College

Hi-Hi-Whooppee

The Method Actors – Hi-Hi-Whooppee

I went up to the storage area to get a tape for the drive this morning. I wouldn’t say I’m running out of tapes but there are fewer mixes and more that have one album on each side. Those seem a little less interesting to write up for Tape Deck Tuesday. Then there’s all the bootlegs that I’ll probably never write up. For today I grabbed one that my best friend taped for me at the tail end of August in 1986 or 87, the year isn’t listed, but I can tell it’s from that vintage.

Side A: Concrete Blonde/ The Method Actors: Little Figures
True
Your Haunted Head
Dance Along the Edge
Still in Hollywood
Song for Kim (She Said)
Beware of Darkness
Over Your Shoulder
Little Sister
(You’re the Only One) Can Make Me Cry
Cold Part of Town
True (Instrumental)
————–
Halloween
Hi-Hi Whooppee

Side B: Gang of Four: Songs of the Free
Call Me Up
I Love a Man in a Uniform
We Live as We Dream, Alone
It Is Not Enough
Life! It’s a Shame
I Will Be a Good Boy
The History of the World
Muscle for Brains
Of the Instant

I had a hard time getting the tape out of the box, it was really wedged in there. Once I did, I could see it was because there was a little slip of paper inside the folded over part of the label. I unfolded it to find this:

Gof4

wpid-wp-1415766967407.jpegThat’s my friend’s rendition of the illustration on the back of the album, which is itself a drawing of the front of the album. Of course I didn’t have the record then (which is why she taped it for me) but I bought it sometime after that and now you can see, she did a pretty good job (click the pictures to enlarge). These things were very important. They’re still important to me. It’s one of the reasons why I still don’t really like downloading albums. I do it, especially when I want something quickly or it’s much cheaper that way and I don’t really want a physical copy, but nine times out of ten, I will still want to at least see the cover and any liner notes, etc. Recently I downloaded an album but then discovered there was a copy at the library so I borrowed the library’s copy just so I could read everything inside and made a copy of the insert to keep. I will never understand why all digital downloads don’t include a copy of the CD insert. It’s a simple file they could easily include if you buy the whole album. Do they just assume, hmph, you’re downloading it, you must not really care.

I popped it into the tape deck without rewinding it, catching the end of the instrumental version of True. This was Concrete Blonde’s self-titled album, their first LP. Then there was some crackling and popping, tell-tale signs of the needle touching down on the record. There must only have been room for two songs by the Method Actors. They were one of those bands we’d heard lots about but they’d already broken up and, let’s be serious, the people we knew at college were decidedly not people who would know anything about them.

After those two songs, the tape reversed itself and started playing Gang of Four. I originally thought about posting I Love a Man in a Uniform, seeing as how it’s Veterans’ Day, then I thought, Life! It’s a Shame was perfect (look up the lyrics and ask yourself how is it they’re still relevant 32 years later!?). I miss music like this. Thought-provoking in both sound and lyrics, and you can even dance to it. People make songs of substance still but, it’s not like this. Tucked in at the end of side B was a live recording of the Everly Brothers doing All I Have to Do is Dream.

On the way home I caught the rest of the Concrete Blonde album and thought, hmm, maybe Still in Hollywood will be the winner for the video today, but in the end, the tape made it all the way to the end of side A again and I decided, it has to be the Method Actors. I mean, come on. And somehow, this video was only uploaded four days ago and I was the first person to watch it. It was meant to be. Hi-Hi-Whooppee!

 

This Time of Night

New Order – This Time of Night

Normally I am not around at 3pm on a Monday afternoon but there was no bus transportation for my daughter’s school today and my husband couldn’t pick her up so I took the day off and took care of some local things as well. I turned on the radio and hit the button for the local college station. The DJ said he was going to be down in New York on Friday for Peter Hook’s show at which he and his band are playing Low-Life and Brotherhood back to back. The DJ decided to play both albums in their entirety as a kind of tribute.

As “Love Vigilantes” started up I said, “Oh, I love this song!” and turned it up and started singing along. A surefire way to embarrass your young teenager.

I then launched into an unasked-for explanation about why I was not also going to this show. Lots of the usual logistical reasons but also I’m not sure how I feel about the whole Peter Hook playing New Order and Joy Division songs with the Light and New Order playing without Peter Hook thing. Bands break up all the time or kick someone out, get a new drummer, but this is weird and uncomfortable, like when a couple you know breaks up and you still want to be friends with both of them but they want you to choose sides. I can’t do it!

