7 1979🔗

I spent the first four months of 1979 at my second internship at the research lab in the middle of nowhere. Not only was this further north in the depths of the Canadian winter (so I would see the first light of dawn as the shuttle bus pulled into the lab’s parking lot, and the sun would be gone by the time I returned to town), but there were no summer interns from other universities, only a handful of students from my university, and a few young misfits who had full-time jobs but liked the cheap accommodation. It was probably the most isolated and alone I have ever been, and I did not deal with it well, even though you might think that with my record of social failure, I might thrive on my own.

You have to keep in mind that there was no Internet, and there were no mobile phones. Long-distance calls were expensive. I didn’t even have a landline in my dorm room; there were a couple of (paid) phone booths in the central lounge area. I had local email on the Math Faculty’s timesharing system when at school, but no way to access it on an internship.

I wrote a lot, on my electric typewriter, letters to friends (or, really, anyone whose address I had), and columns for the Math Faculty newsletter. They would print almost anything, but they debated about these contributions. I guess they were pretty raw. But not all of my writing was about my own exposed nerves. On a whim, I sent a review of a book ("The World According To Garp", by John Irving, which made quite a splash at the time) to the local weekly newspaper. They wrote back (the only way to contact me, really) to say they already had a book reviewer, but would I be interested in writing about music or film? Hell yeah!

I reviewed the movie "The China Syndrome" for them (Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon) which was about the dangers of private nuclear power, a subject of considerable interest to the workers at this particular research lab. They sent me to a concert by the folk singer Odetta at the small local auditorium, which I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It was fantastic, and I am grateful for having had the chance to see this legend in such an unusual place. I even got paid for these pieces, the first time I had ever been compensated for writing.

In this unlikely place, I still managed to hear some new music. One of the other interns from my university said he liked the new (third) album by Ultravox, "Systems of Romance" (released in the UK in August 1978, though I am unsure when the North American release was) and invited me to his room to listen to it. I had heard their first (eponymous) album courtesy of J2, which was sort of punk-adjacent, and didn’t really stick with me. "Systems", though, was more austere. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a large part of the percussion was done by drum machine. Drum machines were almost unknown at the time, except in select circles. While they still used conventional drums, guitar, bass, violin, and synthesizers, it is interesting to me to contemplate how much of the album I can recreate with my current interest in electronic music and the hardware that I own. As I type this, I am tempted to try.

(In 1979, I technically owned a modular synth, but it was built by someone else as a DIY project and then sold to me at cost, a couple of hundred dollars, and it was not very good. Furthermore, my parents objected to the purchase, the first significant one I made with money I earned myself, to the point where I could not use it without my stomach hurting. So it sat in their basement gathering dust until I sold it to a fellow student before leaving for grad school. Forty years later, I set about replacing it, properly.)

I filed Ultravox under "New Wave", the catchall term for unconventional new music that was not punk, but in retrospect that doesn’t quite fit. It doesn’t capture the influence of Kraftwerk and other electronic and Krautrock bands, who it would take me a few decades to learn about and appreciate. Though, curiously, I had a vinyl copy of Kraftwerk’s third album, "Ralf und Florian", released in 1973, which I bought on a trip to NYC while I was still in high school, and couldn’t make sense of. That was produced by Conny Plank, who also produced "Systems".

Another intern who I had known the previous summer suggested I contact my officemate from then, who was a student at Carleton University in Ottawa. I did, and to my surprise, he was enthusiastic about us visiting. I still had my clunker of a car, though it was a challenge to keep it operating and drive in winter conditions. We started spending weekends in Ottawa, quite a relief from the isolation, which convinced me to not return to that job. I liked the work (my first research publication came out of that summer term) but it taught me that I could not spend long in a retreat. I need distractions.

On one of those weekends in Ottawa (which had real record stores) I picked up Elvis Costello’s third album, "Armed Forces", which had been released in January. I published a review of it both in my university newspaper (submitted by physical mail) and in the local paper. It featured quite a different production, despite having the same producer (Nick Lowe, a reasonably successful musician in his own right) as the first two albums. "Armed Forces" had a lush, layered sound. It stands out to me today as a triumph of songwriting.

