9 1982 (barely)🔗

In September 1982, I returned from four months of travel in India and Europe, loaded an old car with some clothes, some books, many boxes of tapes, and a lot of stereo equipment, and drove across the US to Berkeley, California, which was to be my home for the next four years, and would influence me for a lot longer. It was not a mythical trip. The car kept threatening to quit; I sold it for scrap soon after arrival, and would not have a car for most of my time in grad school.

I was living in International House, a fancy dormitory on the southeast corner of campus that put on airs by allowing some foreign students and graduate students in. As a grad student, I had a single room, but it wasn’t very large. It was the dormitory experience I hadn’t had as an undergraduate because I was still living with my parents then. I didn’t do much better than I would have in 1977. It wasn’t a complete disaster; I am still in touch with a woman who lived on the same hallway. I also had a much smaller pool of potential friends in my department, and they were more serious about their studies.

Musically, I had lost the easy loans from J and J2, and the information from J2’s UK music magazines. But for the first time ever, I was within walking distance of a great music store, Rasputin Records. Living on a modest stipend, I couldn’t be too free with my money, but Rasputin had a nice policy, which they called "insurance". They would promise to buy back a record within seven days for 75-80% of what was paid for it. I still had to be judicious, but for a couple of dollars, I could listen to a new release, and tape it if I liked it. That went a long way.

I still needed a source of information, though, and for that I had the student FM radio station, KALX. Waterloo had a student station, but it was more of a public-access channel, with more talky shows for specific nationalities or religions. KALX focussed on what was then called "college rock", and later became known as "alternative" or "indie". The terms of their broadcast license didn’t allow them to play ads; they would do PSAs, promos for their own events, and they were permitted to give away tickets to shows (a stealth ad, because they got to announce the band, venue, and date). I phoned in for many of these offers, and occasionally won.

My vague memory of the time is that the music was harsher than I was used to. The Internet archive has some scanned KALX weekly playlists from 1982 which suggest that a lot of the music played was from bands I was already familiar with. But there was a significant fraction new to me, mostly American hardcore punk, bands like Black Flag, Minor Thread, and the Dead Kennedys, and some more obscure local favourites like Flipper and Fang. When I investigated these, I could only find one or two songs by each band that I cared for, often ones I recognized from repeated airplay. But to have these inserted into an ever-changing stream of mostly interesting music pushed me a little in a new direction. I didn’t always know what I was listening to. The KALX habit was to not announce the title of each song after playing it, but to save them up and back-announce as many as a dozen, after half an hour, or worse yet, just forget entirely.

Bands who emerged from punk often went in a different direction in the US scene compared to their contemporaries in the UK. A good example is the Los Angeles band X. I first heard their third album "Under The Big Black Sun" (July 1982), a melancholy album which hinted more at country and rockabilly. A comparable UK band might have drifted towards music hall, Merseybeat, or Northern soul. I caught up with their earlier work, "Los Angeles" (April 1980) and "Wild Gift" (May 1981), which were more vigorous and to my taste, and saw them live at the Kabuki Theatre in San Francisco, a midsized venue. I enjoyed the disparate looks and minor harmonies of John Doe and Exene Cervenka, but the most striking band member was guitarist Billy Zoom, with his blond good looks, leather jacket, and habit of striking poses and grinning while tearing off one killer riff after another. Doe and Cervenka broke up as a couple in the mid ’80’s, and the band went on hiatus for a while, but reformed and continue to play together, though they announced a final album and tour in 2024.

The filters of a few music-obsessed undergraduates weren’t a sufficient replacement for the detailed articles and reviews of the UK music papers, and the best I could manage on that front was the free alternative weekly papers, of which there were two main ones at the time, the Bay Guardian and the East Bay Express. These were available in newspaper boxes and in piles by the doors of some businesses. They weren’t primarily about music, but they did have regular staff writers. I would also buy and read the extended Sunday editions of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. These were pretty mainstream, and usually wrote about bands I didn’t need to know more about, but occasionally they would fill in some details about someone who had recently gained some attention.

There were a couple of decent small club venues to see bands within walking distance, and more accessible by public transit. I didn’t get to SF, across the bay, as much as I might have expected; it took some time and cost some money. Also within walking distance for the first time were several really good used bookstores, the highbrow programming of the Pacific Film Archive associated with the university, and a really good repertory cinema, which I would hit at least a couple of times a week.

The flip side of Berkeley’s eclectic, active, and diverse cultures was impossible to miss: more poverty, more homelessness, more disturbed people. I also saw grad students drop out at higher rates than the Waterloo undergraduates I had known. There wasn’t a lot of support, and life could be challenging. I expected I would get through it, but the journey would not necessarily be easy.