The old WCAT radio station, where I worked in 1988 and 1995-6.

In early 1988, at the start of the spring semester, I was introduced to the school’s radio club.  I hadn’t even known it existed until Chris and a few other guys in my class had commented on it.  [Then again, aside from the student council, I barely noticed any other clubs in the school, as most of them didn’t appeal to me.]  I asked if I could join late, and they were totally fine with that.  It was run by one of the English teachers and tied in with the local AM radio station on the Athol-Orange border.

WCAT was run by a couple who’d owned it for a good few decades, and it was a local staple for years.  They’d do live broadcasts of the high school football games and the annual canoe race, some local talk shows over the years, but for the most part by the late 80s, it was primarily a station that broadcast a satellite feed of some media conglomerate down south.  The local commercials were recorded on looped cartridges — essentially the same kind of cartridge as an 8-track tape — with a loop of 40 or 70 seconds so we could play 30 or 60-second ads.

The radio club got to intern at the station, doing little things such as reading the school lunch menu for the week, recording that day’s weather message, or running the boards for a few hours.  The mixing boards were old school then, still using the big fat volume pots (thick knobs about an inch and a half across), so the most we’d do was fade the local commercials in or out and do technical readings every hour or so.  The station went off the air at sunset.

I’d join Chris on a few of his weekend shifts now and again.  On Sundays they’d have a ‘swap meet’ show where people would call in with junk they’d like to sell or get rid of, or were looking for…very hokey small-town stuff, but it was good fun.

Let me tell you — it may sound like the most boring job in the world, being an on-air producer at a radio station, but to me?  I was finally learning how it all worked.

And I loved it.

Granted, I already knew that the knowledge of radio that I was receiving here was already woefully out of date; Chris and I used to joke quite often about how the technology within this tiny building was more than likely older than the both of us put together.  The record collection had turned over numerous times since the days my family used to listen to it in the 70s, always veering towards an older generation of listeners.  Back when I was ten, I’d hear Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” or Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” playing over the radio at the local greasy spoon on the corner of Main and School Streets, but after a wave of old-timey shows (including a highly-regarded polka show, believe it or not), by the mid-80s the station had dropped down to a skeleton crew of maybe five or six people tops, and the music was a mix of Adult AOR and Lite Rock, all pumped in via satellite from Atlanta.  The now disused record collection as of 1988 consisted of those leftover polka records and not much else.

We still enjoyed the job, however, because we were gaining experience.  I already had big plans to get on the radio station of whatever college I ended up going to in a bit over a year, and this would help me get a foot in the door.

By that summer I’d signed up for the weekend shift as an actual employee there, radio license and all.  My Dad would drive me over to the station and drop me off, picking me up when the station went off the air.  Sundays were particularly quiet, as there weren’t all that many commercials that needed to be played; more often than not it was just me and my book bag with stuff to read and things to snack on.  I remained at the station on the weekends (giving me enough hours that I didn’t really need to sign up for an after-school job) until the end of the year.

*

But what about the Vanishing Misfits gang?  What would I do when they all left for college that September?  I’ll be honest, I was trying my damnedest not to get all mopey about it.  I’d sat through numerous high school graduations to know what it was like for all your best friends to head off in all directions.  I’d prepared myself.  I didn’t want to get all overemotional.  That wasn’t me anymore.  Besides — I wanted to move on, just like everyone else in the gang.

***

Late August, Saturday afternoon.  One of my shifts at the radio station, a quiet one with not much else to do but read and use one of the wonky typewriters to work on writing.  The gang had met and hung out at various points all through the summer, and we enjoyed every minute of it.  A few of our friends were already heading out into the big bad world, preparing themselves for a major move to out-of-state colleges, spending time with their families.  Our last meetup had taken place maybe a week or so previous, quite possibly one of our trips down to Northampton and Amherst.  Spending time at Main Street Music, eating at Panda East, having a late night drink at Bonducci’s, standing out in the Amherst Common parking lot in the cool summer night breeze, laughing and joking and making plans.

Me, I was preparing myself for one last year in high school.

The Motels’ “Suddenly Last Summer” came on the radio, and I think that’s about when it finally hit me.

The Best Year Ever was over and done.

No more hooting ‘Albatross!’ in the hallways when I saw one of the Misfits.  No more corpsing in the library study halls and writing the Misfit books.  No more jamming with Chris and Nathane until further notice.  No more excited talk about new music and sharing albums and tapes over the weekends.  No more road trips down to the Valley.  No more fun conversations, no more games of Scrabble and Risk over at someone’s house. No more watching my dubs of 120 Minutes.

I was pretty much on my own for the next eight to ten months.

Back to Square One again.

I took to that rickety typewriter and started writing the darkest, moodiest words I could come up with at the moment.  If I was going to feel like shit for the next year, I was going to bleed it all out in my writing. I’d make it a point to be more social, even people annoyed the hell out of me. I’d be damned if I was going to become a mopey loner again.

Some time in March of 1988, I had this crazy idea: I want to start a band.

Sure, I had my bass, my cheapass Casio keyboard that I got for Christmas about six years earlier (and if I asked, I could borrow my Dad’s infinitely nicer Yamaha keyboard).  I’d even started writing songs.  Such as they were.  Okay, horrible poems at first, but I could write lyrics.  All I needed was a few other like-minded souls.