To say my daughter didn’t care in the least is an understatement. She was further perplexed by my insistence that the voice singing these songs should be Bernard Sumner, even though I acknowledged that he isn’t a “good singer” which is really all my daughter seems to notice at this point in her musical development. Then “The Perfect Kiss” came on and I said, “Oh, I love this song!” Eye-rolling in the passenger seat.

But she wasn’t asking me to change the station and any chance I can get to expose her to music that isn’t on the top 40 station is a good thing. I tried to explain how just because someone may not be a great singer doesn’t mean that the way they sing isn’t great. I don’t think I convinced her but I like to introduce the idea to her. I am not immune to the power of a beautiful voice, far from it, but I love a lot of bands with singers that would never make it in an a cappella group. And I love them, in many cases, not in spite of but because of that imperfect voice.

We made it home and I went in and turned on the stereo so I could pick up where we left off in the car. “Sunrise” came on and I heard her laugh as I said, “Oh man, I LOVE this song!” and she wandered into another room. Just wait, I thought to myself. Just wait.

Letter Never Sent

R.E.M. – Letter Never Sent

This past weekend we were up visiting my mother so I took the opportunity to go up to her attic and have a look for some things I thought I might have left there. My mom was thrilled at the prospect of getting more junk out of the house. We hauled two big boxes down and four or five small boxes (old 8×10 B&W photographic paper boxes) that I knew were mine. One of the big boxes turned out to be my mother’s stuff so we sat on the screened porch and went through our old things together.

My boxes were full of old letters and postcards from college and my early 20s. I also found a dozen or more concert stubs that I’ve been wondering where I’d put them. My mother’s box also had old letters and pictures from her college years and early 20s. It was fun looking through them and we’d stop and show each other some of the pictures or read aloud funny parts of letters. I found a postcard from my DC days with a Victorian illustration of a Valentine’s Day card on it and on the back, written in red ink and all capital letters it said only, “THE CAPITOL CUPID HAS HIS EYES ON YOU. BE PREPARED.”

Her one box was dispensed with relatively quickly but I needed more time for all of mine. The next morning I woke up before everyone else, took some boxes out to the porch and started going through them again. Tons of old bank statements and pay stubs and college records that I have no idea why I kept but they all need to be shredded. I divided things into piles; trash, shred, keep.

The keep pile quickly took over the table. I got an empty plastic bin and started filling it up. On several occasions I opened some old letters to see what was inside and found myself taking a seat on the porch swing, reveling in these wonderful old letters. My friends and I used to write really great letters. Even the envelopes got in on the action. I have many that are hand made, true works of art, or that are covered in quotes from songs or books we were reading. Things like, “Sometimes, at a certain point in your life, you come across an artist—or anything; it could be a pastrami sandwich, I guess—and it takes on incredible significance.” – Hubert Selby. Or, “Keep away from hairdos altogether. A hairdo, by definition, always makes you look like someone else. Or think you do.” – Cynthia Heimel. I have no idea who those people are, not then nor now, but reading them today makes me smile and think of the friend that felt they were just the right finishing touch or last thought to include on a letter that had already been sealed.

And the letters themselves, filled with observations, feelings, doubts and fears, emotions and dreams, are a glorious tribute to a time when communication wasn’t instant. Several letters I re-read mentioned missing a phone call, or being unable to reach someone by phone and the resulting regret or worry it caused. No cell phones, no email, no text messages or status updates. We wrote long letters with little notes in the margins documenting time or place. One letter might cover several days, with thoughts being dropped in favor of recounting something that had just transpired then coming back to that thought a day or two later, maybe with some new perspective.

I love that they are also to and from all kinds of different addresses. There were many sent to me c/o a relative or friend I stayed with for short stints while job hunting. Return addresses from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Montreal, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, Tennessee, North Carolina. We were young and moving around a lot but we stayed in touch the only way possible.

I miss the letter writing days. I miss the time we took, the time we had, to sit down and put pen to paper, to ponder things and write it down to share with someone far away. Whether they were really important life decisions or tales of the ordinary day-to-day, these letters are something that tell me more than just what we were up to twenty-odd years ago. There is a large measure of our personalities in them. There is trust and truth. I see what made us click.

