These last ones are the hardest to nail down. The Replacements were a favorite but I don’t think they represent something new in forming my musical tastes. Likewise dozens of other bands that I listened to all the time and loved, but they are pretty much from the same school.
New Order is more electronic than jangle, more dance club than dive bar. One of my sister’s friends from high school was a big New Order fan and anyone who watched a John Hughes movie knew a couple of their songs. .
Substance was big with the college radio station guys and it has the angtsy hits I love. There was still some darkness, not surprisingly, but there was no denying that beat. Growing up in the era of disco meant that I had been hearing dance music for a long time, but it wasn’t music I wanted to dance to. New Order made it possible to retain your indie street cred while also dabbling in the dance scene.
I was introduced to Billy Bragg’s music by a girl who lived across the hall from me my junior year of college. She had his album Back to Basics. I loved his witty lyrics and was charmed by his accent.
Usually when I’m posting a Billy Bragg song it has something to do with politics. But I first fell for Billy because of his songs about unrequited love. He just pierces my heart with his tales of missed chances and failed opportunities.
Seeing as how it’s Thanksgiving, I would like to say that I’m thankful for Billy Bragg. He is funny, smart, courageous, talented, really just everything you want a man to be. Thanks for writing songs that make me smile through the tears and thanks for writing songs that get my fist up in the air in solidarity.
While I do remember hearing this song on the radio in New York before we moved up to Maine, I didn’t know who the band was. It was only once I was at college and diving into the bands who influenced the bands I loved, that I learned about Gang of Four.
I’d read that when R.E.M. were just getting started they had opened for Gang of Four. Then there was the movie, Urgh! A Music War, which was a glimpse into bands we’d heard of but had no idea what they looked or sounded like.
But it wasn’t until my best friend got hold of Songs of the Free and taped it for me that the lightbulb went on. This was the band that did I Love a Man in a Uniform!
Gang of Four were my introduction to post-punk. Their sound and the fact that they were so political, at a time when I was becoming more aware politically, vaulted them into place as one of my favorites. I liked that you really could learn something from listening to their lyrics, but I also loved Andy Gill’s guitar playing and that these songs grooved.
Back in April I went to see Gang of Four on their Last Goodbye tour. I originally got a ticket for the Boston show since that was the closest place they were playing. A few months after I had my ticket, they added a show closer to me so I snagged a ticket. Fun fact, on the first Gang of Four tour of the U.S., Pylon opened up. At the show I went to, they projected some images on the screen behind the band, including the one below which is an old flyer where you can see Pylon listed. Small world.
It should come as no surprise that I spent an inordinate amount of my time in college, following leads and going down rabbit holes in the pursuit of knowing as much as possible about anything R.E.M. related. One of those leads was Pylon.
First, there was the cover of Crazy that appeared on the B-side of the Driver 8 single. It appeared again on Dead Letter Office. I was obsessed with this song. Still am. If there were more songs like that, I needed to know them.
Then there was the movie, Athens, GA: Inside/Out. I took the train into Philadelphia and saw it at the Theater of the Living Arts, back when it was still a movie theater. I think I might have gone twice. I saw it one more time at the Waverly Theater in New York when the semester was over and I stayed with my sister at her NYU dorm for a couple days. I didn’t take notes but I had all of the bands featured in the film burned into my brain.
I am pretty sure I bought Gyrate first. To me, it lived up to the hype. It sounded totally different and I found Vanessa’s way of singing, sometimes screaming, emphasizing the wrong syllables, totally infectious.
I was amazed that these songs were created by the people I’d seen in the movie. Michael Lachowski and Vanessa Briscoe Hay looked like the most ordinary people, not people you’d expect to be praised by R.E.M. and the B-52’s as being the best live show they’d ever seen.
I also found a copy of Chomp some months later. Hearing the original version of Crazy was like discovering the song all over again. I really can’t tell you how much that song meant to me at that time in my life. Seeing Pylon live, during their reunion in 1989, at City Gardens in Trenton, NJ felt like everything had come full circle.
It doesn’t end there though. I bought the CDs Chain and Hits, then Pylon Live in 2016, and then Box, the four album box set with a fabulous accompanying book. I will be a fan and supporter for as long as I live.