I wrote something out on a piece of lined paper (I didn’t even think of typing it) and stuck it up on one of the central bulletin boards near the cafeteria at aschool, and waited to see who responded.  That is, before some jackass jock pulled it down and tossed it away.

Amusingly enough, the two who responded quickly and with much interest were Chris and Nathane, two of the guys I was already haning out with.  Both owned electric guitars, had musical knowledge, and had jammed on their own not that long before.  Thrilled at a plan coming together nicely, we aimed for late April as the kickoff, just after the they returned from their senior trip.

The funny thing about starting a band, I should add, is that the initial session is almost always going to sound like shit.  You have multiple musicians with different qualities and styles — or in our case, instruments and equipment of varying quality — each not knowing exactly what to expect.  The first jam is almost always going to be a wild cacophony of noise of no cohesion whatsoever.  [This happened then, and it happened in 2001 when I started jamming with my buddies Bruce and Eric.  I’m pretty sure it would happen again if I ever sat in with anyone else.]   All three of us had our own styles and sounds, and some of us could play our instruments a hell of a lot better than the other two.  As for the singing, all three of us could, but Chris drew the short stick and became our de facto lead singer.  [I can sing just fine, I was just super self-conscious about it at the time.]

The initial session, played on a school day afternoon from 3 to 5pm on the 22nd of April, was maybe not a rousing success, but it provided us with two songs, which we immediately chose to claim as our ‘debut single’: “The Mellow Song.” (the period is part of the title) backed with “Green Coffee!!!”.  The b-side was the end result of that first cacophonous din.  We’re all playing completely different things, riffing and making it up as we go along, completely ignoring any kind of form or melody, Chris belting out hilariously dire lyrics off the top of his head.  After a brief break and a decision to, you know, actually write a song of sorts — and all three of us knew how — we came up with a much lighter and enjoyable A-side.  I’m actually kind of proud of that song, really; it’s deceptively complex, thanks to Nathane’s idea of each of us playing the same similar riffs but each of us playing it at different lengths so we’re swirling around each other.  We all agreed the lyrics (our first official moon-June love song, apparently to get it out of our system) were indeed horrible, with an ad-lib stating just that at the end.  But aside from that, we all agreed we had something there.  Something clicked, and it was good.

We’d also agreed on the name around that time as well.  Chris and I had thrown all kinds of names around as a not-yet-a-band group of musicians often does before they even play a note, but by that afternoon we’d christened ourselves The Flying Bohemians.

I remember we’d talked about our influences that day as well, and it was pretty eclectic:  New Order, REM, The Cure, Pixies, Depeche Mode, the usual college radio cast of characters that we all wanted to emulate.  Did we ever end up sounding like any of them?  Well, if I had to hazard a guess, our first couple of years were a bit on the Joy Division side — a bit post-punk, a flourish of keyboards, and attempts at dark and brooding lyrics.  The post-Nathane years where Chris and I recorded a handful of songs in the early 90s were more acoustic, more on the early REM side with some Indigo Girls, Love and Rockets and the Cure (circa 1985) thrown in.

Our jam sessions were few and far between as a threesome, maybe no more than fifteen or sixteen meetups at most, but we did manage to record them all.*  I never completely gave up on writing music, even if there were quite a few years where nothing new surfaced, but I did continue to practice on both bass and guitar.  One thing I’ve been proud of other than my novel writing has been my songwriting, which started in earnest that April and hasn’t stopped since.

* – Sadly I do not have the complete session tapes anymore for the 1988-89 years, but I did manage to get a good portion of those early songs on a two-tape compilation.  I have everything else from late 1989 onwards and have transferred them to mp3.

One of the things I liked about high school was that I had much more of a choice in what classes I could take.  Unlike junior high, where I was bound by the prerequisites of history, math, English, and so on, there was a lot more leeway here.  I took to that quickly and sighed up for the classes I knew I’d enjoy, like computer programming (using brand new Apple IIc’s!) and, believe it or not, typing.  I was a two-finger typist like my dad, but without the speed or agility.

I bring this up because this is where I met Eric.  He was our school’s exchange student that year, coming from the UK.  We shared that typing class together and proceeded to cause all kinds of trouble.  We moved to the back of the room where the higher end electric typewriters were stationed, and we would often use our in-class practice time trying to corpse each other with silly notes and other bits of ridiculousness.  We were both fans of Monty Python and our humor usually leaned towards that kind of absurdist irreverence.  (I remember I’d planned out my first meeting with him so I wouldn’t come off like an idiot: I’d told him I was a huge Python fan and that it was part of MTV’s late night line up, but also that I was an even huger fan of British rock.  He proceeded to introduce me to a number of great bands worth looking out for, many of which ended up in my collection.)

That was the class where I reconnected with Kris as well.  I’d known her since elementary school and had her dad as my fourth grade teacher, though we’d drifted into separate social circles over the years.  She became a part of the back-row hooligans.  I’d run into her now and again in during meetings for the school paper, but it was here that we’d reconnected on a musical level; she and I were both fans of pretty much any band currently playing on 120 Minutes.

