High school

Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)

Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)

It’s finally summer, my favorite season. I’ve always loved summer best, especially when I was young and summer meant no school. As I got older and carefree summers turned into summer job summers, I still loved it because hanging out with your friends became so much easier. Suddenly everywhere was a potential party, instead of having to find some indoor spot.

As I raced out the door this morning I grabbed an old tape that I’d recorded in the summer between finishing high school and starting college. A friend and I found our way to a party that someone was having out on a field somewhere down by the water. When I think about these things now, I can only assume I told my mother I was going to someone’s house because you’d be crazy to let your kid go to a party down by the rocky shore in a pitch black field. Who really knows where we were. I’m sure I wouldn’t even have been able to find the spot again the next morning. It was not one of our usual spots. Our usual spots were the athletic fields that were not in use by the local college during the summer, or the blueberry fields. Only in Maine*.

The party was your usual BYOB (and bug spray) and just hang out. Someone had made a small fire. In addition to the people you would expect to see, there were two guys from England, someone’s cousin and his friend I think. We got talking to them and while one of them was trying to pick up my friend, the other guy and I were left to make small talk. Naturally, I asked what kind of music he liked. He replied, British bands. Well, that’s not much help. Granted, after two years of living in Maine my knowledge of British bands was not very robust but surely he could name names. I offered up the English Beat which he pooh-poohed immediately and said no, try this, and handed me a tape.

Side A: Buzzcocks – Singles Going Steady
Orgasm Addict
What Do I Get?
I Don’t Mind
Love You More
Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)
Promises
Everybody’s Happy Nowadays
Harmony in My Head
What Ever Happened To?
Oh Shit!
Autonomy
Noise Annoys
Just Lust
Lipstick
Why Can’t I Touch It?
Something’s Gone Wrong Again

Side B: The Stranglers – The Collection 1977–1982
(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)
Peaches
Hanging Around
No More Heroes
Duchess
Walk On By
Waltzinblack
Something Better Change
Nice ‘n’ Sleazy
Bear Cage
Who Wants the World?
Golden Brown
Strange Little Girl
La Folie

I took it home and copied it so I could give it back to him at the next party out in a field somewhere else later in the week. So thanks, random English dude with curly hair, for having a friend that dragged you along to a party in the Maine sticks. These are some truly classic songs and a foundation for many bands that would come after. It’s also a great testament to the whole culture of tapes. Having handy some music you could share with someone. Would you carry an LP to a party on a field? No, you would not. But a tape, definitely.

* These were just wild blueberries growing in some undeveloped land behind a new-ish group of houses. It’s not like we were partying amidst someone’s crops. Wild Maine blueberries are the best kind but no one was there to go berry picking.

She Bangs the Drums

The Stone Roses – She Bangs the Drums

I’m reading Peter Hook’s The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club and I’m up to 1993. In addition to recording how horribly mismanaged the club was, especially financially, from its very inception, it’s full of tales of the Madchester scene.

The movie 24 Hour Party People covered some of this, and how much of that film or Hooky’s account of events can be really accurate is something he even acknowledges in the beginning of the book. With the kind of rampant drug use depicted in both and the intervening years blurring memories, I’m sure there are holes in some of these stories. Still, I believe it was a wild time and that crazy things were going on in Manchester back then.

For Tape Deck Tuesday I decided to pop in my Stone Roses Fools Gold cassingle. Do you remember the cassingle? It seems like such a joke of a format. This one was even some kind of maxi cassingle because it was the cassette version of a double A side. Both sides of the cassette were the same, the full version of Fools Gold, followed by What the World is Waiting For, then the short version of Fools Gold. Even though I bought the thing, this seemed stupid to me. So I pulled the old, piece of tape over the little hole on the top, move and recorded a bunch of other Stone Roses songs over the short Fools Gold and all of side B. Blasphemy? It’s a cassingle, how much worse can it get?

Fools Gold

I used this tape for the first test of the tape deck, because cassingle.

Side A
Fools Gold
What the World is Waiting For
She Bangs the Drums

Side B
Elephant Stone
Waterfall
Shoot You Down
This Is The One

There’s the visual from Instagram for you.

I liked the Stone Roses and the Charlatans (UK) but I didn’t get into the whole scene. Maybe you needed to be on ecstasy to really appreciate them all but that wasn’t my thing. I rather liked being in control and I never really saw the appeal. I remember going to a Grateful Dead concert with a bunch of friends in high school and one guy in our group became truly green (I’d never seen a person actually turn green before) and passed out. These were some pretty hard partying kids but they were usually drinking beer and smoking pot and he had taken god only knows what. He was a big guy too, fell like a tree being chopped down. If he couldn’t handle that, little old me, who didn’t even smoke cigarettes, had better not take any risks. I wasn’t a total goody-two-shoes but I didn’t see the need to lose myself either.

I used to think I would really have loved to have been able to go to the Haçienda. Now I know that I would have been happy to have been there during the early days when it was a split of dance nights and live bands, and I probably would only have gone on the band nights, but I’d leave the ecstasy-fueled raves to others. The music is enough of a high for me.

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.

Situation

Yazoo – Situation

Over the weekend I finally bought a car to replace the one I’ve been driving for the past four years. I needed something that was cheap but reliable, didn’t already have too many miles on it, and gets good gas mileage. I bought a ’99 Toyota, very basic (manual everything still) but I hope it will be good.

Given that it’s a real no-frills car, the stereo doesn’t have a CD player, and it’s of course too old for an auxiliary jack for an mp3 player, but it does have a tape deck. My husband had an old Saab for a while that had a tape deck but it didn’t work. Mine works! So as long as it’s working I thought I would haul out my old tapes and listen to things I haven’t listened to in a really long time. It’s perfect for my long commute. I’ll pick a tape from my stash then write them up here as tape deck Tuesday, like throwback Thursday, or the once a month Where I Lived Wednesday that I love doing. It should be entertaining, especially as I seem to have a large number of tapes without any identifying marks whatsoever. I had this theory that my siblings would be less likely to steal my tapes if they didn’t know what was on them as they would just not take the time or risk to find out. That was a fine plan when I knew the difference between what I’d taped on the 90min TDK with the red label versus the Maxell with the blue label. Now it’s all lost to time and I’ll find out as I drive to work.

This first tape deck Tuesday (guess I should hashtag that) features an old tape my oldest sister made. It’s titled “New House/Xmas ’83” and she made it at Christmas, our last spent in our house in New York as my mother had finally found a house for us to live in up in Maine. My oldest sister had just graduated from college earlier in May and she had been living in the house and commuting in to Manhattan. She had made some other tapes that are legendary in our family (if I can find them, they’ll probably appear on some other Tuesday), but I think this is the last one from that time period. We spent that Christmas break packing up the house and this tape was pretty heavily in rotation.

It’s a curious mix, like her tapes could be, some big radio hits, other lesser known songs that my sister just liked, and very 1982/1983. This song is the fourth track on side B. When I picked up my 8-year-old son from school today he was so excited to ride in the “new” car. As I started up the engine and the music started playing he asked if it was one of my tapes and I replied yes, it was one my sister had made. He gasped and said, “She made it?! How could she make a tape?! That is sooo cool! Can we make one?!” He has seen my Walkman before and knew you could listen to music on tapes but I guess I just never bothered to explain the whole culture surrounding it. Honestly, I didn’t think he would be that interested or have the attention to span to listen to me rattle on about how much work was involved, etc.

I did, just today in fact, see some blank Maxell’s for sale when I went to a store to buy some other things for the car. I don’t have a cassette player for my stereo anymore (just my Walkman and now the car) but there’s one sitting in my mother’s basement. I don’t remember if that one works but I told him we could check it out next time we’re visiting and maybe we could bring it home and make a tape together.

If you’re curious, here’s the track list.  (more…)

Pump It Up

Elvis Costello – Pump It Up

Whew, what a day. Week, actually. Did you ever have one of those weeks where nothing particularly bad happened, no work crises, nothing horrible on the home front, just a series of frustrations and disappointments that pile on top of each other until you feel like you just can’t take anymore? Yeah. That’s when you need to blast this song as you go peeling out of the parking lot.

When we were teenagers, all the Elvis Costello records belonged to my older sister. I have a 7″ now, I’m not sure where or when I got it, but she owned all the LPs. I taped some of them way back when but I have a hole in my collection where all the Elvis should be.

Tomorrow is Record Store Day and I’ll be hitting my local record store, just down the street. Or as my son once called it, The Most Forgotten Place on Earth. He was only seven at the time and it is down a little pedestrian-only alleyway, but I’m sure it will be busy. Most Saturdays there is some regular traffic through there but it’s not crowded. Tomorrow will be bumping elbows, waiting your turn busy. I may not end up buying any of the special RSD releases but I might pick up an old Elvis Costello album. It’s going to be tough to top my great find from RSD last year.

