High school

Let’s Go Crazy

Prince – Let’s Go Crazy (by way of Hamilton)

The videos are not online. Or, if they are, they won’t be there for long. It was a strange mourning, to be at work and wanting to listen to the songs that we all knew but knowing that they wouldn’t be available to illustrate the shared grief. Luckily I had a meeting that afternoon in a room at the library. I did a quick catalog search and wrote down the call numbers and headed over to the meeting a few minutes early so I had time to stop in the music collection.

I grabbed Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, and Sign O’ the Times. I really wanted 1999 but they didn’t have it. I was not a huge Prince fan but I turned 13 in 1980. That means the entirety of my teenage years occurred during Prince’s biggest decade. If you can remember the videos, I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that Prince was responsible for kick starting a lot of teenagers’ sexual awareness back then. Let’s not forget it was Prince’s “Darling Nikki” that shocked Tipper Gore into founding the PMRC.

I still didn’t listen to the CDs when I got back from my meeting, I saved them for the car ride home. I decided Purple Rain should come first. When “Let’s Go Crazy” started, and those lyrics I hadn’t paid much attention to came on, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…” I lost it. Then the drums kicked in, and he was talking about the afterworld, and I cranked that song up so loud I thought my rear windshield was going to shatter. I pulled out of the parking lot and into traffic and I didn’t worry about anyone seeing an errant tear falling down my cheek because I was sure everyone else would hear the music and feel the same.

It surprised me that I reacted so strongly. Of course I knew all of these songs. Of course they were a part of my life, but it wasn’t music that I had felt especially tied to or even thought about frequently. I respected Prince and I acknowledged the huge role he had played and the love a lot of my friends had for him but I wasn’t among the truly devoted. I even tried following him on Twitter just two weeks ago or so and gave up after a day because I couldn’t make sense of his tweets. As I drove home and listened to all of Purple Rain and then started it over again, I teared up again.

I spent last night watching news come in of late night block parties in Brooklyn and an all night dance party at First Avenue in Minneapolis, and watching all the cities turn their lights to purple. Because none of his music is available online (come on, do you know anyone with a TIDAL subscription?) the legions of his faithful fans had to physically come together, turn on the radio, bring out their albums, just like we used to do. Hell, even MTV was relevant again. Back in January we took to our computers to reach out to friends when David Bowie died, to share obscure videos and pictures, favorite songs, memories. We met there. It helped us all to feel less alone and isolated in our shock and grief. This time it wasn’t enough.

The video above is from the curtain call of Hamilton on Broadway the night that Prince died. I saw it come up on Twitter and I blinked away tears again. I think what moved me so much was watching how people had to be together. These songs were so much a part of our formative years, so much a celebration of living, dancing, sex, love. Even if I never thought about those songs as having special meaning for me, when I listened to them in the car I realized that they are a part of me. And I don’t feel old enough for this piece to be over.

 

 

 

Oh! You Pretty Things

David Bowie – Oh! You Pretty Things

When I picked up my phone this morning and casually opened Instagram to see if any of my friends had been at any great shows last night, I scrolled and thought, wait, what is going on here?! I frantically clicked over to Twitter to find some context, something confirming what seemed impossible. My brain couldn’t process what I was seeing. Days after his 69th birthday, after his latest album’s release and the video for the song Lazarus, without warning, David Bowie was dead.

A Monday morning doesn’t grant you the time to sit and absorb that kind of information. I jumped in the car to drive my daughter to school and fumbled for some kind of explanation to give her for who was David Bowie and how monumental his work and life were and god, how could he have possibly died!?

I got to work and settled into a non-stop Bowie marathon, starting with Hunky Dory. That’s the album that is my starting point for all things Bowie. As I’ve mentioned before, my older brother was a huge David Bowie fan and that’s the first one I remember being immersed in as a pre-teen while my brother ruled the turntable. Next up, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It wasn’t until college, probably, that I stopped to listen to what I was singing when “Suffragette City” would come on, and realized oh, hey, maybe now I get what my mom objected to about David Bowie. I was too young to really understand most of what she found offensive and she didn’t come right out and say it either, probably not wanting to acknowledge what had flown over our heads in case we hadn’t picked up on it the first time around. I just loved the songs and soaked them up like a sponge.

On through Diamond Dogs and Young Americans making my way into the Berlin trilogy, hitting Scary Monsters for the drive home. One of the great benefits of having been exposed to David Bowie before I could fully appreciate everything he was doing is that I just accepted it. Sure, I didn’t get what all the songs were really about but if my brother thought he was cool, then so did I. Having that kind of introduction to not just music but art, fashion, sexuality, film, theater, was truly a gift. If you had seen one of his more avant garde performances, even if you thought to yourself, what did I just watch?, it stretched you and your ideas of what was acceptable.