Over the course of a few months, the jokey notes Eric and I shared morphed into what ended up as a very weird and hilarious game of Exquisite Corpse, and soon included Chris and the rest of the gang I was hanging with.  We referred to them only as “the books”, but they were less a straight plot than an ongoing riff on our Python-soaked senses of humor.  There were only three rules to writing in these books: write something that would make the reader giggle during class or study period, leave it on a cliffhanger, and thrust it to the next person saying ‘here, your turn’ and running way with an evil laugh.*  By the time the gang graduated in May of 1988, we had six books’ worth of bizarre nonsensical prose, bizarre titles (Sonny Bono and Pudgy the Penguin Go Snorkeling, for instance), running jokes, and an unofficial name for our own group: The Vanishing Misfits.  I still have nearly all of them (one was misplaced and has never been found, sadly) and do plan on scanning them to pdf form for the Misfit gang sometime soon.

We had a blast that year, both in school and outside of it.  We’d meet up at someone’s house and watch cartoons or movies (or one of my many taped episodes of 120).  Eric and I had a Python marathon in which we’d watched numerous episodes, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and most of the Young Ones episodes that lasted nine hours.  A bunch of us would drive to one of the malls and hang out.

At one point Chris started a Sniper game where we’d be assigned someone to shoot with a completely harmless weapon (usually a water gun, a wad of paper shot by a rubber band, or something similar).  I’d missed the first run of that game but made it a few days into the second, when one of the guys went so far as to wear camo, sneak into my house, and scare the bejeezus out of my mom before shooting a rubber band at me.   Suffice it to say we figured it was time to shut that game down for the time being.  Heh.

We were taking road trips down to the Amherst/Northampton area, which would become one of our favorite places to hang out.  Even the drive was one of our favorites: to head down to Amherst from Athol, we’d take Daniel Shays Highway (Route 202) down to Pelham and take a side road into Amherst center, but more often we’d turn earlier on Shutesbury Road.  That would take us through the forested hills, down a very winding road, and eventually into the north of Amherst and onto the UMass campus.  And our soundtracks were one of two things: either WAMH, or whatever cassettes I happened to bring with me.

Sometimes we’d head to one of the Hadley malls (Mountain Farms, aka ‘the dead mall’, known for being completely shuttered except for the AMC Theater and the Papa Gino’s, or the newer Hampshire Mall across the highway) to do some shopping or see a movie.  At some point we’d end up on North Pleasant Street in downtown Amherst, eating Chinese at Panda East** and spending time at Al Bum’s nearby while some of the other non-musically inclined of us would hang out at the ‘hippie stores’ down the road.  We’d often finish our night, especially after movies, with a late night snack and soda at Bonducci’s Café overlooking the Common***.  In Northampton, we’d hang out at Faces, a trendy fashion shop aimed at the college crowd which sold all kinds of fun and quirky things from dorm furniture to posters to clothes (oh, the dayglo!!) to whoopee cushions and the silly pins I’d amassed over my high school years.  We’d also head across the street to Thorne’s Marketplace, a giant former department store turned mini-mall full of small shops for books, clothes and more.

But our primary destination in Northampton was always Main Street Music.  I was already familiar with its collection, but once I started heading here with the Misfit gang, it became a ritual.  We had to head there, even if we hardly had the money for it.  The music they played over the speakers was the music we loved hearing on WMUA and WAMH.  The selection was absolutely phenomenal, even better than Al Bum’s, and a million times better than any chain store at any of the malls.  Tapes, vinyl, posters, pins, blank tapes, tee-shirts…what did it not have that I wished I had enough money for?    And imports!  This store was firmly aimed not at the passive listener but the avid obsessive collector and the intelligent punk.

And for us, it was absolute heaven.  At least for me, at any rate.

I truly looked forward to our weekend road trips down to the Pioneer Valley.  Did we go anywhere else?  Oh, sure…but not as often.  We just loved the vibe down there.  The best atmosphere, the best stores, the best college radio stations.

* – In true Python form, while writing this very sentence, I’d originally started with one rule, changed it to two, forgot something and made it three, just like the Spanish Inquisition sketch.  I was sorely tempted to write it flat out without edits and end with “I’m sorry, I’ll come in again.”

** – No one remembers when this restaurant opened, but it was there when we hung out in the late 80s, and it’s still there today.  This was where I had my first Chinese food, in which I nearly always ordered the sweet and sour chicken.

*** – Sadly long gone, it now houses a Mexican restaurant.  This was often our last stop before we had to head back home.  They had huge pastries, tasty coffee, and New York Seltzer sodas — I’d always get the vanilla creme with a chocolate chip cookie.  Decades later while shopping at a World Market here in the Bay Area, to my complete surprise I found that NYS sodas still existed, still with the styrofoam label (or something like it now).  I bought the same exact thing that day, just for old times’ sake.

Moments in time, 1986-7.

Love and Rockets, Express (released 15 September 1986).  I’d heard about the release thanks to MTV playing ads for it, and the track “All in My Mind” getting some minor airplay on WMDK and WRSI.  And where did I buy the album?  At Rietta Ranch in Hubbardston, a giant flea market in the middle of nowhere that my dad and I used to go to almost every Sunday after church!  I listened to it as soon as I got home and decided they were my favorite new band of the moment.  Between this and their Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven album, I managed to teach myself a bit of acoustic guitar playing in the style of Daniel Ash.

