11 1984
1984! An ominous year, and not just because of the book (and the film adaptation released that year). Reagan was continuing his wholesale destruction of the foundations of civil society, Thatcher was doing the same on the other side of the Atlantic, and in Canada, Mulroney was trying also, but simply lacked the skills. It was a depressing time. But the music could be good.
It felt as if the last tatters of my previous emotional attire were peeling away from me, and I didn’t know what to don next. I could finally see that limerence was no way to approach relationships, but without it I was paralyzed. Done were my attempts at creative writing, since no one wanted to hear about me, and I couldn’t understand anyone else well enough to write about them. I had no outlet for the kind of music and film writing I had done for the student newspaper before. Even my letter writing tailed off in this period.
A perplexing but rewarding release in February: the eponymous debut album by The Smiths. I have no idea how I learned about it. The British papers would have prepared me with obsessive coverage from their first single, but I had no good way of reading them. The guitar work of Johnny Marr was slightly reminiscent of Peter Buck of R.E.M., but less beholden to American idioms. Less beholden to any idioms, really; it was at once familiar and strange. It felt at times as if Marr and vocalist Morrissey were paying no attention to each other, or just trying to keep out of each other’s way.
Morrissey’s lyrics could verge on whiny, though with some clever turns of phrase, and he had a high, strong voice. Again, he was just unconventional enough to intrigue without alienating. While the uptempo songs I later learned were singles were the most immediate ("Hand In Glove", "This Charming Man", "What Difference Does It Make?"), I was most impressed by the slower "Suffer Little Children". Cultural references by UK bands often went over my head, in those days before it was possible to do research online, but I knew enough to know that the song was about the 1965 Moors murders, and it was not only brave of them to approach such a sensitive topic, but the result was a deeply affecting song.
I kept up my visits to the good repertory cinema, but I would also occasionally go see bargain first-run matinees at one of the movie theatres in downtown Berkeley, a short walk north of my apartment. A music-themed film was released in July, and it got good initial reviews, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It was called "Purple Rain". I was a theoretician, and couldn’t just sit in an office and work for eight hours; I had to think about things for a bit, put them down, do something else, return. My friends in graphics and systems always had code to write, modify, or stress-test. Nevertheless, I convinced one of them to go with me (I often failed at this, and went alone).
To my surprise, the theatre filled up (unusual at that hour). The rest of the audience was entirely young Black people, probably from Berkeley High, which was close by. I’m not White, but I’m pretty White-adjacent, and my friend was a Midwesterner, so we probably averaged out to two White people.
What I did not know until later was that the film was probably not #1 at that exact moment (that was probably "Ghostbusters") but had taken the crown in its opening weekend in July; the soundtrack album was at #1 on the Billboard charts, and the single "When Doves Cry", released in May, was at #1 as well. When it started to play, over the montage sequence for which it had been written overnight, the audience sang along.
The movie was a hot mess (I’ll spare you my cinematic criticism), but the filmed performances were quite compelling. My friend thanked me afterwards for the suggestion, saying he would never have considered it otherwise. It underlined to me, yet again, how segregated my cultural experiences were. It was not my first experience with a majority-Black audience, and would not be my last, but the lines were drawn more starkly than in multicultural Toronto, or the other places I would later live.
After that, I had to pick up the album. I had heard Prince before. I saw his performance on Saturday Night Live in February 1981, where he played his single "Partyup" from his third album "Dirty Mind", but I didn’t follow up on that. One of my grad school friends had his "1999" album (October 1982) and would sometimes put it on in the evening. I felt that the songs went on for about twice as long as they should (I still feel this, even though this is one of the Prince albums I still own) but it was fine as a backdrop to drinking and casual conversation.
"Purple Rain" has sold more than 25 million copies. It is probably the most popular album I have ever purchased since my Damascene conversion in 1978. (There was at least one, and perhaps two, albums I bought in 1977 that have sold more, but I soon stopped listening to them.)
My focus here is not on movies, but I can’t resist mentioning that some of my fellow grad students were into cult B-movies, and organized an expedition in October to see the new film by the director of "Piranha II: The Spawning". It starred a guy famous for bodybuilding and a couple of sword-and-sorcery films. To my surprise, I really enjoyed it. It was definitely an action film, quite different from my usual arthouse fare, but very well done. At year’s end, I would rate it the best movie I saw in 1984, along with another cult B-movie, "Repo Man" (whose punkish soundtrack was definitely to my taste). The October film was called "The Terminator". Its director went on to make the highest-grossing film of all time (and several others that did almost as well), and the lead actor went on to become Governor of California. (There was a later expedition to a theatre in the South Bay to see "Piranha II". It is not a good movie.)
At the time, I subscribed to the daily national edition of the New York Times (more slender than the NYC edition) as well as the bulkier Sunday paper. A July article by their main popular music critic, Jon Pareles, alerted me to two interesting albums just released on SST, the independent record label run by guitarist Greg Ginn from Black Flag. Both were double albums, unusual in the hardcore scene, but both bands were moving past hardcore. It was a bit embarassing learning about them from such a mainstream source and not KALX, but I will explain why.