There will never be another person like David Bowie. Someone who never stopped creating and innovating, right to the end. Have you seen the videos for “Blackstar” and “Lazarus“? And I loved this one for The Stars (Are Out Tonight) from The Next Day back in 2013. He was a genius, an artist, and an inspiration. We are lucky to have been alive during his lifetime.

Don’t You (Forget About Me)

Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)

On Saturday, my high school class in New York held their 30th reunion. I wasn’t there, we were up in Maine for Thanksgiving with my mother. One of my former classmates had added me to the Facebook group earlier in the fall and I was halfway tempted to go but logistically, it just didn’t make sense. Plus, I didn’t graduate from there, as we moved the summer after 10th grade, and I’m not at all sure people that hadn’t also been in elementary school with me would have remembered me.

Today there have been lots of pictures from the reunion posted to the FB group. I am silently sitting here looking at them all and wishing someone would get busy tagging everyone because, hey, not everyone looks the same as they did 30 years ago. To be sure, some people I could easily identify and for the most part, everyone looks really great for our age. They fared much better than the Maine high school reunion pictures I saw from their get together this summer.

I could have attended either or both of those reunions but one of the consequences of having split my high school years between two places is that I didn’t have enough time in either to really have a close group of friends. Typically after you graduate from high school and people go off to college in different places, you at least see your old friends when you’re all home for summer or Christmas. We did go back to New York a lot that first year but even then I could already see that the dynamics of the social scene in my class were shifting and I wasn’t going to be a part of it. It’s hard to know if we hadn’t moved if I would have been hanging with the cool kids or not. I’d like to think so but I remember feeling like I was losing my friends to the other kids who were still there. The only way for me to keep in touch was through writing letters (because long-distance phone calls were really expensive) and how many teenagers are going to do that? Not many, I can tell you. Out of sight, out of mind.

As I drive my daughter to her high school every morning, I sometimes get a little peak into what her life is like. She’ll tell me she’s got a quiz in a class that day or she’ll see someone she knows as we wait in the drop off line and tell me a little something about them. One morning she complained that high school wasn’t what she expected it to be and that “all the movies lied” because she felt they hadn’t portrayed the reality of what a slog it was. I told her she had just been watching the wrong movies because all of the high school movies from my teenage years were 100% accurate. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (’82), Sixteen Candles (’84), The Breakfast Club (’85). Am I right? Anyone? Anyone?

I think a John Hughes marathon may be in order. Which one do you think I should have her watch her first?

Ohm

Yo La Tengo – Ohm

My daughter asked me to help her with her math homework tonight. I’m sure I learned what she’s studying at some point but I have only the faintest clue how to go about solving these equations and the way I was taught is probably not how they teach it now.

It’s hard to counsel kids about advanced math subjects when you have forgotten all of it yourself. I often think it’s sending the wrong message for me to even try because I run the risk of admitting that it’s something I had to memorize for a test, promptly forgot, and have never needed again. This kind of math problem is more my speed.

Personality Crisis

New York Dolls – Personality Crisis

My local record store is a tiny cramped space, even if you’re the only customer in there. Today there were a couple of people in there when I arrived and more came when they left so it felt particularly tight. The guy who works there said there were several bins of records that they hadn’t had a chance to price yet, a big collection that they’d bought, but they were all for sale so feel free to dig through the milk crates.

While the owner does get in new records, re-issues as well as new releases, he mostly sells used stuff. New vinyl is generally too expensive for me so I stick to the used bins and hope that he has something different in stock. That new collection had some interesting records but most of them were in kind of iffy shape. Missing inner sleeves, worn out covers, some scratches on the vinyl. I passed on a number of albums that I might have thought about buying if they’d looked a little less worn out.

After flipping through seven or so dusty bins, in the last box of records, I found an original copy of the first New York Dolls album. The cover was coming apart at the seams, as was the inner sleeve, but the record itself was in good condition. Such a classic. My brother used to play it all the time when he was in high school. I think he probably still has his copy, and given how meticulous he has always been about his stuff, I’m sure it’s in excellent shape. I only have a tape that my brother made me with this album on one side and Lou Reed on the other. I decided it was worth taking a chance with this copy since I’ve never come across it (in recent years – oh if only someone would have told me to grab a bunch more records back in the day).