This Mortal Coil, Filigree & Shadow (20 September 1986).  I didn’t pick this one up until early 1987 if I recall, but once I did, I played the hell out of it.  I bought the cassette for that very reason: I knew this was an album I’d be listening to at one in the morning on a school night.  I would always equate TMC’s music to either a dimly lit recording studio or an empty field at dusk, just after the sun has dipped down below the horizon.  Consequently, my writing style changed accordingly, introducing much darker moods and more vibrant visuals.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Liverpool (released 20 October 1986).  Say what you will about Frankie’s sophomore album — they’d shed a lot of fans and salivating music journos by this time — but I still feel this album is so much tighter than the bloated Welcome to the Pleasuredome.  It’s also much more organic and less overtly flash.  I found a copy of this one in a discount bin somewhere and instantly fell in love with it.

They Might Be Giants, They Might Be Giants (released 4 November 1986).  This album was my next attempt at album reviews in my school newspaper.  It did get some responses, as “Don’t Let’s Start” actually got some daytime play on MTV as well.  I totally fell in love with the goofiness of this album (even if I didn’t know that they were kinda-sorta local; they originated in Lincoln, MA before moving down to New York City — thus the title of their second album).  WRSI and WMDK loved this album as well, so I got to hear a lot of their tracks on the radio, which was always a cool thing!

The The, Infected (released November 1986).  Bought this on tape at that small music store inside Faces in Amherst, after reading about it in Only Music and other music magazines.  My first reaction to Matt Johnson’s music was that he seemed to have one hell of a chip on his shoulder, but he was also one hell of a great songwriter.  Night Flight played the film he’d made of the album soon after.  I let one of my buddies borrow the tape for a few days…he handed it back saying the music was okay, but “who wants to hear a song about a piss-stinking shopping center?”  I’d buy his previous album, Soul Mining, a few months later at the same store.  Both ended up getting serious late night airplay on my headphones.

Fuzzbox, We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It!! (aka Bostin Steve Austin in the UK) (released December 1986).  I placed Fuzzbox in the same spot as Sigue Sigue Sputnik in my brain: loud, wacky, fun, punky, and great for blasting in my headphones.  [They also embraced the 80s UK punk scene with the Oxfam clothes and the wild hair, which I of course gravitated to.  I’ll totally admit to having a teen crush on Vix, the lead singer.]  In a way I felt that while Flaunt It was my ticket into the new social circle, this one cemented it when my copy of the cassette made its rounds.

Concrete Blonde, Concrete Blonde (released December 1986).  “Still in Hollywood” got major airplay on 120 Minutes back in the day, and that’s where I heard it first.  I think Chris had the album first and I copied it from him soon after, but I ended up buying a used copy sometime in the spring of 1987.  I remember being excited by the revelation that a hard rocking Los Angeles band sounded this badass, when their more popular local brethren were playing weak glam-soaked pop songs with squealing arpeggios and hitting the top of the charts.  [This is also why I was impressed by Guns ‘n’ Roses, even though I was never that big of a fan of them.]  A year or so later Chris and I were working at the local radio station and found two of their singles gathering dust in the back bins, inspiring another wave of heavy rotation from me.  This one got a lot of play during my summer job at the DPW as well.

World Party, Private Revolution (released March 1987).  One of the last albums I got from the RCA Music Club, I believe.  This was one of those then-rare college rock albums that crossed over to commercial radio with ease.  I listened to this one a lot in the afternoons while doing my homework.  Decades later I met lead singer Karl Wallinger at Amoeba Records; he’s a super nice and friendly guy who absolutely loves what he does.

 Siouxsie & the Banshees, Through the Looking Glass (released 2 March 1987).  I think this was the first Banshees album I owned, having dubbed a copy from someone not that long after it came out.  Cover albums are usually considered suspicious (usually a sign that they need to fulfill part of their contract and don’t have anything else lined up), but this one’s great in that their choice of songs veered towards the alternative side.  Tracks by Sparks, Iggy Pop, the Doors and Television popped up alongside Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday.  Unfortunately, this album was released the week before the gazillion-selling The Joshua Tree*, so it was kind of ignored by all but the closest fans.

The Smiths, Louder Than Bombs (released 30 March 1987).  Another singles mix to go alongside my copy of Hatful of Hollow (which I’d picked up at a store in North Adams, of all places), my copy was a dub from Chris that added a few extra album tracks at the end of each side.  Morrissey was definitely an influence on my more personal writing then, as a lot of my high school poetry (and later on, Flying Bohemians lyrics) were inspired or influenced by his lyrics.  I still find it kind of ironic and amusing that I chose to finally get into this band just as they were on the verge of breaking up.

Erasure, The Circus (released 30 March 1987).  I was familiar to Erasure thanks to Vince Clarke’s previous jobs in Depeche Mode and Yaz, so when their sophomore album dropped, I’d hear them quite often on the radio.  [Surprisingly, I would not own any of their albums until The Innocents later in 1988.]  At the time they were a band whose albums I’d have liked to buy, but never got around to it until much later.