But it is also where Elvis Costello peaked for me. I listened to his fourth album, "Get Happy!" (released in 1980) several times, but it did not click, and I cannot name a single song or hum a tune. He was not particularly happy at that point, either, soon parting way with the Attractions. He released a couple of albums in the mid ’80’s that I at least bought and liked, but he was no longer in my top tier, at least as far as new releases were concerned. He continued to release albums well into the 2010’s.

When I returned to school for the summer term, classes were smaller and hallways quieter because the regular students were not around. It was easier to socialize (not that I ever found it easy). Sometimes people would come and sit beside me in class and talk to me. It was a start. I went through interviews (wearing a suit for the last time in my life) and secured a job with the telephone monopoly, in their networking division in downtown Ottawa. (Yes, there was a telephone monopoly, for decades, insane though it seems now.)

I borrowed the three Ultravox albums from J2 to tape them, including their second, "Ha! Ha! Ha!" (released in the UK in October 1977; I don’t think it ever had a North American release). That album was also more punk-adjacent, except for one long, slow, haunting song, "Hiroshima Mon Amour", with only synthesizers, vocals, and a drum machine. I liked their trajectory, and was eager to see what they would do next.

Among the albums I caught up with was the Jam’s third album, "All Mod Cons", released in the UK in November 1978, and in North America some time in the winter of 1979. It was by no means a perfect album; the solo acoustic guitar ballad "English Rose" should have been left to ferment longer. But it was a considerable improvement on their second; there were a number of good, catchy songs, and it boded well for their future trajectory. I would continue to follow them to their end just before my own dramatic shift from Ontario to California in 1982.

This summer could be considered the point at which post-punk started to dominate in my new discoveries. I would not hear the term for many years, and it remains problematic, as punk never really went away (it was just dropped as a subject of lurid interest by the mainstream press), and some music that has been given that label developed while punk was still prominent and even before. Still, even at the time, the popular phrase "New Wave" was inadequate to describe the wide scope of the music that used some of the spirit and energy of punk, even if it didn’t hew to the narrow sonic definition.

Perhaps the most significant post-punk album I would hear and tape in the summer of 1979, both personally and to the wider world, was the first Joy Division album, "Unknown Pleasures", released in June. More than two years later, I would write, in a lengthy piece in the student newspaper, of how much this album meant to me. It came out of nowhere: the first album release on Factory Records, a label out of Manchester no one had heard of, with a producer, Martin Hannett, that no one had heard of, either.

Hannett gave the album a sense of space with digital effects and found sounds that particularly rewarded listening on headphones (I cannot think of anything else comparable at the time). The band had been inspired by Sex Pistols concerts in 1976, and some of that punk energy was still present in Bernard Sumner’s guitar. Peter Hook’s bass lines were often played in an upper register (later he explained it was the only way for him to hear what he was playing at their live gigs) and Stephen Morris’s drumming was extremely precise. But their sound was dominated by Ian Curtis singing his own oblique lyrics in a style that hinted at the depths rather than plunging into them theatrically. The music is sometimes frenetic and insistent, and sometimes vague and detached, but always compelling.

Most commentators would give the nod to their second album, released about a year later under very different circumstances. But for me this first one is the best. It is not on my desert island list, but if you swapped it for any of the five albums that are, I would not object. Though the music had captured me, I knew almost nothing about the band, and that would continue to be the case for a while. It was one of the defining sounds of my fall work term in Ottawa. The striking cover image, a plot of radio signals from a pulsar taken from a 1970 PhD thesis, continues to be popular on T-shirts to this day, even with added text that has nothing to do with Joy Division (I saw one once that said "Columbus, Ohio".)

