Showed up at Blats at 3pm for the College Gameday Game of the Week: Iowa Hawkeyes at Iowa State Cyclones.  Our day was supposed to line up perfectly, watch the game then walk over to see Vince Neil headline Downers Grove Oktoberfest.  I brought my DJ gear to crank Motley Crue tunes at halftime and postgame.

Mother nature had other ideas for Ames on Saturday.  Lightning & hail caused hours of delays but did allow rowdy students to have some fun:

Good old fashioned college mayhem, nothing can match the fun.

The game finally restarted around 7pm, but we had to leave the house by 7:30 for a meet & greet with lead singer and & inspiration for the best music biopic Hollywood ever released, Neflix’s “The Dirt”.  Love the film because Nixxi Sixx and Crue don’t take themselves seriously.  You don’t have to sit through the scenes explaining what rare musical geniuses they were and how they blessed the world in that moment the lyrics and riff to “Don’t Go Away Mad(Just Go Away) came together.  They’re openly 4 idiots who partied balls and created some epic 80s songs.

Not long after I arrived – but before the Lucano’s pizza guy showed up – Amazon left a package.   It was a bierstick – ordered the night before so we could party like proper hair band fans.  I’d never heard of bierstick before, but it’s like a giant syringe of beer for injection directly into the mouth.  Like a beer bong with an accelerator.  I’m sure they exist on every college campus, but came along after my time.

I volunteered to be the bierstick guinea pig after we followed the instructions and lubed it up:

As luck would have it, the nozzle came loose and Coors Light poured all over my shirt.

We were having so much fun with bierstick, we left a little late for the meet & greet with Vince Neil, which I heard was uneventful.  You get a picture with him, but not with your own phone.  Vince’s people take a pic and send it to you.

Vince took the stage about 9:30 and played until almost 11.  He stuck to the Motley Crue hits, opening with Dr. Feelgood:

OK, so he’s far from his vocal peak, and even further from the top physical shape of his life.  A real a bowler’s gut Vince is working on there. But it didn’t stop us from having a rock n roll time at the fest.  The beer consumption played a hefty role in my enjoyment.  But the dude put on a show full of 80s nostalgia- and for Downers Grove residents of a certain age, that was music directly connected to their youth.  The crowd was big and very into the show.  My friends and I had a fucking great time.  And as a bonus, we watched on Blats’ phone as the Cyclones muffed a punt to seal a win for the Hawkeyes.

Sometimes there’s no high that can match headbanging to “Kickstart My Heart” with your middle school buddies – the same ones whose parents drove you all to Rose Records to buy “Decade of Decadence” decades ago.  A+ Saturday night for my crew…and the lead singer of the Crue.