Wire, The Ideal Copy (released 12 April 1987).  I’d heard of Wire before, thanks to the numerous American punk and indie bands professing their love for them.  It wasn’t until I picked up the Enigma Variations 2 compilation later in July that I finally got to hear one of their best songs ever, “Ahead”.  Their sound was so unique that I could never quite pin down what it was that drew me to them, only that they resonated with me completely.  I picked up this album later that year, and have been a dedicated fan ever since.

 The Cure, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (released 25 May 1987).  After a year of listening to Standing on a Beach and familiarizing myself with their early discography with Happily Ever After and The Head on the Door, I was twitchy with excitement that I’d get to buy a new Cure album on the drop date!  Added to that, it was a sprawling, noisy double album filled with blistery pop, goofy psychedelics, and even some of their trademark doom and gloom.  It was released right around the end of my sophomore year, and it was an immediate hit with the new gang.  We’d listen to it everywhere we went.  [Okay, aside from the questionable moments in the “Why Can’t I Be You?” video — Lol Tolhurst’s blackface and his, er, lips costume, in particular — it’s by far one of the band’s silliest.]

*

The summer of 1987 was relatively uninspiring at first, as I finally found myself facing that crossroads I’d expected some time ago.  School was out, and I retreated to my usual shell of listening to music, keeping myself busy with writing (One Step Closer to You) and rewriting (the Infamous War Novel), teaching myself how to play guitar and bass, and whatever day job I happened to have.  [If memory serves me, I believe I jumped on one more summer of working at the local supermarket.  I’m pretty sure the YMCA job was only during the school year.]

It took some time for me to adjust to this new frame of reference.  I would still see some of my old friends around town, but I was no longer hanging around with them with any frequency.  Thankfully this new group of friends were more than happy to invite me on their road trips to the Pioneer Valley or elsewhere, whether it was to see a movie, go out for dinner, play mini-golf, or whatever else there was to do.  I didn’t care if we were just going to sit around someone’s living room and watch movies all night — I just felt so happy to finally be a part of a social circle where I could just be myself.

My junior year was going to be bitchin’.

* – I was tempted to add U2’s The Joshua Tree here, but decided against it.  Suffice it to say, that album transcended all barriers in my small home town; it was pretty much a smash hit from the beginning.  They’d expanded their fanbase in 1984-5 thanks to The Unforgettable Fire and their performance during Live Aid, and by the time the lead single “With or Without You” popped up a week before the album release, everyone had gone nuts.  It truly is a great album, though!

courtesy Amherst College’s website

So.  New friends, new outlook, new music.  My teenage life certainly had changed within the span of a year or two.  I wasn’t going to complain.

Between autumn 1986 and autumn 1987, my music collection expanded — more like exploded — thanks to Amherst and Northampton’s used record shops, the mall stores in Hadley and Leominster, the RCA and Columbia House music clubs, and a hell of a lot of blank tapes.

UMass Amherst’s station, WMUA, was back on the air, and it became a late night staple for me after a day’s listening to the AOR of WMDK and WRSI, or the pop and rock of WAAF and WAQY.  And I’d also just discovered their neighbor, WAMH 89.3 at Amherst College, so they were added to my late night listening lineup.  That November, I made it a point to start making radio tapes of those college stations.  Unlike the pop/rock radio tapes I’d made, however, I’d wait for the right moment, hit record, and just let the tape run for a good half hour or forty-five minutes.  I heard songs and bands new and old; punk bands from the 70s and post-punk bands from the 80s; classics and obscurities; titles and names I should know.  The Church.  The Go-Betweens.  Sonic Youth.  Felt.  The Only Ones.  This Mortal Coil.  Billy Bragg.  The Woodentops.  Peter Murphy.  Danielle Dax.  Love Tractor.  The Damned.  Bauhaus.  Butthole Surfers.  Hüsker Dü.  Robyn Hitchcock.  The Mighty Lemon Drops.  The Chameleons UK.  Love and Rockets.

I had a lot of catching up to do.

The easiest, of course, were the bands on major labels.  This meant the Smiths and Depeche Mode, both of whom were on Sire; The Cure, who’d recently inked a deal with Elektra and would be re-releasing their back catalog soon; REM, who were at this point still on IRS but had a large following in collegiate New England and thus were easy to find. I could pick those up at Strawberries or Musicland at my leisure.

It was the others that started the thrill of the hunt.  Knowing which mall stores were ‘cool’ enough to carry certain titles.  Strawberries in Leominster had quite a large selection and gave me a better chance at finding items.  Musicland in Hadley was somewhat smaller but still catered to the Pioneer Valley college crowd.  The other music store in that mall (whose name I no longer remember, due to it changing multiple times) carried quite a few independent labels.  Al Bum’s in Amherst carried imports, as did Main Street Music in Northampton.

That’s a good point right there — catering to the college crowd.  New England (and specifically Massachusetts) is unique in this respect, due to the extremely high number of schools of higher learning, both in the Boston area and in the Pioneer Valley.  College radio stations were not exactly a huge scene per se; they were more like one of New England’s best kept secrets.