Another post-punk sound prominent for me at the time was due to Magazine. Once again, due to the vagaries of J2’s collection strategy, I heard the inferior second album "Secondhand Daylight" (released in the UK in March 1979) first. I would eventually acquire the much better "Real Life" (1978) and "The Correct Use of Soap" (1979, also produced by Martin Hannett). Magazine had a much more cold, cynical sound, both in the music and the lyrics, as well as Howard Devoto’s arch vocal delivery. Devoto took pains to differentiate the band from punk, which he considered passé. I don’t think I could put up with a full album now, but I like it in small doses.

The B-52’s were not post-punk. They were unabashedly New Wave, with their thrift-store look, surf-rock meets funk sound, and madcap vulgarity. They didn’t take themselves too seriously, and we didn’t need to, either. Their eponymous album (July 1979) was an immediate hit with me. Also with my younger sister, though her friends thought she had lost her mind. When the single "Rock Lobster" zoomed up the charts and started being played at every party, we looked like visionaries. Unfortunately, none of their later work resonated with me, though they were quite successful, and continue to tour as I write this.

I shared a small apartment west of downtown Ottawa with a school friend, and had an easy bus commute to work. My division was responsible for the fledgling packet-switching network known as Datapac, a sort of Canadian proto-Internet. There was a node in Waterloo, meaning I could use it to log into the timesharing system I used for school email, and keep in touch with and share files with people still there.

I turned twenty that fall, and even though I knew birthdays weren’t significant, and neither were numbers ending in zero, it still felt different, like I was finally growing up. I knew I had some distance to go, still. I celebrated by buying myself a good reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Since I had some money, and was away from my sources of borrowed music, I would occasionally buy an album of particular importance. One such was the third Talking Heads album, "Fear of Music", which had been released in August 1979. It was a step forward in an unexpected direction, more experimental, more angular and rhythmically insistent. It was one of those albums that bore repeated listening as we wrestled with the songs.

Ottawa had a pretty tiny music scene, mostly centred around pub rock, but I did go to a few concerts. A small club improbably announced a date by Ultravox. I went, but it was both too late and too early. We were kept waiting outside in the freezing cold for hours, and the gig ran so late that public transit had shut down and I had to cadge a ride home. They played a lot of unfamiliar songs, and while I wouldn’t have recognized any of them on sight, the lead singer didn’t have John Foxx’s distinctive vocal mannerisms. Finally, at the end, he apologized for the wait (explaining they had been denied a proper sound check) and said they had only been together for six weeks.

I didn’t understand what had happened until the following year. John Foxx had left the band in March for a solo career in mostly electronic music. The band recruited Midge Ure to replace him, and they were touring new material to refine it for the album "Vienna", released in July 1980. I recognized some of the songs on that as ones I had heard at the concert, but not the title track, which was a successful single and probably the song most remembered from the album, because that was written in January 1980. I liked the album "Vienna", though not as much as the earlier three, but they lost me with their subsequent direction. They became associated with what was then called the New Romantics (bands like A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran) and later the Second British Invasion, a commercially successful strategy, but not to my taste.

I have to talk about the Buzzcocks somewhere, and it might as well be here, because their compilation album "Singles Going Steady" was released in September 1979 (with a probably later North American release). I don’t remember first hearing it, or how exactly I acquired it. I later bought the CD, but I must have appreciated the vinyl album (and probably had it on tape) because I remember thinking that the arc of the first side, containing their first eight singles, was the perfect pop-punk set, sounding as if the Ramones had grown up listening to Merseybeat. That judgment has held up, and the second side (with the B-sides) is pretty good, also. Curiously enough, I never cared for any of their albums. Howard Devoto had briefly been in the Buzzcocks, at the very beginning, and he and Pete Shelley would collaborate again in 2002. I didn’t care for any of their solo material either, and I haven’t heard the results of the Buzzcocks reunion period starting in the ’90’s.

It was the end of the Seventies, a decade I cannot honestly recommend to anyone, especially for coming of age, even if it produced some of my most beloved music. The Eighties would be a lot more interesting.