the 80s: sara and the new wave

At the dawn of the 1980s I lived in a condo subdivision on the outskirts of Elkhart, Indiana. There was a girl down the street from me named Sara. She had long blond 1970s girl hair that glowed in the sunlight. I was in love with her.

She was completely out of my league, of course. But there was no one else to hang out with in that neighborhood, so she sometimes hung out with me.

She made a point of explaining to me how much cooler she was than me. She didn't listen to top 40 radio. Her favorite band was the Fabulous Poodles.

Fabulous Poodles.

That name sounded so exotic and weird to me. Nothing like the popular groups of the day - The Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Christopher Cross, Linda Ronstadt.

I'm sorry to say that I've never heard the Fabulous Poodles, at least never to my recollection. But I heard some of the other bands she talked about - Devo, the Split Enz, Psychedelic Furs - and I liked it. In 1980 I got a copy of Freedom of Choice and True Colours and I found myself quite happily out of the mainstream for the first time in my life. I even joined the Devo fanclub and started receiving their weird mailings.

Of course, I still liked some of the top 40 stuff - especially Fleetwood Mac's "Sara," which was the third top-selling song that year.

Gee. I wonder why.

the 80s: background - Son of Schmilsson

The first album I ever owned was Son of Schmilsson by Harry Nilsson. It completely twisted my mind.

My mom and step dad bought it for me. They gave it to me along with one of those little plastic record players that's about the size of a donut box. Mine was red.

Must've been when I was four or five because the album came out in 1972. I have no idea why they got it for me, or why they thought it would be appropriate for a kid, because it wasn't, honestly. I'm guessing it was my step dad's idea.

Son of Schmilsson is a decidedly adult album. Not just because it has cuss words (one song goes, "You're breakin' my heart, you're tearin' it apart, so fuck you!"), but because it's full of irony, metaphors and puns, all of which can really mess with a young mind.

You're Breakin' My Heart - Har...

Remember, at this time, I had no concept of how an album was made. I thought groups just pressed record on some sort of record recorder and started playing, live. Listened to in this mindset, Son of Schmilsson has some really weird twists. It begins between the first and second songs when this weird Dracula voice shouts "Son of Schmilsson!" You can hear someone snoring, and they suddenly wake up wondering who said that and what's going on. As I listened, I was trying to figure out where this all was happening. Was the band just standing around watching? Was this guy sleeping in the middle of the room where the band was playing? Where was Dracula?

Then it goes right into this beautiful song called "Remember (Christmas)." Like, the band just started singing again as if nothing happened.

Remember (Christmas) - Chris S...

Another weird moment comes on side 2, when they start singing "Remember" again when suddenly the singer burps really loud, at which point the band kicks into some hard rocking. Out of nowhere, a crowd breaks into applause. And I'm thinking, where'd the crowd come from? They must've been sitting quietly for the whole album. But then when the guy burped and they started jamming, it must have been too much for them to contain their enthusiasm.

At My Front Door - Harry Nilss...

Beyond that, it's just weird from top to bottom. Like, it's a very accessible, poppish album. But the lyrics are filled with backward logic:

Joy to the world
Was a beautiful girl
But to me Joy meant only sorrow

and

You know I wanted to be a space man
That's what I wanted to be
But now that I am a space man
Nobody cares about me

and

The most beautiful world in the world

and

Well, if you haven't got an answer
Then you haven't got a question
And if you never had a question
Then you'd never have a problem
But if you never had a problem
Well, everyone would be happy
But if everyone was happy
There'd never be a love song

Seriously. Imagine a four-year-old brain chewing on that one.

It even had a song that went, "I'd rather be dead than wet my bed." I was still young enough that bedwetting was a not-so-distant memory, so that one sort of struck home. But what made it really weird was that the chorus was sung by a choir of really old people. And I just couldn't put that one together. Old people wet beds?

I'd Rather Be Dead - Harry Nil...

So there you have it. I'm a little kid in the 70s listening to this record over and over and over and my little brain is forming along with it. It should come as no surprise that by the time I hit my teens, in 1981, I wasn't to keen on Lionel Richie and Hall and Oates. I was ready for something weird.

madness

This morning I woke up with a seething resentment against Pete Campbell. I told Allie about it she said something like, "Wow, it is a good show. I don't think I've ever known you to be mad at a fictional character."

A good friend of ours who has impeccable taste in all things fictitious practically demanded that we check out season one of Mad Men from the library. We're three quarters of the way through. It's gripping.

It's weird, though, because I only like three of the characters. There others I kind of like sometimes and there are a bunch more I pretty much can't stand. And I don't share any of their ambitions, at least not superficially. It's about an ad firm. I could care less if they keep the Lucky Strikes account.

But it's great drama because all of the characters are hurting, and the writers and directors show this expertly. So when the guy you hate does something despicable you also feel just a little bit sorry for him, enough to want to keep watching and hope he might turn around. Which, actually, he usually does do, kind of, with a semi-nice gesture a few scenes later.