Bob Mould mentions this in his book See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody —

“[Hüsker Dü] were quickly discovering that the East Coast had a unique mentality that might be summed up best in two words: college rock. A lot of it came down to the clustering of high-quality schools in the Northeast, particularly in the Boston area, where the tour took us next. There were many more college radio stations in the Northeast than in the Midwest, and they gave rise to the likes of the Bongos, Violent Femmes, and the dBs, bands who had a more accessible, more melodic sound than hardcore.”

Most college radio stations in this area did play their share of hardcore, of course.  WMUA and WAMH were where I first heard Sonic Youth, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and so on.  But their playlist was vast and varied: they were stations where I learned about industrial and its danceable offshoot EBM (electronic body music), with bands such as Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and D.A.F.; the ambient classic 4AD Records sound with Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, and This Mortal Coil; the snotty goofball punk of The Dead Milkmen and the demented noise of Butthole Surfers.  They were all champions of local bands: Dinosaur Jr., Pixies, Mission of Burma, Moving Targets, The Neighborhoods, Throwing Muses.*  And especially: most emphatically, even, the sounds of British indie rock of The Cure, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Fuzzbox, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Wire, and more.

New England college radio played it all, and some of it was due to the fact that there really wasn’t that large of a physical scene to go along with it.  There were nightclubs in Boston and in the Amherst/Hadley/Noho area, of course, but that was just it — they were in the college centers, but not anywhere else.  Especially not out in my home town, that was for sure.  The rest of us had to make do with the soundtrack and forgo the scene.

And that suited me just fine.

* – This could merit its own entry (or multiple entries), to tell the truth.  Massachusetts  has always had a fascinating music scene, both in the commercial and independent scenes.  For every well known rock band out of New England (i.e., Aerosmith, The Cars, Boston, The J Geils Band, ‘Til Tuesday, all the way up to the present with Passion Pit — a band from my alma mater, Emerson College), there’s hundreds of local heroes like Tribe, Heretix, Caspian, Guster, The Lemonheads, and more.  Go check out Brett Milano’s The Sound of Our Town and Carter Alan’s Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN for excellent histories on the local scenes.

Meanwhile, my search for music continued unabated.  I would buy blank videotapes and record each Sunday’s episode of 120 Minutes.  Well, not right away…I was still watching and taping Night Flight as well, so I’d often toggle between the two, especially if the latter was showing some kind of cult film.

I was also checking out a lot of the new releases that the music magazines were suggesting.  I started picking up a new (and sadly shortlived) magazine called OM: Only Music, a monthly set up by Spin magazine to feature just the tunes.  Their reviews were gems, focusing mostly on hard rock, punk and metal, with the college rock thrown in.  This was where I found out about The Minutemen, The The’s multiplatform release Infected, and the quirky danceability of New Order.  Over the course of the next few months, from late 1986 into 1987, I went out of my way to find as much of this stuff as I could, whether it as in a record store at the mall, a bargain bin in some department store, a flea market or a garage sale, or at an indie store like Al Bum’s.

I’d often share these new purchases with Chris, as both he and I seemed to gravitate towards the same styles of music.  We were both big on REM as well as bands like New Order and the Cure.  Gleefully and willingly, we both worked hard against the Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign, dubbing each other’s collections whenever one bought a new title and the other had blank tapes available.  I’d be the one buying most of the new releases, though I’d just as easily be the one forgoing homework time to copy three or four albums from other people.

By the autumn of 1987, my collection had grown exponentially, and my social life had changed dramatically.  I’d moved on from my old circle of friends by this time and spent nearly all of my school time with the new gang.  This was for a good reason, too — this was their senior year, and I’d be damned if I was going to pass up hanging with them as much as I could.  This would be the best school year ever.

One of the things that had started in the early part of the year and had become an extremely important mainstay was MTV’s Sunday late-night line up, and it had evolved in an interesting way.  The flagship show, 120 Minutes, had been the idea of Dave Kendall, a well-regarded journalist from the UK and had originally worked in tandem with its predecessor, the monthly IRS Records Presents: The Cutting Edge.  The shows leading up to it, however, seemed to evolve from the recent stand-up comedy boom of the mid-80s.  Both MTV and VH-1 had ‘comedy hour’ shows (as did numerous radio stations) that were showcases for well-known comedians and newcomers alike.  Since they were always a ratings boom, MTV chose to bring in some alternative comedy from across the pond to fit into the late night schedule.  The Young Ones and The Comic Strip were two series from the alternative comedy genre from the UK (spearheaded by one Alexei Sayle, who was also connected to both these shows).

At the same time, and in a completely different context, early evening comedy came in the form of reruns of The Monkees, the classic music and comedy show from the late 60s.  The Monkees themselves had recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their show in early 1986, and that spring MTV provided a day-long marathon of episodes entitled Pleasant Valley Sunday.  For this MTV Generation, most of us remembered watching these episodes on the local independent stations some years back (4pm on WLVI 56 for me!).  The renaissance was so huge that The Monkees became a mainstay on MTV, and nearly the entire band reunited for a tour and new songs.

