In the summer of 1984, I went to visit M, who was living with his future wife T in a small apartment in a Victorian house in San Francisco. M and I were both graduate students at Berkeley; T was studying to be a nurse-practitioner. T's best friend S was also there that day, and the four of us sat in the living room and chatted. Then S said to M, "Play some punk."
Neither M nor I had any claim to be part of the punk scene, though we each owned some punk records, and we listened to the Berkeley campus radio station, which played a lot of California hardcore. M asked me to put something on. I knew that the women didn't really want to hear the anger and discordance of punk; they just wanted something a little different.
So I put on one of the more accessible post-punk songs I could think of that M had, "Jumping Someone Else's Train" from the first Cure album. The stereo was set up in the fairly empty dining room, and there was space to dance. M and I started jumping around, and the women joined in. But I could tell that the tempo was uncomfortably fast for them, and they couldn't or didn't want to affect the angular, jerky movements that M and I were using.
When that song ended, I went even further down the spectrum of accessibility, putting on "Modern Love" (David Bowie, from his comeback "Let's Dance" album), a song that at the time I found almost irresistable, in terms of getting me on my feet and dancing, but which also had more catholic melodies and rhythms. T gamely danced on with us, even trying to sing along to a later verse once she got the hang of the song structure. But S collapsed into a chair, panting. When the needle hit the groove between tracks, she headed for the stereo, and pulled out one of T's albums. I remember it as being Laura Branigan, but that could be a layered-on memory from M and T's wedding.
M and I looked at each other. Our punk moment was over.