I’ve decided to write letters again. I was once a really great correspondent, if I may be so bold, and I want to try to rediscover that pace of writing and that level of attention and observation. I may not get any in return or I may fizzle out and they’d all become letters never sent, but I think it’s worth a try.

The Music Vault has this full concert on video. The quality is amazing. Do yourself a favor and check it out on their site.

Rise

Public Image Limited – Rise

I seem to have a little theme going here this week. Uprising. Rise. Yes, definitely a stand up kind of week. This week’s Tape Deck Tuesday is a tape called Listen ~ Sing, April, 1989. There is a banana sticker firmly stuck to the case that I’m sure I stuck there. The tape was made for me by a friend shortly before the end of my senior year, her sophomore year, of college. She’d made me a tape of songs that she loved that I didn’t have so I would be able to listen to them (and sing) once she was gone.

This friend had been in my dorm the previous year. It was an old house that had been turned into a dorm, all women, of course, there was no other option. It was on the edge of campus, which is why I had picked it, but the majority of freshman and sophomores in the house would have preferred somewhere more happening. I was also looking for space, and something beyond your standard issue cinderblock with non-opening windows. I had been all over campus and had zeroed in on this dorm and this one room. It was the largest double on campus and I wanted it. I needed more room for dancing, after all.

If I remember correctly, the house had two singles, two or three doubles, a couple of triples and two quads. That’s a giant room with two sets of bunk beds. This girl arrived as a freshman and was put into one of those quads with three other girls who couldn’t have been more different from her. My roommate had been a total lucky lottery pick, just a junior like me who didn’t have a preference so they put us together. It turned out she didn’t have much in the way of preferences for any of the things that mattered to me. She liked to study with some background noise but didn’t care what it was so I could play my music pretty much any time I wanted. She didn’t have a lot of stuff so I could hang my posters any place I liked. Consequently this freshman saw and heard that I might be sympathetic to her situation and she ended up hanging around with me a lot.

The following year she brought a car back to campus with her. A car meant road trips and that called for tunes for the ride. She was a big fan of bands on the 4AD label, in some cases just because they were on that label. There are a bunch of those on this tape, a couple of her cult favorites (not The Cult though), and then some more of your usual college radio bands. PiL falls into that latter category.

Listen~Sing, April 1989
Side A – Listen
Persephone – Cocteau Twins
Muscoviet Mosquito – Clan of Xymox
Cut the Tree – Wolfgang Press
Fish – Throwing Muses
Birthday – Sugarcubes
Land of the Glass Pinecones – Human Sexual Response
Privilege (Set Me Free) – Patti Smith Group
Lucretia (My Reflection) – Sisters of Mercy
Unforgettable Fire – U2
Crushed – Cocteau Twins
Frontier – Dead Can Dance

Side B – Sing
This Corrosion – Sisters of Mercy
Mandinka – Sinead O’Connor
Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction
Caribou – Pixies
Jackie Onassis – Human Sexual Response
FFF/Rise – PiL
I’ve Been Tired – Pixies
Holiday – Salem 66
A New England – Billy Bragg

I had totally forgotten about Human Sexual Response. Completely. But when Land of the Glass Pinecones came on, I remembered. I liked the Jackie Onassis song in a campy way but Land of the Glass Pinecones was just a little too out there for me. Were they serious or not, I couldn’t really tell. This friend loved it. She used to sing along and really try to make that vibrato over the top just to annoy me. And This Corrosion by Sisters of Mercy is the classic song college DJs would put on when they needed to go to the bathroom, or run out to the other room to get more records, because it was so long.

My brother had been a Sex Pistols fan so I knew who Johnny Rotten/John Lydon was. Somehow though I had missed Public Image Ltd. in those years after he went off to college and we moved up to Maine. This video reminds me a lot of staying up late on Sunday nights to catch 120 Minutes on MTV. A bunch of these songs were aired on that program now that I think about it.

This is a fitting song for my mood lately. I am just as angry, if not more so than yesterday. So remember, “Anger is an energy.” Just make sure to funnel that anger into something productive. Get energized. It’s going to be a long haul.

 

Stop It

Pylon – Stop It

Hey! Kids! I’m in the crunch phase of a project at work and it’s the end of the school year, there’s a lot going on. Still, I did drive to work today and I did listen to a tape in the car so here we go. This Tape Deck Tuesday was just one of the cassettes where you wanted to have some albums on tape for the car or Walkman and not because you were creating some masterpiece.