One of them was "Zen Arcade", the second studio album by Hüsker Dü (the name is taken from a memory board game, the phrase means "Do you remember?" in Norwegian, the umlauts were added to evoke heavy metal, for some reason). When I later got hold of their previous releases, I recognized some songs from KALX, notably "In A Free Land" from a 1982 single, and "Everything Falls Apart" from their 1983 album of their same name. But thanks to KALX’s lax attribution, I had never known what I was listening to.
What immediately struck me about "Zen Arcade" was the guitar tone of my dreams, achieved by Bob Mould with nothing more than an Ibanez flying-V knockoff, an MXR Distortion+, a chorus pedal, and a miked amp. The sound seemed to spread across the spectrum, with gorgeous overtones. Mould did the bulk of the songwriting, but drummer Grant Hart also wrote songs. Hart sang in a more conventional and melodic fashion, in a higher register, but I actually preferred Mould’s lower, harsher delivery. Hart did write the most catchy songs: "Pink Turns To Blue", "Turn On The News", "Never Talking To You Again". The music was clearly rooted in hardcore, but could get psychedelic, or quieter (just solo piano, or voice and acoustic guitar). It was pretty strong as a double album, but not without filler. I thought the closing track, a fourteen-minute instrumental, was a bit of a stretch.
I was lucky to get hold of the album; apparently SST only pressed 5000 copies at first, and they were soon sold out. Much later I learned that the band had been rehearsing the songs for months, and playing some of them at live gigs. Nearly all of the songs on the album are first takes; it was completed in only forty hours of studio time. They used "Eight Miles High" (originally released by the Byrds in 1966) as a warmup in the recording sessions, and released that separately as a single. It remains one of my favourite covers of all time.
"Zen Arcade" got more public attention, but I preferred the other album mentioned in that NYT article, "Double Nickels On The Dime" by Minutemen; it became one of my desert-island discs. Minutemen adopted an eclectic style, mixing punk with funk, jazz, and R&B. Their songs were short and punchy; "Double Nickels" contained 45 songs, compared to 25 on "Zen Arcade". All three band members (singer/guitarist D. Boon, singer/bassist Mike Watt, and drummer George Hurley) were very good on their instruments (though only passable singers), and their precision allowed them to condense and polish their songs. As with Hüsker Dü, I would have heard Minutemen songs on KALX, but when I finally caught up with their back catalogue (on CD rerelease), I didn’t recognize anything. Their early work isn’t bad, but it isn’t compelling, either.
Minutemen were inspired to create a double album when they learned that their labelmates Hüsker Dü were doing so, and there is even more filler: cover versions, at least one rerecorded song (admittedly these are both pretty good), and a few short bits that just sound like farting around in the studio. One of these is even titled "The Roar Of The Masses Could Be Farts". But there’s more than one album’s worth of great music ("This Ain’t No Picnic", "Toadies", "Corona"), and they could also be quieter and more introspective, as on "History Lesson - Part II", a sweet elegy to their early days as punk fans and wannabes. I knew enough by then to know I might never hear anything good from either band again, but what I had was great and seemed promising, so I settled down to wait.
KALX started playing a song called "I Will Dare" by The Replacements on heavy rotation in July. It was instantly catchy and when the album "Let It Be" came out in October and won some critical acclaim, I picked it up. Again, it took me years to learn that Peter Buck of R.E.M played the guitar solo on "I Will Dare". I had heard an earlier Replacements song on KALX, "Kids Don’t Follow", but it was quite different, definitely in the hardcore idiom. The band were from Minneapolis (like Prince and Hüsker Dü) and tried for a while to play hardcore, but they were really inclined more straight-ahead college rock. There is a greater stylistic range on this album compared to the previous two discussed above: achingly eloquent with solo piano and voice on "Androgynous" or solo guitar and voice on "Answering Machine"; heavy metal on a cover of "Black Diamond" by KISS; juvenile silliness on "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out".
When I investigated their back catalogue, I liked their first album, "Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash" (August 1981), but only one song on their hardcore EP "Stink" (June 1982), and nothing from the album "Hootenanny" (April 1983), which struck me as disorganized and rushed. The Replacements were unusually shambolic, even by the messy standards of the time. I had heard that one in ten of their concerts were brilliant, but when I saw them at Berkeley Square (in April 1985, I think), luck was not with me. I had a bad feeling when I saw them spray each other from beer bottles just before taking the stage. They were sloppy drunk, and played badly. At one point, the guitar cut out, and it happened to be during a song that is mostly a guitar-dominated instrumental ("Seen Your Video"). So we had to sit there and endure the pedestrian bass and drum parts. They didn’t seem to care.
I threw a couple of parties that were successful. People stayed late to dance and converse. I had a reasonable circle of friends, and they seemed to respect me. Through friends of friends, I tried making contacts in the English and Library Science departments. These efforts would not really bear fruit, but I was trying. The next year would prove pivotal.