Following up on the comedy, MTV brought in another indie TV station mainstay from our youth: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Soon, Python became part of the late night Sunday line-up, starting with Python at 11pm, The Young Ones or The Comic Strip at 11:30pm and 120 Minutes kicking off at midnight.

These three hours were manna from heaven for a lot of teenagers and college students, especially those (like me) who were in dire need of the alternative.  Many videotapes were used to the point of wearing out during this time.  I’d pretty much given up on Night Flight at this point and swore allegiance to the almighty Sunday lineup.

120 Minutes had found a stable host in the softspoken and slightly weird form of one Kevin Seal.  Seal’s delivery was not quite smarmy, but not cloying either.  He spoke like he was fully aware of how corny and simplistic his script was.  He chatted up songs and bands with a slight wink or nod when he found their names funny or peculiar.  His overall performance was as if he wasn’t even trying to be all that professional.  Not that it stopped us from loving how inherently strange he was in relation to the other more commercially likeable veejays.  Downtown Julie Brown was that party girl you loved hanging out with.  Caroline Heldman was the cute college girl you had Literature class with.  Adam Curry was the metalhead you hung out with at the bridge.  Kevin Seal was…that guy in history class that knew a frighteningly vast amount of information, didn’t say much, but surprised the hell out of everyone when he did.

Plus, he was the perfect foil for Dave Kendall, who was more about the mystique and the attitude that came with the alternative rock genre; Kendall was not only extremely knowledgeable about the scene, but immersed himself in it and wrote about it via Spin and other music magazines.  Kendall often came off as insufferable, sneering at pathetic and obviously derivative attempts at punk, delivering all-too-hip asides when spouting trivia, and sometimes shoehorned the Question Authority mindset into his own scripts.  On the other hand, it was hard not to appreciate his willingness to be the genre’s mouthpiece for the show.  He was the one you’d trust the most with accurate alternative rock news.

On a personal note, I could feel that this school year was going to be a special one, a unique one that I’d be cherishing for years to come.  I had the new friends, I had the soundtrack, and I had one hell of a better and healthier positive outlook on life than the last few years.  I may have still been the goofy-looking dork with the braces (which I’d had since eighth grade), the spiky 80’s hairdo, and the acne and everything else…but I didn’t care about that anymore.  I knew who I was now, and what I wanted to do with my life and that’s all that mattered.

One major thing that happened was that I’d bought a bass guitar for Christmas.  It was a white Arbor Stiletto with no headstock — the tuning pegs were down at the end of the body — and it was my baby for a good couple of months before I released it upon the world.  I bought it at a tiny local music store that one of my sister’s classmates had opened up just across from Town Hall downtown, a steal at fifty bucks*.  I taught myself how to play by taking what I knew on guitar (which really wasn’t much) and expanding on it by playing along with songs from my growing collection.  Led Zeppelin’s first album, Wire’s “Ahead”, The Cure’s Pornography, anything where I could pick out what was being played.  I gravitated towards bassists like The Cure’s Simon Gallup (repetitive but high on the fret board and unexpectedly creative), New Order’s Peter Hook (bass as lead guitar) and, a short time later, Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde (dual tones and harmony).   This would soon lead to my first band, but that’s a little further down the road.

For now, I let myself have some fun.

* – In all honesty, there really wasn’t all that much to choose from in the cheap amount I was looking for.  I twas either that one, or a black one with the body in the shape of a machine gun, which even then I found too embarrassing to pick up.  Also, to this day I have never taken guitar or bass lessons.  I’ve always been self-taught on both instruments.

I’m not going to lie, I really did feel a sense of, well, a lot of emotions when I started hanging out with Chris and that gang.  A mixture of relief, nervousness, amusement, and maybe even a bit of pride.  These were all people one year ahead of me, and it kind of felt like I was skipping to the front of the line.  [I was in fact rather close in age to some of them.  Only a few weeks separate Chris’ birthday from mine, for instance.]

There were about a dozen of us, maybe more, shifting position at the cafeteria table we’d meet up at.  A few of them I knew in a roundabout way — one was the lifeguard at the YMCA pool during my years at that job; someone else’s mom knew mine; one lived on the outskirts of my neighborhood and we’d hung out briefly, years back; a few others I knew from Student Council.

Since they were all a year ahead of me, I never really thought of hanging out with them up until that point.  Was it a revelation?  Well, not really, but it sure felt like some kind of emotional and intellectual release.  It was probably the first time in years where I actually felt like part of a group instead of an outlier, and I really liked that.

We weren’t meeting up on a daily basis of course, but as our own class schedules and projects permitted.  Many of us had the same lunch period so that seemed the best time to congregate.  We’d say hi as we passed each other in the hallways or on our way home from school.