Side A:
The Replacements
Let It Be/Stink

Side B:
The Replacements – Stink
Pylon – Gyrate

I’ve already written about Let It Be so I’m going with the Pylon track. Also because I just finished reading No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes, an oral history of City Gardens in Trenton, NJ. I was only at City Gardens once, to see Pylon in 1989. It was right before I graduated from college and I think now what lucky timing because if they had come through just a few days later, I would have left the area and missed the tour.

It’s no surprise that I first learned about Pylon because R.E.M. covered Crazy and talked about them a lot back in the mid-80s. I love that song. I had to know more. I can’t remember if I bought Gyrate or Chomp first but I have them both still, complete with the DB Records order form inside to order more great stuff! No matter which album I had first, I became a devoted fan. Some of the songs are just fun. “Precaution” comes to mind. Or “Read a Book.” You should see the way my kids look at me when I sing “Turn off the tv! You can learn more try to do without it.” Others are bit more nuanced, even if Vanessa is kind of shouting the lyrics as much as she is singing. Some of my favorite song lyrics are Pylon lyrics.

Speaking of books again, I really enjoyed the City Gardens book. If you had never been there, or weren’t aware of its legendary status, I’m not sure it has a lot of appeal. There are recollections of shows from band members who performed there as well as staff and club regulars. Since I was only there the one time, I didn’t really have much knowledge of the scene back then but I liked how each chapter/year began with a list of that year’s top 10 hits. Nothing could have been further from those top 10 than the stories that follow the listing. I’m not even a fan of most of the hardcore bands that are featured but I can appreciate how City Gardens was an oasis for kids in the area.

1989 was a period of time when Pylon was active in their on again/off again way. They had yet to put out Chain but a CD had been released that was a selection of songs from their two early albums. I loved the show. It was a small crowd, which always hurts a little, but on the other hand, I had plenty of room for dancing. Now rock & roll now!

My show may not have made the cut for inclusion in the book but I’m very glad that City Gardens existed and that I got to see Pylon there. I still have the t-shirt I bought that night and I consider it to be one of my most prized possessions. Sorry to say I have no idea if Jon Stewart was working the bar back then.

 

 

Back to the Old House

#WhereILivedWednesday: The Costume Shop

This past weekend was my 25th college reunion. I did not go. I never will.

I hated it there. It had been my safety school and I arrived with every intention of transferring after getting good grades for a year. Oh but plans can fall through as so often they do. After two rounds of transfer applications to at least a dozen schools, my choices weren’t better so I stayed put. While I had almost nothing in common with the vast majority of the students there (shallow, immature, young Reaganites looking to have the party experience they’d been too sheltered to have in high school), the university’s location in the Philadelphia suburbs was great. I could hop a train and be in the city in less than half an hour, I could ride my bike past centuries-old farms and enormous old houses, there were good record stores, and I had my work-study job at the costume shop.

The costume shop was my saving grace. I had auditioned for a play once during my freshman year but I discovered that because the university had a Master’s program in theater and they opened up their shows to anyone in the greater Philadelphia area, Equity actors even, I didn’t stand a chance of being cast as a middle-aged woman when plenty of actual middle-aged women (with much more experience) were also auditioning. My sophomore year I qualified for a work-study job so I went to the financial aid office and looked through the book of available jobs. There were two jobs at the theater, the box office or the costume shop. I looked into both but decided I could make more money in the costume shop and it looked like more fun anyway.

I was a dresser. The dresser is the person who gets all the costumes ready before the show, puts all the costumes in strategic locations backstage and helps the actors make those quick changes off stage. The rather less glamorous parts of the job included doing all the laundry and ironing and any mending the costumes required during the run of the show. You needed to be a jack of all trades in this small shop; wig maintenance, shoe repair, hat reshaping, hairstylist, always ready with a safety pin or a glue gun. Because I was pretty good at sewing I was allowed to help make the costumes prior to the show as well.