I wasn’t so sure about The Smiths the first time I heard them. Morrissey’s voice wasn’t what I was used to. My best friend had bought the 12″ of How Soon is Now* and after repeated listens, I decided that actually, I need to hear more.
Back down to Plastic Fantastic I went. It’s crazy to think that it has been 40 years since these songs first came out. Hatful of Hollow is a compilation album but at the time I didn’t realize that. No matter, l would end up picking up the other albums over the next year.
The Smiths helped describe my life and gave me endless quotes to trade with my friends. Plus Johnny Marr’s signature sound, what’s not to love?
*I was so sure that it was the How Soon is Now 12″ but according to discogs, the lead track was actually Barbarism Begins at Home.
The way I remember it, my brother loaned me his cassette of Murmur over Christmas break my freshman year of college saying, “here, I think you’d really like this.”
So while you could say that this was another case of me just absorbing what my older siblings were listening to, it’s not the same. For one thing, my brother let me take it away to college, so clearly he wasn’t listening to it that much. Plus it was a cassette so when I was listening to it, it was on my Walkman with the headphones on and not a case of just being in the room while it was playing. It was my choice.
To say I listened to it a lot is an understatement. I particularly remember playing it while I was walking from my dorm on campus over to the women’s college a mile away, where I had a job in the dining hall. There’s something about having the music go straight into your ears that feels more intimate, more private. It can only have been a couple of weeks before I decided I needed to have my own copy. Off to Plastic Fantastic, where I then discovered there were more records by R.E.M. At that point there was Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables. I can’t remember if I left the store that day with both Murmur and Reckoning or if I went back for Reckoning a different day. I just know that by the time spring break rolled around the first week of March, I insisted on taking both of them with me to my best friend’s house where I was going to spend the week. I couldn’t live without them for even a week. In short order I went back to the record store and completed my collection. I was also buying any zine I could find that had any article about R.E.M. Word was a new album would be coming out in the summer and I needed to know everything.
Sometimes I wonder, if we had never moved up to Maine halfway through my high school years, surely I would have heard R.E.M. before I got to college. I probably could even have gone to see them in concert. But we did move up to small town Maine in 1983, just when Murmur came out, and as we were so far removed from everything, it took two years before I knew anything about it. At the same time, having them to myself, in my Walkman, in my dorm room, meant I was free to binge listen as much as I wanted. I spent hours looking at the cover and the inner sleeve, hunting for clues. Could I have done that with my siblings around? The answer is no.
Everything in my life changed once I had this album. It’s like the part of my brain that feels music had a combination lock on it, and all the music I heard before Murmur was the numbers you spin clockwise and counter clockwise, before you finally get to the right number and click! The lock opens.
Sophomore year of college, 1986, I lived in a brand new dorm with a roommate that was just unluck of the draw. We had nothing in common, hadn’t known each other before, and I mostly tried to avoid being in the room at the same time as her. She had a group of friends that also lived on our hallway so at first she spent a lot of time in their rooms. But somewhere midway through the fall semester she had a falling out with them all so she was in our room more. She transferred after the first semester and I got a new roommate who was placed with me because she was on academic probation and they felt she needed to be away from the distraction of her boyfriend, Vinny, back in South Philly.
Most of the girls on our hallway were the stereotypical big, teased, permed hair, tons of baby blue eyeshadow kind of girls you see in 80s movies. There were two other girls who were more like me though. One of them really seemed cool. She had a Room With a View poster on the wall, instead of the ubiquitous Top Gun, and she even knew the Feelies. She was from New Jersey (along with half of the campus it felt like) and she’d had a summer job at some newspaper or something, where someone in the band worked. I can’t remember the details, lo these 37 years later, but it was like three degrees of separation from my heroes. Even if she was totally nonchalant about it, that was enough to make me a little nervous around her. She also had a boyfriend who was pretty cool which made her seem way more successful than I saw myself as being.
Since I never achieved true friend status with her, I kind of lost track of the two of them once that year was over. I saw the boyfriend now and then at the campus radio station but that was more like across a room full of people sightings and let’s be honest, I would probably have avoided talking to him anyway for fear of saying something stupid.