It’s also Easter weekend and my kids have been off from school all week so I contemplated going up to Maine to visit my mother. We could spend Easter with her and I could go to an event at a branch of the record store where I had my first post-college job. I had too much going on at work though, and didn’t really want to spend that many hours driving up and back for what would end up being a day and a half there. It’s also just as well we stayed put because I’m close to securing a new (to me) car and I need to do some things to get that all lined up.

Have a fun Record Store Day!

Burning Down the House

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8D4AsLzlM0

#WhereILivedWednesday: Mrs. Black’s House

This is part of a series of entries about places you once called home, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. Check out the links on her site for more stories!

My mother started a new job in a small Maine town during the summer of 1983. Our house in New York was on the market but not generating much interest and the three of us still left at home needed to join my mother up in Maine by the start of the school year. When the first day of school rolled around, we were still living at a summer place an hour away, in the tiny beach town where we’d spent many summers of our childhood. After two weeks of making that drive with three reluctant passengers at 6am, my mother found someplace closer to school.

Our new temporary home was also a summer house, right down by the water, but in the same town as my mom’s new job and our school. It was owned by an old lady named Mrs. Black who cleared out after Labor Day and was happy to have some extra income by renting it to us. The reason she moved back into town then was because the house wasn’t winterized; a new term for me that I didn’t fully appreciate until later.

At first it was great. September in Maine is still beautiful, with the fall colors starting, and you could still look forward to warm afternoons. The house had a very large open room with a double fireplace smack in the middle. One corner was the dining area, the opposite corner had a big sofa and one of those lobster trap tables common in Maine summer houses. There were two bedrooms back behind the living room area of the open room, and one small bathroom. There was another bedroom tucked in behind the kitchen but it was a little creepy and we preferred to double up in the regular bedrooms.

Even though we were now in the same town as our school, it was about as far away as you could be and still be in the same district. We could have taken a school bus, and in fact my younger sister did start taking the bus home from school after a couple of weeks. But my older sister and I were New York snobs and absolutely refused to do anything so rural as ride a school bus. Besides, there was nothing to do at Mrs. Black’s house. It was lovely but remote. You could go for a walk past the deserted summer community and that was about it. My mother borrowed a black and white tv from a young guy in her office but again, being that far away from a broadcast center, you could get maybe two channels, no cable, no MTV.

September turned to October and the sun set earlier every day. Those crisp fall days everyone loves? Not so fun when your summer cabin has no heat or insulation. That big double fireplace didn’t really work. We tried once but just managed to smoke up the whole room. There actually was some kind of electric heat source, a grate in the floor blew hot air when you flipped a switch on the wall, but after my younger sister nearly set her sweater on fire by placing it on top of the grate to warm up one frosty morning, my mother declared it off limits. The bedroom my older sister and I shared had a little space heater that was basically like leaving the door open on a toaster oven. We were allowed to run it for a few minutes before going to bed to take the chill off the room so you could stand to change into pajamas. Under no circumstances were we allowed to let it run all night for fear of it shorting out and starting a fire. I think my mother was more afraid of us burning down the rental house than of our own personal safety but it was a pretty sketchy heater so we obeyed.

By November it was bad. Really bad. We now had no hot water either. It turns out that one night when it got really cold, the hot water pipe had cracked and every time we turned on the hot water, instead of coming out of the sink or shower head, it was dumped onto the rocks beneath the house and trickled down to the ocean. We wore long underwear, sweatpants, and flannel nightgowns, all at the same time, two pairs of socks, and mittens, when we went to bed. My mother and little sister started sharing a twin bed, for warmth, with the cat sleeping on top of them trying to get in on some of that body heat.

We lived out there until Thanksgiving. Our house in New York still hadn’t sold but we couldn’t stay in the non-winterized house any longer. A person my mother knew at work had built a new house and was having trouble selling his old one, just like we were. He agreed to rent it to us until he had a buyer or we managed to sell ours and finally really move up to Maine.

Hey, it’s my two-year blogiversary! I’ve got a tradition going now of posting Talking Heads songs on this day, this makes the third one. We listened to this album a lot that first year up in Maine, and the last song on the record is my favorite TH song, but that’s the song on my first post so I took this one instead. It seemed to fit better anyway.