This was the real deal. The shop was run by a designer who drew what all the costumes would be and when we didn’t have something suitable in storage, we would build it from scratch. No Butterick or McCall’s patterns here, we would make patterns with muslin based on her specifications. We had several dressmaker’s dummies and an industrial strength iron and steamer, six or seven fancy Swiss sewing machines, a serger, two big padded and muslin covered tables around which several graduate students spent their days hunched over sewing costumes. If you were in the Master’s program, you had to do a practicum and you could choose building the sets, working in the costume shop, or doing dramaturgy. The set guys were pretty nice but the boss, not so much. The costume shop was definitely the life of the party.

I loved my job. I was good at it too. I took it seriously, unlike most of the other work-study students, most of whom only lasted a semester, a year at most, and were flaky and just didn’t think they really had to do anything. Maybe because I had once harbored dreams of being the one on stage, I felt you had better make damn sure everything was ready before the show and the costumes were all set up back stage because how shitty would it be to come flying off the stage and have less than a minute to get changed and back out there without help or without everything set up just so. I would set up the dresses so all the actresses would have to do is run off, I’d unzip/snap/button the dress they had on, they’d step into the next outfit, lying open in a circle on the floor, then I’d pull it up around them and zip them into the new dress. New shoes at the ready, hat, gloves, accessories, 1, 2, 3. Boom. Back out there. During a show’s run, I could easily rack up 50 hours of work each week.

The costume shop was my turf. When I walked across campus it was a toss-up whether I’d be ignored or laughed at by the other students but in the costume shop, I ruled. I had the key. I’d get there and open up before anyone else, then the actors would come in and be thrilled to see me. We’d talk, tell stories, and laugh. There was music and people and we were young and alive. To have a place where I was accepted and respected, by people who were way cooler than the big-hair/mullet crowd, made those three years tolerable. There were perks too. I never paid for doing my own laundry once I started working there because I had access to our private machines in the basement of the theater building. I scored some signature pieces of clothing, and found out where to buy my beloved shoes. I learned how to alter clothes and how to make fake blood.

When I left campus 25 years ago, I was relieved to be done with that place and haven’t missed it once since then. But I still keep the costume shop close to my heart.

#WhereILivedWednesday is a meme started and hosted by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. Please check out her site for other stories.

Ask

The Smiths – Ask

Let’s stay in Manchester a while, shall we? A few weeks ago I listened to a tape from my senior year of college that was titled “Anguish, Fear, Lamenting.” That one was a thinly veiled account of my frustrations with my lack of progress with a certain guy. Long time readers might have thought to themselves, wow, no Smiths on that tape? That’s a surprise.

Well, that’s because only a month earlier I had made the tape I listened to today. The title should tell you all you need to know. “Does the Body Rule the Mind or Does the Mind Rule the Body, I Dunno!” Subtitled “Morrissey’s Most Moaning Melodies.” I didn’t need any Smiths songs on that other tape because this one had 90 minutes worth, all trying to answer that question.

Body Rules the Mind (Side A)
This Charming Man
‪Handsome Devil‬
‪Hand in Glove‬
‪Ask‬
‪The Boy With the Thorn in His Side‬
‪Stretch Out and Wait‬
‪There Is a Light That Never Goes Out‬
‪Reel Around the Fountain‬
‪Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want‬
‪Oscillate Wildly‬
‪Well I Wonder‬
‪Half a Person‬
‪Suedehead ‬

Mind Rules the Body (Side B)
‪I Want the One I Can’t Have‬
‪Girl Afraid‬
These Things Take Time
‪You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby‬
Miserable Lie‬
‪Still Ill
‪Back to the Old House‬
‪Accept Yourself‬
‪Unloveable‬
‪How Soon Is Now?‬
‪I Know It’s Over‬
‪What Difference Does It Make?‬

I contemplated writing this entire post just stringing together lyrics from these songs to tell the story but I don’t have that kind of time and the songs tell it all themselves anyway. So I made a YouTube playlist this time since these songs are all readily available, unlike some of the other old tapes.

Tomorrow should be #WhereILivedWednesday so I’m borrowing another song from this tape to help out. Stay tuned!

Regret

New Order – Regret

Warning: stupid rant ahead

After months of deliberating, I got my haircut on Saturday morning. I delayed it for so long because I can’t find a hairdresser I like near either my home or office. The last two times I got it cut while visiting my mother, and the woman did a better job than the previous cuts I’d had, but I also didn’t really try to get the cut I want.

Which is what, you might ask. I have no clue how to describe what I want and I never find a picture that really matches the idea in my head. I think I used to have this haircut, pretty much, not exactly right, but closer than I’ve managed since, well this New Order song was new.