I got thinking about them today though because I read that Rosalynn Carter died. I was reading her obituary and remembered that a few years ago, after watching a documentary called, Jimmy Carter, Rock & Roll President, I got curious about what Amy Carter was doing. When I Googled her I saw that she had married a guy who had the same name as the boyfriend of the girl down the hall my sophomore year. I thought that seemed like a weird coincidence. But today I fell down the rabbit hole and I can now confirm, it is the same guy. They got divorced but they have a kid together, and it is just crazy to think about. I am 1000% sure this guy would never remember me, but I can still picture him in his girlfriend’s dorm room with the Room With a View poster and this album playing on the stereo.
(You should check out that documentary if you haven't before.)
Today my best friend sent me a link to a video from some VH1 program back in 1987. It was a VJ doing the usual VJ thing with Natalie Merchant there to chat about things during the breaks. It was super awkward because the VJ clearly didn’t know anything about 10,000 Maniacs and Natalie clearly didn’t want to be there, but there she was. You can watch the whole thing if you want to but I am going to link to the relevant part at the mark here. Go ahead, watch him ask Natalie about her shoes.
Ok, it kind of drags on a bit but I want to talk about shoes. Natalie’s shoes, my shoes, people’s perceptions of shoes. First of all, I love that Natalie says they are her dream shoes. I also have had dream shoes. Shoes where you find them and you immediately feel like you are complete. Shoes that state, this is me, I am grounded in these shoes. For me, my dream shoes said to the world, everything you need to know about who I am can be read by looking at my shoes. And you should always look at people’s shoes. Always. If, like the interviewer, you are puzzled by my shoes (or Natalie’s shoes), well, sorry, you just didn’t get it. The shoes will speak to the right people in the right way. I have based my life on it. “When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes” is good advice that has never steered me wrong.
Natalie said her shoes remind her of her grandfather’s shoes. My shoes were old man shoes too. Literally, they are men’s shoes. And let me tell you, Natalie Merchant is tiny and finding shoes in her size is probably no easy task. My old man shoes were a men’s size 6. They rarely come that small. What’s great about them? They are sturdy. They are practical but not in a “practical shoe” way. There’s a tiny bit of a heel but not like a woman’s shoe heel, it’s the whole back part of the shoe so it’s stable. And they lace up so you can make them nice and snug, unlike the slip-on nature of so many women’s shoes. They are a little dressy but they are comfortable. You feel strong and confident in a good pair of shoes like that. Perhaps most importantly, you will not look like everyone else in these shoes.
When I got to college I think I had some regular sneakers, maybe a pair of Keds, and probably a pair or two of flats to go with skirts or dresses. I’m sure I had boots for the winter but after two years getting schooled up in Maine as to what is appropriate footwear for snow, they were likely nothing like the boots my classmates in Pennsylvania wore. By my sophomore year I was really on the hunt for “my” shoes. There is nothing like the conformity of your peers to make you long for something that will set you apart. I knew exactly what I wanted but I had no idea where to find it. I had looked in thrift stores and the big army/navy store I. Goldberg’s in Philadelphia, but I kept striking out. I didn’t want combat boots, I didn’t want Doc Martens, I wanted something more refined, slimmer.
My work-study job was in the theater department as a dresser. Sophomore year the spring musical was Sweeney Todd, set in Victorian London, with a large cast and a good number of male roles. We made the costumes in the costume shop ourselves but one day I came in and saw they had been to the storage space off campus and come back with shoes for everyone. There they were. MY shoes. Black, lace-up, ankle height, low-stacked heel, old man shoes. I asked where we had bought them and was given the name of a men’s shoe store down by the bus station in Philadelphia, near Chinatown. When I finally had enough money saved up I took the train into the city, found the shoe store and left with my dream shoes in hand.
I wore them everywhere with everything. Summer, winter, rain, no matter. I had to have them resoled twice and the heel repaired once. I felt invincible in them. I loved nothing more than taking some $20 bills, folding them in thirds and putting them in my shoes, then lacing them up tight and heading off on adventures; sleeping out for concert tickets, taking the train up to New York or Providence. No one was ever going to guess I had over $100 in my old man shoes. Eventually they developed a crack by my pinky toe that was their undoing. I went back to the shoe store in Chinatown and bought a second pair, though they had changed ever so slightly, now with a cap toe design, that was just never quite as comfortable as the originals. I still loved the second pair but at some point I must have allowed my mom to get rid of them because I wasn’t wearing them any more.
Fast forward to middle-age and not being able to wear heels but not wanting to wear what look like orthopedic shoes either, I started looking for my dream shoes again. I had a couple of different attempts with women’s shoes that were ok and I felt sufficiently comfortable in them, but they were a compromise. I tried a pricey pair of Frye boots that looked online as if they might be close enough to work but when they arrived and I tried them on they were not right. Too pointy, the heel just a tiny bit too high. I sent them back and resigned myself to my sensible mom shoes but couldn’t stop hearing, “Oh, how do I feel about my shoes? They make me awkward and plain, How dearly I would love to kick with the fray…”
Then just after Christmas of 2019, I was looking for something on Etsy and lo and behold, someone was selling my shoes. They were a tiny bit too big (a men’s 6 1/2 now being the smallest they make), a little bit too shiny, and they had the cap toe that my second pair had, but they were the actual real Stacy Adams shoe that I wanted, at less than half the price. I was trying hard to not let myself spend the money on them but my husband said I never spend money on myself and I should get them.
They arrived in January of 2020. I wore them to the office a few times but they were on the stiff side and the leather sole on the carpeting coupled with being a bit too big meant I kind of felt comically slippy in them. I was determined to break them in but not really sure how to go about it. When the pandemic arrived and shut everything down, I put them away and didn’t really think about it for a year and a half. I wore almost no shoes at all during the 18 months I worked from home. I was either in slippers or flip-flops around the house and sneakers if I went out for a walk or the infrequent forays to the store. Once we were ordered back to the office in the fall of 2021, the other shoes I used to wear all the time to work had become so uncomfortable I could barely walk in them. It was time for my old man shoes to come back out.
While I would prefer to be working from home full-time, on the days I have to go to the office I lace up my shoes and look down at my feet and it gives me the little boost I need to get out the door. The snug fit around my ankles shoring me up both physically and emotionally. I see them and I see the memories of my old shoes and all the places and things I did in them. I feel like I have my armor suited up for the day, my trusty shoes ready for anything. I may be a middle-aged mom at a desk job but you can look at my shoes and know that’s not the whole story.
Another band/song from the Music League (the theme was a song that name checks another band), though it was new to me I loved this one right away. If you give it a listen, you will understand why.
My hair has gotten really long (for me) but I’m still not really ready to go to a salon to get it cut. I did chop off at least five inches last year, I did it myself and it was a fairly decent job, I think. My hair is wavy so it wasn’t really noticeable if it was uneven. Lately, the scissors have been calling to me but I’ve been trying to resist.
I just got my booster shot this evening so maybe in a couple of weeks I’ll be feeling like I could venture in to somewhere to have someone else cut my hair. Part of my issue is also that I don’t know where to go. I don’t like spending a lot of money and the place I went to most recently (two years ago at this point) didn’t survive the initial shut down.
This song reminds me of high school, particularly once we’d moved up to Maine. My older sister and I were used to a New York sense of what was cool and, when we first arrived, we really stood out from the rest of the Maine kids. We would sit around in the evening talking about stuff and invariably, the topic would turn to our hair. My mother got so tired of it she forbid us from talking about our hair more than once a day.
I also came across some old pictures of myself the other day and I still think the way my hair looked during my junior year of college was pretty great. How do I show up at the salon with a picture of myself at 20 to show them how I want my hair cut and avoid coming across as a woman deep in the throes of a midlife crisis?
They arrived in January of 2020. I wore them to the office a few times but they were on the stiff side and the leather sole on the carpeting coupled with being a bit too big meant I kind of felt comically slippy in them. I was determined to break them in but not really sure how to go about it. When the pandemic arrived and shut everything down, I put them away and didn’t really think about it for a year and a half. I wore almost no shoes at all during the 18 months I worked from home. I was either in slippers or flip-flops around the house and sneakers if I went out for a walk or the infrequent forays to the store. Once we were ordered back to the office in the fall of 2021, the other shoes I used to wear all the time to work had become so uncomfortable I could barely walk in them. It was time for my old man shoes to come back out.
Noisy Cats 