13 1986
This was a year of transition. I moved in with my girlfriend, filed my PhD thesis in the summer, and started as a postdoctoral fellow at a different institution in a different country in September. All that change makes it hard for me to tell when and under what circumstances I first heard a particular piece of music in this period.
I would definitely have picked up "Candy Apple Grey", the fifth Hüsker Dü album, when it came out in March. It was their first release on a major label (Warner). For a long time, I thought "Flip Your Wig", which had been released the previous September, was also on Warner. In fact, Warner had asked to release it, but Hüsker Dü opted to stick with SST for the earlier album, even though they were quite frustrated with the indie label by that point.
The reason for my confusion is probably that I view these albums as a pair, from a great band at the peak of their creative arc. "Flip Your Wig" is the better album, by a slight margin, and was the first one that they self-produced, which made a huge difference. Warner left them alone for "Candy Apple Grey", and both albums have clearer vocals and more melodic songs, supported nicely by that wonderful guitar tone. To have these two albums come out six and fifteen months after the "Zen Arcade" double album is an amazing concentration of quality music.
A new source for me of complex guitar sounds was the latest album by Sonic Youth, "EVOL", their first on SST (released in May). They did not come out of the hardcore scene, though for a while they were inspired by it. Their roots lay more in the underground New York art and noise-rock communities. There was a brief No Wave phase in New York, named to scorn the early demise of UK punk and the co-opting of New Wave trappings by otherwise conventional pop bands. It essentially said "try to co-opt this", but was so uncommercial as to be unsustainable as a movement. But the artists persisted, as did some of the ideas.
I later investigated some of the No Wave material, and found the work to be intellectually intriguing, but emotionally uncompelling. I have a soft spot for the avant-garde. While still in high school, I had attended a concert by the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (which still exists), playing Stockhausen on EMS VCS 3 synthesizers. Sonic Youth’s back catalogue was more to my taste, but still too experimental and unfocussed. "EVOL" was the first point at which it gelled enough to ignite my enthusiasm. Some of their mentors and influences, like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, would also prove interesting.
The songs on "EVOL" were sometimes barely songs, but certainly more so than their previous work, which had been more popular in Europe than North America. They didn’t tumble along at a breakneck pace; they were often more atmospheric, relying heavily on alternate guitar tunings (with two guitar players, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo), dissonance, and noise elements such as controlled feedback. Moore had brought his girlfriend, Kim Gordon, into the band, and taught her to play bass; she also supplied vocals along with Moore. Drummer Steve Shelley, new for this album but with previous hardcore experience, was another factor in their evolution. This lineup would continue for the rest of their long history, and I would follow it to the end.
I’ll mention here The Cure’s singles collection, "Standing On A Beach", also released in May, though I didn’t buy it immediately. I picked it up later on CD, some time in the ’90’s. It’s an excellent compilation. I had already missed their album "The Top" (May 1984), and I would miss more after that. During the COVID lockdown, I went back to catch up, and found some worthwhile things in this and the next three albums, ending with "Disintegration" (May 1989), the last album with founding members other than Robert Smith. What followed wasn’t bad, just not to my taste.
To my astonishment (and probably that of others as well), The Cure released an excellent album, "Songs of a Lost World" in November 2024, harkening back to their earlier work. Smith’s voice had aged remarkably well, and his guitar work remained impeccable. The album was a critical and commercial success; I would personally put it in my top three of theirs, along with "Seventeen Seconds" and "Faith", and slightly above "Disintegration". Smith has hinted that at least one and possibly two more albums are in store.
I didn’t miss The Smiths’s June album, "The Queen Is Dead", but I might as well have. They weren’t very much in mind for me in those days, and I only heard this because J lent it to me in the fall, along with some other albums of his choice. I gave it one listen, and nothing held my interest. I would not pay attention to them again until well after their breakup in 1987.
I bought a used car in Berkeley, a Honda Civic station wagon, and my girlfriend and I drove it across the US in August for my sixth and final traversal (two in 1981, one in 1982, and two at the end of 1984). I was to take up a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, and my girlfriend would continue her graduate studies there, in the same department. The institution was determined primarily by the location of one of my co-authors (one of the people I had started working with in 1983) and I had expected it to be the University of Washington in Seattle, where she had moved as a faculty member, but she had to move again because her husband could not get a tenure-track position there. I took that as a cautionary tale; I was likely to face similar issues soon.
We rented an apartment in Koreatown, to the northeast of the university, on one of the two subway lines. But we would usually walk to and from school together, through one of the more pleasant and lively neighbourhoods in the city. It was there that I might have heard two buskers singing an X-Ray Spex song, the original madeleine of my earlier memoir.
For years after that move, I felt myself in exile from Berkeley. But I had not lost the city entirely. My girlfriend had grown up there, and her parents still had the same house in the hills. We would visit in Decembers, and later on, in summers as well, and sometimes in the springtime also. It was where I would get my fill of good restaurants and music rentals.
I thought some of my grad school friendships would persist, but I was wrong. They had won the lottery in the American academic caste system, and most of them went off to Tier-1 research universities or industrial research labs. That route did not appeal to me, and I avoided it; it meant their lives were much more focussed on their work than mine would be. They also quickly got married, bought big houses, started having children. On our visits to the Bay Area, I would see some who hadn’t graduated yet, but that cohort diminished rapidly. There were a couple of drives down to the South Bay, but it was too far for the limited time we had on visits to Berkeley, and our lives had diverged too much. Most of my past friends were in different research areas, so I couldn’t even see them at conferences.
Since my girlfriend was a grad student, we tended to hang out with the Toronto grad students, but that might have happened anyway for me. The faculty were mostly older, and didn’t come to the lounge at lunch. They went out to eat, at nearby Asian restaurants on Spadina Avenue, or in the cafeteria of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). A few of the graduate students had tastes in music that overlapped with mine, so I had some people to talk about music with and possibly attend concerts together. One of them is still my oldest and closest friend, though he has let Apple take over his music, which I continue to resist.