This time I had two pictures that were not alike at all, really, but both had elements of what I wanted. I explained that I did not want a standard short haircut. That I wanted to be able to flip my head over, use a hair dryer, scrunch it up so it would be wavy (which my hair will do now in the hot and humid summer weather), but that I can’t stand having hair on my neck. So, it’s a short haircut, very short on the nape of my neck but long enough elsewhere to curl up some.

She started cutting and was making the very bottom hair in the back way too long. I told her, really, make it much shorter back there, I don’t want it on my neck (which it would have been in a big way). Ok, she made it much shorter and continued on. It seemed to be going fine. It was only when she was nearly done that I thought, fuck, I’ve got the standard mom short haircut. How did this happen? It looked nothing like the pictures I’d brought along when she was done. There’s no difference between my head flipped over or standing up. There’s not enough length to curl anything. I can make it poofy but that’s it. Yeah, the back is short but even that is still not right.

Sigh. In high school my mother used to limit my sister and me to one conversation about hair a day. I’m sorry, it was the early 80s. Hair was a big topic (pun intended) even if we weren’t big-hair girls. I got a short haircut during my senior year of high school and went off to college with one of those asymmetrical short haircuts that stood out on my campus full of Jersey girls with perms and teased bangs that sat up four inches high. I grew out the uneven cut and discovered that if I went to the on campus barber and held most of my hair out of the way, I could get them to buzz cut about an inch of the part on the nape of my neck by telling them to make it like the top of a ROTCs head. I believe you would call this undercutting but I didn’t know that then.

It’s hard to describe to people how to cut something they can’t see. I have failed, yet again. Here I am with the good hair weather before me (warm and muggy is perfect) and yet my hair is now too short to take advantage of it. I should have gone down to Astor Place. I should have waited until I went back up to my mother’s. I couldn’t take the hairgrow I had any longer though and now I am really regretting it.

But, only one conversation about hair a day. Everyone at work has seen my cut and heard it wasn’t what I wanted, though they all said they liked it. If you saw me over the weekend you probably are thinking, what’s your problem? It looks perfectly normal. Which is my problem. It’s probably much more age appropriate, and it is a big improvement over my grown out cut from just a few days ago, but it’s very ordinary. It looks good, she did a nice job, it’s just… not right.

Yes, that’s Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band in the Astor Place video and no, I don’t want my hair cut like that either.

Teen Love

No Trend – Teen Love

This morning got off to a rough start, chalk it up to having had Monday off I guess. Just enough time to get yourself a little bit out of the daily routine to leave us scrambling to get out the door. Consequently I forgot my breakfast, which I usually bring along in the car because I don’t have time to eat it before I leave.

I was annoyed with myself for not having my breakfast and looked through the seven or eight tapes I had in the car to choose one for Tape Deck Tuesday. Which is how I came to decide that today was the day for ON THE FRINGE OF THE FRINGE (Assorted new music) Vol. 1.

This tape was given to me by a guy named Fred who was a graduate student when I was an undergrad in college. I can’t remember what year it was but probably 1986-87. My on-campus job in the costume shop at the theater meant that I got to know just about everyone at the school who didn’t fit the dominant big hair/mullet, sorority/fraternity paradigm, simply because that was the only welcoming spot. Fred wasn’t one of the regulars but he was around often enough at one point to have heard the music I was playing when I was the one working in the shop. He suggested I might be interested in some harder stuff and he’d bring me some tapes.

I assumed he’d bring in some of his tapes for me to listen to during whatever show was being performed, or he’d let me borrow some for the length of the run. Instead he gave me two tapes, ON THE FRINGE OF THE FRINGE (Assorted new music) Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. He may have had these mixes at home already or he may have made them just for me, I wasn’t really sure. He was very nonchalant about it so I took them to be tapes he really didn’t need cluttering up his car anymore. The insert was typed, on a typewriter, which is an impressive level of detail, or an admission of horrible handwriting, either one. I’m typing it up the same way it appears on the tape for authenticity.

I’m sure I dutifully listened to these two tapes a handful of times so I could feel like I could talk about them if Fred came around and not sound stupid but my overall feeling was, if this is the fringe of fringe, I’m pretty sure the actual fringe is not my cup of tea. I had heard of some of the bands and maybe one or two songs were something I’d heard on one of the other college radio stations’ hardcore shows but mostly this was unfamiliar territory.

