Courtesy of CV Comics.

On Saturday I met a real life rock star.

A 70‰’s icon decked out with big long hair, tight jeans and his mother‰’s blouse. I (and all of my friends) met Bobby Liebling, vocalist of the legendary doom metal band Pentagram. I experienced the whole nine yards: the backstage shenanigans, the sound check, the horrified look on my club advisor’s face. All were priceless memories I will cherish forever.

However, meeting said icon was both surreal and uncomfortable. Being that close to someone of that level of notoriety in such a personal setting is strange and I‰’m not sure if I would want to do it again. Granted the man was the hardest partier in all of heavy metal for a time in his life he and even has the documentary on Netflix to prove it.

Seeing musicians on stage is one thing, even while in the front row fans still have a separation between the artist and the person, the performer and the man. Here I didn‰’t have that, since my cohorts and I were the ones running the show we had an all access pass to anything and everything we wanted that night.

I went into this with no expectations. The man has quite the rowdy reputation and I borderline expected him to not even acknowledge us. The running jokes for the week prior were “Oh Bobby‰’s going to be a diva‰” or “Remember, we ARE dealing with rockstars‰Û. I think we all went into it knowing that this wasn‰’t going to be our usual encounter with a sweet 23-year-old who‰’s grateful we paid him enough money for Taco Bell. This was the real deal.

I watched our club VP, Mariana, put makeup on him as he dug through her makeup bag rambling incoherent sentences and putting on women‰’s perfume while giving awkward dating advise. He was your drunk uncle and your crazy grandmother all rolled into one, smudged eyeliner and all. We talked to his friend about Krispy Kreme and one of the women with them made vegan bread.

I‰’m still not sure how to process the experience I had, but it was funny, fun, and worth the hard work. But no matter how I feel about the experience later in my life, whether I look back on it with disappointment or with reminiscent laughter, I will remember the time I met the living, breathing, definition of a rockstar.

The picture below captures the essence of my experience: