10 1983
I was generally unhappy in 1983, but in retrospect, I was slowly accumulating the skills I needed to be happy. I just didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t like the social scene or the food at I-House, but I found an apartment in the summer (after six solid weeks of searching). My roommate was also a grad student in my department looking to move out of I-House. We weren’t close, and I wasn’t a very considerate roommate, but he was easygoing and put up with me. The apartment was within walking distance of the great produce section at the Berkeley Bowl supermarket, and I set about learning how to cook properly.
I didn’t dislike the students in my research group, and I don’t think they really disliked me, but it was clear we weren’t going to be good friends. Instead, I started hanging around with people in graphics and systems. The large graphics lab wasn’t far from my small office, and they kept the door open when someone was in there, so it was easy to wander in and see if anyone was up for a short chat or longer distraction. I wasn’t making much progress in the kind of research I had planned to do, but a side project with two postdocs in the summer grew into the foundation of my thesis three years later. I had to change advisors as a result, another passing trauma.
At some point early in the year, or late in the previous year, KALX started playing a lot from R.E.M., a band from Athens, Georgia. That is, playing a lot of a few songs, because all they had was a six-song EP called "Chronic Town", which had been released in August 1982. While all the songs are excellent, I fell in love with one in particular, titled "Carnival Of Sorts (Boxcars)"; it is still my favourite R.E.M. song. The main elements of their sound were the crisp arpeggiated guitar from Peter Buck (inevitably described as "jangly"), and the cryptic, sometimes unintelligible lyrics by Michael Stipe. The music was grounded in American folk-rock, but moved beyond it.
R.E.M.’s first album, "Murmur", was released in April 1983, on IRS Records, a division of A&M run by the manager of The Police. KALX added several songs from it to their playlist, notably "Radio Free Europe", which had been an early, obscure single in 1981, but was rerecorded for the album, and released as a signle again in June. I saw them play that month, at the Keystone Berkeley, a decent small venue on University Avenue, with maybe a hundred other people present. It was a good show, though Stipe was somewhat subdued by having one arm in a cast. "Boxcars" was the unexpected second encore.
R.E.M. went on to release four more excellent albums in a row, culminating with 1987’s "Document", slowly gaining exposure and reputation. A streak of five like that is rare for me; I can think of only one other artist who beats that, a surprising late entry I’ll talk about soon. The single from "Document", a song titled "The One I Love", got a fair amount of mainstream airplay. I remember attending an "alternative" concert in Toronto in 1987 where the two warmup acts and the lead act all did faintly mocking covers of it in their sets. It was jealousy tinged with respect; like any musician, none of them could claim with a straight face that they didn’t want their songs played on the radio or their albums purchased in shopping malls. R.E.M. were on the brink of something big. They signed with a major label, and started playing arenas and headlining festivals.
But I was no longer following them. It wasn’t because they were popular or had sold out; they deserved their new fame. The music was no longer as interesting to me, not as complex and mysterious, and I made that judgment before their sales jumped and the hit singles started appearing. Success was not entirely kind to them, and they called it a day in 2011, seemingly not enjoying it any more. I’m still happy to hear any and all of the music from those first five albums. I am not alone in that feeling; people speak fondly of "the IRS years".
Violent Femmes released their eponymous debut album in April, and it soon went into heavy rotation on KALX. "Blister In The Sun" was the obvious favourite, but "Add It Up" and "Kiss Off" also got much airplay. Lead singer and guitarist Gordon Gano was nineteen at the time. A contemporaneous review described his voice as "like your kid brother after his first six-pack". The focus on adolescent concerns in a more naturalistic frame reminded me of the first Undertones album. Violent Femmes had produced and recorded their album using cut-rate studio time paid for by one of their parents, and then somehow convinced Slash Records to release it as is, instead of rerecording it with a proper engineer and equipment. I saw them play at Berkeley Square on Hallowe’en, and their busking roots were evident. Brian Ritchie played acoustic bass really well, his melodic runs underpinning the songs, while drummer Victor DeLorenzo used a minimal standup kit of a snare, a cymbal, and a tom covered in a metal bushel basket, all of which he played with metal brushes. It was a fun, fresh concert, reminiscent in mood (though not at all in musical style) of my seeing U2 in 1981.
I thought Violent Femmes would be very successful, but they never really hit it big. Their second album, "Hallowed Ground" (May 1984) seemed decidedly inferior, even though the songs were written at the same time as those on the first album. The occasionally juvenile lyrics grew more grating, and Gano’s Baptist faith was more in evidence. I gave "The Blind Leading The Naked" (August 1986) one listen and gave up on them. They broke up but managed to reconcile after a few years, and the core of Gano and Ritchie, with other players, continue to play, with new material released as recently as 2019. That first album sold slowly but steadily over the years; several million copies were issued.