I paid a little more for it than I thought it was worth really, given the sorry state of the cover and sleeve, but the guy cleaned it for me and I brought it home and ordered everyone else in the house to sit still while I put the needle down. This song came screaming out through the speakers and I got a huge grin on my face. It sounded great. It looked great too, nice and flat. Not bad at all for a 42-year-old record.

Shellshock

New Order – Shellshock

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks, big projects at work that kept me late, family visiting at the end of the summer, and finally, the start of the school year.

Sometime in there I was also added to the Facebook group for the 30th reunion for the high school class that I attended up through 10th grade. Even though we moved away for my last two years of high school, I had spent all of my earlier school years with those same kids and had a number of friends that I’d reconnected with on Facebook. People started posting old pictures from high school to the group. I even spotted myself in the class picture they posted as the cover photo for the group. It’s funny because I never would have remembered the event but then when I saw the picture, it came back to me.

With all of these images from 30 years ago fresh in my mind, my daughter started high school. I was definitely more nervous about it all than she was. I tried to hide that but I’m not really sure how successful I was. She has had a good start and seems to have adjusted pretty well. I, on the other hand…

First of all, the school bus goes past our house at a completely ridiculous hour so for years I had told my daughter I would drive her so she didn’t have to wake up before 6 a.m. Instead we both wake up by 6:15 and then sleepily shuffle through the bare minimum to get ourselves out the door by 7. As we sit in the drop off line, I watch all the teenagers pile out of cars and into the school. Even in my pre-coffee state I can see history repeating itself.

Last night was the Open House. There was precious little information about what that entailed but I knew we were supposed to get our child’s schedule and then follow through their classes for brief introductions from the teachers. Where to go inside the building, how long it would last, where all the classrooms are, were all things they just expected you to know. There weren’t any special signs just for the night to help out the freshman parents. The announcements on the PA were barely audible, the building has a confusing layout so the main entrance on ground level is actually considered the second floor. Not that it says that anywhere.

I wandered through the hallways alone, feeling very small and totally lost. I saw some people I knew but nearly all of them were breezing through the place like old pros and they seemed not to recognize me from elementary school events three years ago. I’m sure it’s partly a question of logistics that they have us all follow our kids’ schedules but I also think they are trying to give you an idea of what your kid’s day actually looks like. French class in this hall then race over to that wing for math, all the way to the far corner for gym class (led by Mr. Clean’s twin brother), up to the third floor for history.

It was just as awful as I remembered high school being 30 years ago. The walls of lockers, the tight staircases, the buzzing bell telling you to change classes, the smell of an old, sweaty gym, the cliques (yes, even as parents) you aren’t part of clustering in the hallways; all of it unchanged. I was walking around growing increasingly haunted by flashbacks. This was not helped by the presence of cheerleaders in high ponytails with heaps of baby blue sparkly eye shadow. I really don’t think it was the school’s intention to make my palm’s sweat but I’ll give them extra credit for recreating that authentic experience for me.

I can’t remember what I dreamed about last night but I woke up this morning with this song stuck in my head. When I went to find the video this morning, I realized there was a shorter edit of this song in the John Hughes movie, Pretty in Pink. The subconscious works in mysterious ways.

U.S. Blues

Grateful Dead – U.S. Blues

I had a really hard time picking one Dead song for today but hey, it’s the 4th of July weekend so this one, with its bicentennial video, seemed appropriate. Plus it’s one with Jerry Garcia on vocals and as tonight is the first of the three 50th anniversary Grateful Dead concerts in Chicago – which are also commemorating 20 years since they played their last shows before Jerry died – I thought it was fitting.

My oldest sister was (is still) a Deadhead. I don’t remember not having the Dead playing around the house as a kid. She put a “Honk if you like the Grateful Dead” bumper sticker on our family station wagon and much of the time it would be my mom driving around with a bunch of us littler kids in the back. She went off to college in 1979 and my next oldest sister and brother carried the torch for a while too but never to the same extent. I’m sure she toured as much as her money and available transportation allowed but it wasn’t like she ever dropped out and followed the band exclusively.

When we moved up to Maine, lots of the kids in my class were Deadheads. I was instantly welcomed by them as I knew all the songs and could sing the higher vocals in their basement jam sessions. And when a friend found himself with an extra ticket for the second show at the Augusta Civic Center in October of our senior year, he offered it to me. I was sure my mom would let me go, even though I was asking about going just hours before the show. To be honest, I didn’t have any of their albums myself and I was more interested in newer music but there’s no denying that the Grateful Dead helped shape my tastes, and I felt like one ought to go a Dead show at least once in life.

