanket on which I had drawn a soccer field with an indelible marker, while this song sounded in the boombox that my younger brother had bought with his savings a few weeks earlier. Perhaps the sound was so loud that it provoked the windows cracked.
I was on my knees beside my bed, feeling ashamed of behaving like a kid. The door was locked and the boombox was playing Use Your Illusion II.
I didn't want to be disturbed nor to be discovered. I felt so guilty. I felt divided in two personalities: a playful kid, attracted to silly toys, and a rebel teenager, attracted to the tough world of rock n' roll music.
While Izzi's voice sang something about what seemed to be his teenager life, I was focused in recreating a soccer match with these soccer action figures I had started to collect in junior high school.
Since my brothers were born in the same month of different years, sometimes my parents celebrated their birthdays in the same day. A few years before I discovered Guns N' Roses on TV, they did so.
By that time, it happened that I'd just begun to play in the soccer team of elementary school and I'd just begun to watch soccer matches on TV, so I had a soccer fever.
That birthday my parents gave in to my whims –my brothers didn't complain at all– and they bought a soccer birthday cake. From then I'd asked my dad almost once per month to take me to the cake shop and to buy me some other soccer action figures. Once in a while my dad had accepted. He must have bought me around forty action figures without a cake. Now, it makes me feel we were some sort of partners in crime. He always did the what he thought it would be the best he could do for me.
I'd discovered this dangerous band one day I was so bored from having nothing to do on summer holidays that I decided to turn on the TV. Boredom coincided with a music video called “Estranged”.
It was an incredibly crazy video. It included clips of a rock n' roll band concert in the old Munich Olympic Stadium and tattooed tough guys walking thru the streets, smoking with fantastic women in bars, descending from an enormous airplane, playing a terrific guitar solo in the middle of a storm in the ocean, jumping from a big fishing ship and swimming with a dolphin*.
This eccentric video lasted almost ten minutes and it was supposed to tell a chaotic story of a troubled man named Axl Rose, who, apparently, tried to hide from police in the closet of a mansion and also tried to overcome the rejection of a woman he loved desperately.
While “14 Years” sounded, I made a pause from my silly entertainment and begun to pay attention to the lyrics and to the music. It was raining outside. It must be one of the last days of summer. It must be Sunday. I'm pretty sure that the next day it would be my first day in senior high school. I was so excited.
I was about to celebrate my fourteenth birthday on December. I wanted to quit my childhood, but it was so comfortable. A few hours earlier, my dad had drove us my brother and myself to the record store of the neighborhood.
At the record store, I had looked desperately for the section of the Guns N' Roses albums' and, particularly, for the album on which “Estranged” appeared. I was obsessed with the song. It had transmitted me feelings I had never experienced with music.
Finally, I had found the album and I had bought it on cassette. It was 1994 and I guess compact discs were rare. I'm not even sure if they were available by then. Vinyls, as nowadays, were so expensive.
While it was raining outside and I was locked in the bedroom I shared with my brother, I was listening to it for the first time. It was a rad experience. Though my interest was to listen “Estranged” with high quality –I was so obsessed with the song, that I had recorded it several times from the music video directly from TV, and the sound totally sucked 'cause the boombox had also recorded the environmental hissings and the sounds of the living room–, this song caught my attention.
I thought it told a story of a guy like me, trying to leave behind his childhood and trying to fake he was a man. I was so innocent.
This morning, as I wrote this post, I just read on the internet what fans around the world think this song is about. They seem to be convinced that Izzi Stradlin tells the story of Guns N' Roses. Apparently, it took them fourteen years to become the biggest band they became right after Appetite For Destruction was released on July 21st, 1987. Other fans are convinced that Izzi tells the story of his fourteen-year friendship with Axl.
Regardless of what they speculate, as I listen “14 Years” for a countless time –a few weeks earlier, I started to play it on guitar and I was so surprised that the chords are not a pain in the neck–, I prefer to believe it is about what I thought it was about, when I was about to have my first day in senior high school and when I was about to celebrate my fourteenth birthday.
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*Ironically, by the time “Estranged” was filmed, Izzi had quit the band.
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