It’s been some time since I really listened to rock-n-roll. I’m not talking about turning up the radio when “Baba O’Reilly” comes on in the car. I’m talking about clearing all the inhabitants out of the house and cranking up the stereo—the old beast I bought off a former boss that’s one of the last of its kind, rigged with outlets for ten speakers of any wattage I can afford—and letting “L.A. Woman” shake pictures off the wall at about 200 decibels.

Have you done that lately? The bass on that song can pop a valve in your heart if you’re not careful, and I’m not. I sit six inches from the speakers and let the vibration of “city at night, woo!” blow through my bones from the floorboards. I turn it up so loud that it’s impossible to hear myself screaming along.

It’s been a long time since I felt I could do this. Music is a minefield in a time of grief, as anyone who’s lost a loved one knows. Hondros was a classical music junkie, but what many forget is that the roots of his musical tutelage came mojo risin right out of the classic rock standards. We drove big fast American muscle cars in high school—mine was a Chevy Impala; Chris had a Nova—and there was no Mahler or Mozart involved. Def Leopard, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Journey, U2, Foreigner, and AC/DC composed our soundtrack. We once drove 400 miles between Jackson, Miss. and Dallas—in a 1975 Malibu station wagon—listening to nothing but Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” over and over so that we could decipher the lyrics and to keep our minds off the real fear that a badly leaking head gasket would leave us stranded somewhere in East Texas. For Chris, classical music came later and took over the playlist. I never budged.

So it’s been hard in these long months to brave the radio dials. There are weird days when his spirit seems to have hijacked the airways and no matter what button I punch there’s a song that takes me back to a specific time and place on the timeline of our lives. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” reminds me of spring break in Myrtle Beach; “Start Me Up” takes me back to the fake ID fiasco in Ft. Lauderdale; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” puts me back in my old VW bus during the time I managed to drunkenly park it, after much back and forth, so that the open sliding bay door was less than an inch from his Raleigh apartment’s back door, ensuring that anyone making a break from one of his legendary parties would sprawl headlong into a musty-smelling Grateful Dead daydream and be trapped. Taking a trip along the FM dial’s classic rock stations, in other words, runs the risk of sobbing behind the wheel on the highway. I’ve been keeping to talk radio since April.

But that’s no way to live, and Chris would agree. So on Monday, I paired the iPod to this dinosaur of a stereo that I’m convinced can break windows if I push it far enough (I’m really not kidding about this—I finally sold the three-foot high Sony paneled speakers it came with because I couldn’t get the volume beyond quarter power without toppling vases and showering fine powder from the rafters), dialed in “L.A. Woman” and let her ride. This is a safe enough song, because I remember it as one we sang at the top of our lungs while rock climbing in Joshua Tree. Chris belted out Morrison’s “I gotta woooo!, yeah!!” a cappella when he nailed a hard move on a hard climb during a high-desert sunset back in the summer of 1990 and the memory always makes me smile.

Don’t get me wrong; there are still songs that are totally off limits (I might never be able to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony again, the only classical piece I’ve ever truly loved because Chris once talked me through its majesty note for note, and which could always be counted on to bring me to tears without the added freight of grief; or The Doors’ “The End,” which was something of an anthem we shared in high school because we knew that real heartbreak was required to truly understand it, which neither of us had yet experienced), but this was a start. A start at what, I’m not really sure. I just know that music was a critical component of Chris’s life, one of those things that simply couldn’t be done without, like oxygen and literature. It’s the same with me, and I know that he would frown on me listening to some jazz channel on Pandora because it has no connection to anything important.

So I brought down the house Monday. I blew that motherfucker out—“L.A. Woman,” then “Moonlight Drive,” “Backdoor Man” and “Break on Through.” I went through the opus, even risking Zeppelin’s “That’s the Way” and “Going to California.” By the time “Kashmir” came on—which, by the way, is a truly transcendental experience when total aural input solders off all other senses—I was on another planet. I was crying, of course, because these songs couldn’t (and would never) be severed from my memories of him, but it was finally OK. In my mind, we were in the car again, cruising across East Texas toward the horizon, happy enough that the oil pressure was holding and we could make it another hundred miles, at least, before we’d have to start worrying again. That was all the foresight we needed, and we took it one song at a time.

Even if we had to play that one song over and over again.