I can’t say I remember a whole lot about the show, not because I was high (although is it possible to not have at least a contact high at a Dead show?) but just because it’s been 31 years. I remember it being an unseasonably warm, sunny day and wandering around the parking lot before the show to buy a t-shirt to change into since I hadn’t had time to go home and change and my yellow and white striped button-down shirt really made me stand out. For all the concerts I have attended over the years though, this may be the one at which I saw more people just totally into being there. Completely immersed in the experience. It’s almost impossible to imagine a concert in 2015 that would have people that dialed in to a collective musical event.

My oldest sister lives in San Francisco now and she just went to the two shows in Santa Clara. Trey Anastasio is filling the Jerry Garcia role for these shows and even though I’m not a Phish fan, I can’t help but marvel at the way this has come full circle. One of those guys I was friends with in high school, went off to college where he became an early Phish fan, and subsequently became their manager. Small world.

Happy 4th of July and Happy 50th Birthday to the Grateful Dead!

Chapel Hill

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCKRIFslsvo

Sonic Youth – Chapel Hill

My recent posts lamenting the weather prompted one friend to say she felt so sorry for me and wished I could live someplace warmer. That was my sole goal when I applied to colleges. My family was well-versed in small New England liberal arts colleges and Ivy League schools, but once you passed the Mason-Dixon line, it was the land of the unknown. After only two Maine winters, I was hell-bent on going someplace warm and I didn’t much care what programs the schools offered, I just wanted to be where it was warm.

My mother refused to pay the application fee for any California schools so I decided to just apply to all the big state schools in Virginia and North and South Carolina. Not Georgia, that seemed too far south (I know, I know, but I didn’t then). Off went my applications to UVA, William & Mary, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UofSC-Columbia. My mom thought this was a really bad plan and insisted that I apply to two schools in familiar territory that her youngest brother had attended; one in CT, the other in a Philadelphia suburb. My dream school was Chapel Hill, with William & Mary a close second.

What we didn’t know was that these schools were much harder to get into if you were an out-of-state resident. I had bombed my junior year of high school because I was pissed off about leaving New York and moving to Maine. With less than stellar grades and only decent SAT scores, I didn’t make a convincing case. Chapel Hill only accepted 15% of its students from out-of-state residents. The Virginia schools allowed as much as 30% but the competition was strong. Needless to say, I didn’t make it.

In the end I had to choose between South Carolina and the Philly ‘burbs. I really wasn’t excited about either one. I’d had my heart so set on Chapel Hill that everything else seemed like a disappointment. My mother reasoned that if I intended to transfer anyway, good grades from the school she knew would look better than good grades from a giant state school that no one knew much about. While that made sense, the deciding factor for me was something I’d read in a brochure than came in the fat envelope from South Carolina.

It was a little piece filled with testimonials from students and there was this one girl who said her favorite thing about UofSC was sharing the bathroom with 20 other girls. I’d hardly ever known a day when I’d had the bathroom to myself and I was quite certain that my 17 years of sharing the family bathroom with my five siblings and parents had made me immune to any possible charms of a group bathroom experience with 20 girls I didn’t know. Plus, if that was considered printable by the school, it stood to reason that other people also shared that girl’s view and I was going to be a real fish out of water. South Carolina was out, and the deposit was sent to my uncle’s alma mater.

I did try to transfer, but I was slightly better informed the second time around and of my original group of schools, I only tried for William & Mary, where I still didn’t get in. I continued to carry a torch for North Carolina, Chapel Hill especially, but I recognized that my chances were even worse as a transfer student and maybe caring about the programs and majors was a better reason for choosing a school than just its happening music scene and lack of a harsh winter.

Years later when I was living in DC, a good friend from high school was going to Duke for her master’s. I rented a car and drove down to spend a few days so I could finally see if it was the perfect place for me. I hung out in Durham, made my pilgrimage over to Chapel Hill, and wound up my visit by meeting with someone in Raleigh at the North Carolina Museum of Art. I was working in one of the Smithsonian museums at the time and we’d been in contact with them regarding some piece in an exhibit so I figured it was my foot in the door. The person I spoke to was very nice but said it was pretty rough to work in a publicly funded art museum in a state where Jesse Helms was your senator. Oh. Yeah. I remembered happily signing a friend’s absentee ballot when he was voting for Harvey Gantt against Jesse Helms only a couple of years earlier. Hmmm, that was something I hadn’t spent much time thinking about.