Ages of You

R.E.M. – Ages of You

Today I found out about the Amtrak Residencies for writers. I can’t tell you how perfect that is. I might cry. Right now I am listening to the train tape I made in college (the digital edition on my iPod) and I can see the backyards of America in my head, obscured now and then by the blur of greenery; interrupted by the occasional overpass. I always thought that would make an excellent anthropology thesis, America’s Backyards as Seen from the Train. That’s where the truth hangs out. The discarded bicycles, rusted red wagons, trampolines, and clotheslines.

Close by the cities, the scenery is much more industrial. Warehouses. Graffiti covered brick buildings and cement walls. Trenton Makes The World Takes. The cities give way to the suburbs, where the backyards and cemeteries make up the scenery. Depending on what train you’re taking, you might get far enough away from the built up areas to see more traditionally scenic views. I always try to sit on the right side of the train in a window seat. If you always sit on the right, you’ll see what’s on the left on your way back.

I love everything about train travel. I love the big, beautiful, historic stations. I love the smells of the engine, some kind of weird mix of diesel and electric, hot and metallic. I love the rhythm of the train swaying gently as it clatters along the tracks. I love the tracks! I have two rusted and discarded old railroad spikes saved in a bin. I have several Amtrak train ticket stubs saved alongside concert tickets. I love leaning my head against the window and trying to find a spot to put your feet that gives you just the right amount of ‘please don’t talk to me’ body language or trying to sit in such a way as to invite a little conversation. I love watching my fellow passengers, listening to them chat with their seatmate or talk with their children about what’s passing by the window. I like to sneak a peak at the book they’re reading. Watching as people meet them when they get off the train, and others saying goodbye as someone gets on.

I have taken the train as far north as Montreal, as far south as Georgia. The Adirondack. Southern Crescent. Overnight trains. Commuter trains. Sightseeing trains. Subways. I’ve been to Zoo Station. Paddington Station. Two of my proudest foreign language moments were giving directions to Salzburg’s train station in German and confirming in Czech that someone was waiting for the correct subway train in Prague. The only Czech words I can still remember are the words for beer and ‘next stop’ which is what they would announce as the subway pulled into every station.

It is hands down my favorite mode of travel. It’s not the fastest, there are usually delays on the line somewhere, but when I take the train, at least half the reason is just being on the train. It’s not the most convenient, being at the mercy of someone else’s schedule. A few years ago, Amtrak started running a train up to Maine, the Downeaster. I am dying to take that train. In order to get the train from my house to my mother’s house up in Maine would involve me getting on a train when it’s still dark in the morning and switching stations in Boston. It would take more time than driving but I’m actually contemplating buying a used car up near my mother just so I have an excuse to make that trip.

There is just something about the train that brings up all kinds of emotions for me. It’s like I feel a tiny shred of what everyone else in my car is feeling. Some people are excited, some are sad, some are hopeful, some are worried, some are exhausted, some can’t sit still. I know all those feelings and have, at different times in my life, been one of those people sitting there. So now I look around and see me on my first solo train trip, me going to visit a sister or a friend, me with my best friend on an adventure, me trying to hold it together when things aren’t working out, me on my way to a job interview, me seeing new places and remembering all my old favorite haunts. I don’t get that from any other form of travel.

This is the fourth song on the train tape. My vinyl copy of this song has a longer finger-snapping intro. I really wanted to use this version but I couldn’t get it to only play the first part.

Rock & Roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avM0qzEF5I

The Velvet Underground – Rock & Roll

Some of my fellow Still in Rotation contributors have started up a new site called Raised on the Radio and they invited me to put together a playlist for the Twisted Mix-tape Tuesday feature. Just to make it more fun, every week there’s a new theme. This week the theme is anything goes so I got to choose my own theme.

I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating a playlist (or a CD or tape, back in the day), so half a dozen ideas that popped into my head were rejected after I was unable to settle on five songs. I decided on songs in foreign languages partly because that limited the number of songs I knew and made it easier to keep it to five.

The name of the site and the idea behind it reminded me of this Velvet Underground song. Such a classic, and so true.

Then one fine morning she puts on a New York station
You know she don’t believe what she heard at all
She started shaking to that fine, fine music
You know her life was saved by rock & roll.

I grew up outside of New York City and the station we listened to was WLIR. I didn’t realize how lucky we were to have that station until we moved up to Maine half-way through my high school years. There were some pretty glaring gaps in our classmates’ musical knowledge, at least to our way of thinking, though they seemed happy enough.

