When the Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, burned to the ground during a Great White show last February, a hundred heavy-metal fans died and the Providence Journal (taking its lead from the New York Times’s September-eleventh coverage) published small obituaries for each, based on interviews with the victims’ families. Well over half of these families focused on their loved one’s passion for music. They spoke with deep affection and pride about the degree of fanship these adult victims exhibited—how far they traveled to attend concerts, how much band memorabilia they owned. The mother of thirty-one-year-old Great White fan Robert Croteau told the Providence Journal that her son “died doing something he loved” and recalled how the family had used one of Great White’s albums to coax Croteau out of a four-month coma the year before. She described a bedside vigil in which the family played Great White songs to the comatose man, who finally awoke from the coma asking to hear more Great White. I realized, as I don’t think I had before the Station tragedy, that there are scenes and circles I don’t travel in where adults take pride in their rock fanship and their friends and family don’t regard it as any freakier a passion than athletics, foreign travel, or gourmet cooking.

Days after the Station disaster, I attended a comedy show in Los Angeles where a comedian described this incineration of a hundred music fans on the opposite coast as a form of “natural selection.” The audience giggled. To this comedian and this audience, the Station victims represented some weird, undesirable other. Was it a class joke? I don’t think so. I doubt the audience would have laughed at a hundred working-class people burned to death in a factory fire. Heavy-metal music revels in all the excess—the aggressive hedonism and overwrought emotions—that we’re expected to leave behind, or at least submerge, when we leave adolescence.

All of this got me thinking about my own musical fanship and the nagging sense of shame that accompanies it. My friends have trained me to treat the ferocity of my musical passions as a shameful secret. The message seems to be this: Listen to whatever you want and like whatever you want, but temper your enthusiasm to suit your advanced age (I’m thirty-four). Praise moderately and possess no evidence of devotion aside from music. That is to say, no “merch,” unless intended ironically: vintage Peaches and Herb T-shirt, cool; new Radiohead T-shirt, not cool. The trappings of my fanship appall my friends: my T-shirts (Mudhoney, X, Hole), my show posters (Kristin Hersh, the White Stripes). I have a postcard from Exene Cervenka of...