I briefly flirted with the idea of graduate school down south, falling hard for Savannah College of Art & Design’s master’s program in historic preservation, but I didn’t end up going that route. I’ll never say never but at this point I think it’s unrealistic to uproot the family and though I hate the winter here, I am usually pretty happy about the political climate at least.

San Francisco Days

Chris Isaak – San Francisco Days

I was awakened at five something this morning by the sound of the snowplow going by. Again. It’s hard to sleep through, what with the loud scraping noise followed by that beep! beep! beep! of the truck backing up and then – thunk! – as the plow hits the ground again and more scraping as it turns the corner.

My mother just returned from a week-long visit to San Francisco to see my two sisters who live out there. My oldest sister moved first and slowly lured several other friends and family out to the city by the bay. At the time she lived in a house with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, when there wasn’t any fog. You’d wake up in the morning and go out to the living room and boom! It was easy to see how so many people decided to make the move. All the more so if you’d left behind winter grossness and still had an uncertain number of weeks more of it waiting for you upon your return.

When I was a young teenager, my dad lived in southern California for a couple of years. One summer trip we made a tour of California and saw San Francisco but trips with your parents (my dad, at this time in his life especially) when you’re that age are never your idea of fun. So I consider the first time I really saw the city to be a trip I made in February one year in my twenties.

I’d been living in Maine, losing my mind from all the snow. I tried the power of suggestion* and bought travel magazines and books about Caribbean islands, poured myself steaming hot baths and imagined I was in the tropics. It wasn’t working. My sister a year older than me, who had only a year or two earlier been enticed to leave Maine for San Francisco after experiencing the wow factor of our oldest sister’s place, convinced me I needed a vacation. I’d come to San Francisco for a few days then the two of us would go to Hawaii for five days, after all, San Francisco wasn’t vacation for her, and I’d get my tropical island dream.

My oldest sister picked me up at the airport. It was February. She had one of those little Jeep-like cars with open sides and the air was warm and flowers dotted the hillsides. “Wow,” I said, “it’s like spring.” My sister replied, “It’s not like spring, it is spring.” Suddenly the idea of moving to San Francisco didn’t sound so far-fetched after all.

I didn’t do it, obviously, but I have been out there a couple more times. Once in June for a wedding, when a busy schedule kept me from really doing anything on my own, and then another time in 2007 when I went for a conference. I’d offered to stay with my sisters to make it more affordable for work to cover the trip. My sisters pulled out all the stops again but by then I had two kids and moving that far away wasn’t in the cards. I enjoyed every last minute of being somewhere warm with green and flowering things and on dark mornings when I hear that snowplow go by, I am tempted by the idea all over again.

* It was also somewhere around this time that I went through a Chris Isaak phase. All his songs sound like warm weather. Just saying.

Modern Love

David Bowie – Modern Love

My brother was a huge David Bowie fan and my mother hated David Bowie. But my mother also worked full-time so my brother took advantage of her not being home in the afternoons and my other two sisters and I received a daily education in all of David Bowie’s great achievements. We were schooled on Ziggy Stardust, we looked at the cover of Diamond Dogs unsure of what to make of it, we sang along to “Queen Bitch”, I did a report for 9th grade English class on “Kooks.”

My brother went off to college in 1982. In 1983 David Bowie released Let’s Dance. This was not my brother’s David Bowie. This was more like my older sister’s David Bowie. In fact, the cassette I listened to in the car today is the original 1983 copy that my sister bought, complete with a little sticker with her initials on it to identify it as hers in her college dorm room. This was dance-y Bowie, and not in a “John, I’m Only Dancing” way. It was produced with Nile Rodgers, after all. For my brother, worshipper of punk, hater of disco, this was a step too far.

Listening to it now, some of the songs are not really that far of a departure from some of his previous work, but the hits were really big hits. If you’ve been a fan of a band or musician when they’ve been less adored by the general public and then they suddenly become everyone’s favorite, especially if the album they’re now getting all the attention for is one you don’t like, it puts a real strain on your relationship with that band. I know a little something about that. So in hindsight, I’m sympathetic to my brother’s plight. At the time, though, we little sisters thought it was pretty cool that David Bowie had made an album you could dance to with your friends.

Last week was David Bowie’s birthday and I presume my brother has long since forgiven the now 68-year-old for Let’s Dance, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to know that he doesn’t own it. Judging by the fact that this tape was abandoned by everyone and found by me in my mother’s basement when we were there recently, I’d say it’s no one’s favorite. That and no one has a tape deck anymore. Long live my car’s tape deck and Tape Deck Tuesday for these trips down memory lane!