Ad, of course, it's got that whole "it was a different time, different place" thing going. The sexism is astounding. It's satisfying to watch from the next century, with a wife you don't lie to, hide things from or cheat on.

the 80s: background

My step dad Dan was a record collector. He was a fancy, uptight 70s guy. He took a long time making his hair just right every day and he often wore white pants. He mostly bought cheesy jazz. He also bought plastic cover protectors and anti-static inside dust jackets for every record, which he would file alphabetically when he got home.

Dan took forever to figure out what he wanted to buy. So I'd wander around the store and look at record covers. A lot of it scared me.

I'd been warned that some rock and roll was satanic. I even heard a Christian tape once where they played records backward and, though you could never hear the words that were supposed to be there, like "satan" and I don't know what else, they still sounded really creepy, so they must've been bad. Plus, my real dad, who died in 1976, when I was eight, was a born again Christian and he thought all rock was a sin. I didn't quite believe him, but I was still a little young to be sure.

So there I was, eight or nine, I suppose, in a record store surrounded by records by Blue Oyster Cult, Nazareth, The Grateful Dead, Judas Priest, ACDC, Black Sabbath and probably a few others I can't remember. The covers were dark and full of demons and skulls and blood and they terrified me and fascinated me all at the same time.

I was still too young to distinguish completely between art and reality. I was into pop music. My mom kept the car station set to the top 40 station, and I could sing along with most of the songs. My favorite was Elton John. I would wear sunglasses and silk shirts and put on lip-sync concerts for my family. I couldn't uderstand how or why they got the audience to stay quiet for every song on his Greatest Hits except for Benny and the Jets.

So it was in this highly impressionable stage, poised between bubblegum and the pits of hell, that I received a great gift. My mom and stepdad Dan came home with a bright-red, plastic record player, and a record that would propel me on a path that would take me through all the weird little corners of the 80s.

40 to 80

My friend Chuck says that 40 is half time. It's when you look back over where you've been and get ready for the rest of the game. (It's also an age I never pictured Chuck to be, and he probably didn't of me either.)

He's right. I've been doing a lot of looking back lately. Or more accurately, listening back. I've been digging up all the old tunes I used to listen to.

Of course, that's got me rememberin. And the more I remember, the more I want to write it down. So I'm going to do a little Back to the Eighties thing on this here blog for the next couple of weeks.

Warning: This isn't going to be like an Eighties Night at your local bar. I lived a comletely different decade.

For instance, the other day Allie said something about dancing on the ceiling. I didn't know what she was talking about. So she got on YouTube and pulled up this:



She was shocked when I said I'd never heard the song or seen the video. She said it was on the radio all the time back then.

But, back then, this was my idea of a party:

writeous

Today I got an email from my grandma: "If writing is so hard why not go lay brick"

(And I thought grandpa was the editor.)

I wrote back: "Because I'm a writer not a bricklayer."

Truth is I love writing. Especially on days like today when after four days of agonizing I have three decent paragraphs and a pretty good idea of where to go with however many graphs I have yet to write.

As Joyce Carol Oats said, the vice has loosened and I feel incredible.

I have a hunch that if I'd approached a bricklayer yesterday, when it was 105 degrees, and asked him what I thought of his job he'd say he'd rather be a writer.

vice

I once saw Joyce Carol Oates speak at the University of Colorado. She said being a writer is like having a vice permanently clamped on your head. The only way to loosen the vice is to finish writing something.

I have one of those vices. Mine is radioactive. It weakens my brain. So I have a harder time loosening the vice.

Today I reworked yesterday's paragraph and then I wrote three more for a total of 791 new words, all of which suck.

Then I went for a punishing four mile run in the noon heat, during which it occurred to me that I ought to begin the proposal with an entirely different paragraph. When I got home, I scribbled down an outline.

The vice loosened a little.

When I complete this proposal, which I will do, the vice will be completely removed, and I'll feel elated. As Oates said all those years ago, it's just the feeling of a normal head without a vice clamped on it. But for the writer, it's euphoric.

grinding graph

I spent two hours today writing a single paragraph. One usable paragraph. I actually wrote more than one, but they were awful.

I hate writing.

The toughest part is starting. No, actually, the toughest part is after you decide to start, when you get all settled in your chair, with the right documents open and the right music playing, and you're brain completely freezes up. That sucks.

I've gone through all kinds of routines to trick myself into writing. This time around I'm using "Dark Star" to get me going. I pick a version of the song, which is typically about a half hour long and force myself to sit at the computer in a writer's pose for the duration of it. Lately I've been doing this four times.

So far it's working, sort of. Five or ten minutes in, I manage to write a sentence. Often that's enough to keep me going. The downside is that I only wind up writing one paragraph, maybe two, during one version of the song.

Here's hoping a month of this will be enough to give me a draft of proposal.

garden midsummer

Here's an update on the growing things around me.