I went to these concerts alone. I could occasionally convince one of my Berkeley friends to go to a small venue, and I got invited along on some expeditions across the bay to midsized venues, but for the most part, I didn’t have anyone who came close to sharing my musical tastes. The guy I drove from Waterloo to Berkeley twice with was the closest, but he had found a girlfriend in SF, with much more conventional tastes, and was soon to move in with her.
New Order released the "Blue Monday" single in March, and for a while, one could not go to a club to dance without hearing it. It is still the best-selling 12" single of all time. Their second album "Power, Corruption and Lies", was released in May, and I gave it a spin, though I thought I wouldn’t like it, and I was right. I liked to dance, but I still didn’t respect disco, and they were veering too close for my tastes. Bernard Sumner is not a good singer, and his lyrics are downright embarrassing. I did eventually relent somewhat and pick up the compilation album "Substance" (originally released August 1987) some time in the ’90’s when I was backfilling my CD collection.
Talking Heads released "Speaking In Tongues" in June. It became their most successful album, and I liked it well enough, but it felt like "Remain In Light" with the edges sanded off. The rest of the band had essentially told Byrne "Eno or us," and Byrne’s collaboration with Eno on "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts" (February 1981) had fallen flat, so he tamed some of his musical ambitions, or found other outlets for them. I saw them tour this album, an absolute triumph described in my concert reminiscence. They would never tour again. I bought each of their last three albums on vinyl, but I didn’t listen to them much, and wasn’t too upset when they broke up in 1991. David Byrne has had a reasonably varied and successful solo career. In addition to several solo albums, he founded an influential record label, has collaborated with artists in a number of fields, and has written a well-regarded book on music production.
The release of his eighth album, "Swordfishtrombones" by Tom Waits in September, a decade into his career, marked a quantum leap forward, one of the most astonishing musical reinventions that I have witnessed. I had been asked by the Waterloo student newspaper to review his on-campus performance touring his previous album, "Heartattack and Vine" (September 1980). He played solo piano, periodically stubbing out cigarettes on the stage of the university’s main theatre, or taking a slug from a bottle of bourbon stashed under the piano bench. The music was bar-room ballads, sometimes raucous, sometimes mournful. I enjoyed it, and gave it a respectful review, though it was clearly a mannered performance, a little too retro for me.
Waits didn’t completely abandon his earlier sound. He used it as a foundation, adding on layers of experiment, pushing his voice and the instrumentation. The result could sound like a carnival nightmare, thumping, wheezing, clanking, and tooting, or like some broken, elegiac memory. Much of the credit for this transformation is due to Kathleen Brennan, whom Waits met and married in 1980. She introduced him to a new set of artistic influences, encouraged him to take a freer musical approach, and to experiment with new arrangements, later even modifying instruments or creating his own. Later she would become a collaborator on songwriting and production.
His followup album, "Rain Dogs" (September 1985) made further progress on this path, and these two albums stand out for me as examples of how conventional and avant-garde elements could co-exist without alienating either side of a broader audience. After that, he indulged an interest in musical theatre, alone and in collaboration with Robert Wilson, only a decade removed from his groundbreaking work with Philip Glass on "Einstein On The Beach". I could appreciate Waits’s influences in this (Brecht and Weill), but it didn’t work as recorded music for me (I never had a chance to see any of the productions, even on video). This would not be the last I heard from him, though.
By then, I had caught up with The Cure’s fourth album, "Pornography", which had been released while I was travelling in May 1982. I have since come to appreciate it more, but at the time, it struck me as bleak and harsh, especially the noisy title track. Amidst personal and professional difficulties, Robert Smith decided he had better do something about his life, and the immediate musical result of this was his attempt to write some hit singles. This would be a hopeless ambition for most, but Smith actually pulled it off, starting with "Let’s Go To Bed" (November 1982) and then "The Walk" in June 1983.
"The Love Cats", released in October, was positively giddy. In the video, Smith dances around a pivoting camera in the centre of a residential living room, while his bandmates pretend to play instruments in the corners. It was miles away from the gloom of the concert I had seen. I "rented" these singles and taped them, though they felt somewhat lightweight to me, and I remained curious about what the Cure would do next.
I would have seen that video on MTV, the first widespread all-music channel, which debuted in August 1981. I didn’t make a habit of watching MTV (we didn’t have cable in the apartment, and only a small black-and-white TV we mostly used for weird UHF stations late at night) but my friends would sometimes put MTV on when there was nothing better on the conventional broadcast schedule, or in place of a radio or a record that had to be changed every twenty minutes. Before this, bands with big budgets would sometimes put out "promo" films, which would be shown on music shows broadcast late at night, in between more conventional music performances. MTV changed both the way music was marketed and the way in which people listened to it.