Side A
FLIPPER
Sacrifice
The Light, the Sound…
The Old Woman…
Sex Bomb
HALF JAPANESE
Mt. King/Louie Louie
Thing With a Hook
8-EYED SPY
Diddy Wah Diddy
Love Split With Blood
Lightning’s Girl
Lazy in Love
EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN
Seele Brennt
Sehnsucht
Halber Mensch

Side B
WILMA
Life Without Adjec.
Georgie Girl
BUTTHOLE SURFERS
Concubine
Eye of the Chicken
Creep in the Cellar
American Woman
TEENAGE JESUS
Red Alert/Orphans
The Closet
Burning Rubber
Crown of Thorns
Red Alert
NO TREND
Teen Love
Your Love
Karma Nights

Ironically, the box is checked off for noise reduction. I’ve kept these tapes all these years mostly because I never get rid of music and I’ll admit that back in the day, I liked having something like this as part of my collection. I didn’t have Volume 2 in the car with me today but I think that’s the one with HĂĽsker DĂĽ and Sonic Youth, among others, so I probably listened to that one more often. As for Volume 1, this No Trend song brought instant recognition when I heard it as I pulled into the parking lot at work. Timeless, really.

Model Worker

Magazine – Model Worker

I’m fighting off a cold so for this installment of Tape Deck Tuesday, I wanted something that would not tempt me to sing along. I picked up Urgh! A Music War, which I’m pretty sure was taped through some elaborate VCR to cassette arrangement by my best friend, back in the analog days.

She had a friend from high school who had a cousin (if I’m remembering this right) who was into cool music and he dressed really funky and was really good looking with curly hair that flopped in his eyes. He was the one who had maybe taped it off of tv or something, and she had borrowed it during the summer and taped it for me. It wouldn’t all fit on one 90 minute tape so she left off bands we already knew enough about, like the Go-Go’s and Joan Jett, in favor of the more obscure ones like Klaus Nomi and Invisible Sex. Accompanying the tape was a long letter with her impressions of the visuals that I would have to wait to see until a future date.

I know I did eventually see the movie because I remember seeing those performances by Klaus Nomi and Invisible Sex and thinking, what is going on here? Very unlike any concert experience I had had up to that point. Likewise Skafish doing “Sign of the Cross” and Pere Ubu. And the Cramps. I knew the Cramps because my older brother was a big fan but I’d only seen the album covers and I just remember watching the video and wondering how Lux Interior managed to keep his pants from coming completely off. Many of the clips are on YouTube now but not all of them. I really wanted to see “Sign of the Cross” again but no luck.

Here’s the track listing for the tape I have (the actual movie listing is here):

Side A
Wall of Voodoo – “Back in Flesh”
Toyah Willcox – “Dance”
John Cooper Clarke – “Health Fanatic”
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – “Enola Gay”
Chelsea – “I’m on Fire”
Oingo Boingo – “Ain’t This the Life”
Echo & the Bunnymen – “The Puppet”
XTC – “Respectable Street”
Klaus Nomi – “Total Eclipse”
Athletico Spizz 80 – “Clocks are Big; Machines are Heavy/Where’s Captain Kirk?”
Dead Kennedys – “Bleed for Me”
Steel Pulse – “Ku Klux Klan”
Magazine – “Model Worker”
Surf Punks – “My Beach”
The Members – “Offshore Banking Business”

Side B
Au Pairs – “Come Again”
The Cramps – “Tear It Up”
Invisible Sex – “Valium”
Pere Ubu – “Birdies”
Devo – “Uncontrollable Urge”
The Alley Cats – “Nothing Means Nothing Anymore”
John Otway – “Cheryl’s Going Home”
Gang of Four – “He’d Send in the Army”
999 – “Homicide”
The Fleshtones – “Shadowline”
X – “Beyond and Back”
Skafish – “Sign of the Cross”
UB40 – “Madame Medusa”
The Police – “Roxanne”

I’ve mentioned before how just being able to see a small sampling of what the music scene was like outside of the mainstream (in those couple of years before I was old enough to take part it in it myself), felt like putting the puzzle pieces together. I don’t think I listened to this tape all that often but I liked knowing what the bands both sounded and looked like. It definitely played a part in my overall music education and if you get a chance to see it, you should do it.