Kiss Off

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5k_j_A3ac

Violent Femmes – Kiss Off

If the sight of this album cover doesn’t immediately take you back to high school, well, maybe you’re older than I am because if you’re my age or younger, it should*. Even if you weren’t in high school when it came out, like I was, there’s something so quintessentially high school about it. Probably because many of the songs were written by Gordon Gano when he was that age. It was just voted #5 in the top 10 albums of 1983 poll by the readers of Slicing Up Eyeballs. This reader definitely included it in the ten I voted for.

I thought of this song this morning as I sat in traffic, already late for work before hitting the wall of cars. There had been a substitute bus driver this morning who showed up eight minutes early and, with no one standing out waiting in the rain, blew right past the house. My seven-year old was in tears at the thought of missing the bus, probably because it meant no Pokemon trading card opportunities, but still, tears first thing on a Monday morning is a very inauspicious beginning to a week. So I told him we could catch up to the bus, grabbed my car keys and we hurried on alternate streets to beat the bus to a stop a few after ours.

Normally I should already be on my way to work when his bus arrives but I could barely get out of bed this morning since I some noisy neighbors woke me up at 2:15am. They were just hanging out on their front porch, talking loudly, at 2:15am on a Sunday night. Clearly these people don’t work 9-5 jobs or have school-aged children.

I sent my boss and a co-worker a text explaining I was running late because of a school bus mishap and hoped I’d be there before a 9:30 meeting I had scheduled. I didn’t have to attend the meeting but ideally I would have been around to make sure it got underway without any problems. Therefore I should not have been surprised to come upon a sea of red tail lights just as I thought I might make it in by that time. And of course I would get an email from one of the participants saying can we please reschedule, I just left you a voice mail.

I’m not really annoyed with any of the people that caused me to be so late this morning (ok, yes, the noisy neighbors) but I was listening to the new album by the National since the show’s tomorrow night. On the last track, Hard to Find, which came on while I sat in the stop and go traffic, Matt Berninger sings “You can all just kiss off into the air…” an obvious tip of the hat to the boys from Milwaukee. With everything feeling like it was out of my control, the frustrations that are so prevalent throughout the Violent Femmes first album were mounting and I found myself thinking, “10, 10, 10, 10 for everything! Everything! Everything! Everything!”

*Maybe because I so strongly associate this album with my youth, it was jarring to see them perform basically the whole album at Coachella this past April. Some things are better left in your memory.

April Fool

Patti Smith – April Fool

This past week was pretty busy followed by a weekend full of activities. Now here it is April 1st. I am so ready for it to be April, for spring to finally get going full strength, but it’s been such a long winter that I almost feel unprepared. I need to schedule summer camp for the kids but I still don’t know what the last day of school will be because of all the missed days from hurricanes and blizzards. That kind of unprepared. I am always ready for winter to be over. Before it even starts.

I didn’t really care much one way or the other about spring until I learned what passes for spring in Maine. I’ll never forget our German teacher explaining to a classroom full of kids how, in Austria and Germany, it gradually gets warmer in March and little flowers start popping up and then more in April and everything gets green again. He was kind of a character, this old man from an Austrian skiing village, so I figured he was trying to be funny to get us to remember the words for the season. Then I looked around and saw a number of kids listening as if they hadn’t ever heard of spring before. That first winter in Maine was a pretty harsh one, not just by our weak and untested New York standards, and I remember it snowed into April that year.

My primary goal in applying to college was to get as far south as seemed reasonably possible. I applied to only two schools north of the Mason-Dixon line. I hadn’t given much thought to the type of schools (mostly the big state universities) or to my chances of getting in, I just didn’t want any more snow in April. In the end I wound up outside Philadelphia, which wasn’t south by any stretch, but the seasons did at least arrive when the calendar said they should and you could easily get by without real winter gear. Biking was possible pretty much year round.

But I really came to appreciate spring when I lived in Washington D.C. Unless you are an allergy sufferer, you should try to see DC in the spring. It really is beautiful. I was thrilled to discover daffodils in February, and once all those flowering trees get going, it’s a riot of color everywhere you look. The cherry blossoms really are lovely down around the Tidal Basin but there are lots of less crowded places I loved to walk around; Rock Creek Park, Dumbarton Oaks, the C&O Canal, and Mount Vernon over in VA.

I’ll always love summer the most but thanks to those years in DC, I’m a fool for April.