The change in atmosphere must have done me good, as I found myself finishing off the Infamous War Novel in May of 1987, as well as starting a new story that January.  This new project was something that had been floating in my brain for at least a year, and I’d attempted various versions of it around late 1985.  It was also my first attempt at writing in screenplay format.  It was a John Hughes pastiche, heavily borrowing from Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, its soundtrack chock full of tracks from that era’s American Top 40.  I called it One Step Closer to You (name borrowed from the minor hit from Gavin Christopher), it was your typical ‘boy meets girl, girl is out of his league, but he eventually wins her over’ story.  It was full of my horrible puns and goofiness, and it’s a painful piece of derivative crap…but it was so refreshing to write, to be honest!  It’s so infused with my own idiosyncrasies that it’s essentially one big fat Mary Sue story, but it’s fun and it contains some rather creative bits to it.*

It did feel kind of strange to be hovering between two different social circles, to be honest.  Part of me wanted to drop everything and everyone and hang out with this new crowd.  Our conversations were so much more intellectual, even if I found myself barely keeping up sometimes.  When they talked about theories and philosophies they covered in their AP classes, I had little to no input, but I would sometimes ask for clarification.  Not often, as I was still a bit too shy to admit my small town hick ignorance.

But when we talked about music?  Gods, that’s when I would not shut up!  Even then my ace in the hole was obscure music trivia, release dates, and being aware of the latest trends in college radio.  I could infuse song lyrics into regular conversations at the drop of a hat (which would sometimes cause a hilarious ‘wait a minute…’ reaction).  We had some great times and conversations during our short visits at lunch.

But what about my past?  What about my other social circle?  The kids in my own grade, most of whom I’d known since grade school?  I was leaving them in the dust most of the time.  I hadn’t meant for it to happen but it felt now as though I’d…well, outgrown them somehow.  A tough thing to say, let alone admit.  It felt that way at the time, though in retrospect of course I was merely giving myself a way to evolve in my own way, separate from the influences and people I’d known for so long.  This meant adults as well, really…I respected my elders as I always had, but I had stopped being so deferential, often to the point of going against my own thoughts and emotions.

So I did my best to balance the two.  Since this new gang had a different schedule than mine, some days I’d be with them and other days I’d be back with Kevin and whoever else happened to be nearby.

It was kind of a strange feeling, straddling the two circles.  On the one hand I wanted to break out and try new things, but on the other, I felt a sense of guilt, like I owed it to my older friends not to leave them in the cold.  Call it the Catholic Guilt if you will.  [Noted: I was brought up Roman Catholic, so I know what I’m talking about!]  But let’s be honest here — I couldn’t really have it both ways, and I knew that instinctively, even if I didn’t always act on it.

* – I would resurrect One Step Closer to You in early 1995 when I decided to try my hand at writing a screenplay for a local writing competition.  I updated it and rewrote it in the span of one month, proving two things to myself: I can still write a script, and I can definitely write under deadline.

What was the tipping point, though? What was the time and music where I finally got it, and sold my soul to the Indie Devil?

Well, that would be a summer afternoon when I finally found the album I’d been looking for since about April of 1986, when I first saw them mentioned in Star Hits and my British pen pal dropped one of their songs on that mixtape for me.

I found the cassette, with its hot pink spine and white norelco box, and the spandex-and-frightwig lead singer on the cover, alongside the band’s ringleader, guitarist and dual drummers, looking like something straight out of Blade Runner.

Yes, I’m talking about Sigue Sigue Sputnik and their debut album, Flaunt It.  News of the band’s infamous four-million-pound signing to EMI in the UK had made its rounds in the American music magazines, and by August they’d come stateside with their ridiculous (yet ridiculously catchy) album — complete with commercials inserted between the songs.  The music, now that I hear it decades later, is a cross between the aural weirdness of Suicide, the single-chord foundation of Neu!, and the twitchiness of early 80s synthpop, only it’s played by a couple of guys let loose on samplers and synthesizers and don’t quite know how to operate them correctly.

It’s gloriously amateur and exciting at the same time, as their entire shtick was to infuse science fiction into the mix, via images and soundbites from glitzy London, neon Tokyo, Blade Runner, THX 1138, the evening news (a reading of David Hinkley’s attempted subway vigilantism, among other things), and Max Headroom.  The future was an apocalyptic mess, but it was damn sexy!

This ridiculousness was right in my wheelhouse.

From the moment I hit play and heard the synthetic orchestral crash opening the album version of “Love Missile F1-11”, I was completely hooked.  It was so exciting, freakish, hilarious and over the top that it was enough to put the rest of my life in perspective.*  That cassette followed me everywhere.  I nearly wore it out and probably would have, if I hadn’t lost it later in 1987 to one of my friends!

 Come September, I was a sophomore, no longer the lowest rank, and I had a fresh outlook on life.  Some of my longtime friends may have thought I’d gone off the deep end or gotten all full of myself over the summer.   Meeting up with my buddy Kevin again was something I was looking forward to as well — we’d crossed paths rarely over the summer, since he was a Royalston kid and too far away from it all (well, back then, anyway).  He and I shared a lot of classes again, and also had the same lunch period, so we’d be like two peas in a pod.  Bad jokes and puns, quoting Dr. Demento songs, and other silliness ensued on a regular basis.  He probably saw the change as well.  He didn’t say much about it, but apparently my more positive and outgoing attitude wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

So this is where the school newspaper comes in.

I was in a bit of a conundrum here…I did want to write for it, but I didn’t want to write reportage.  I wasn’t a sports fan so I couldn’t have covered any games.  I wasn’t the best at coming up with interview questions on the spot, and I was definitely no good at writing and listening at the same time.  What I did offer was entertainment news, stuff that the other kids might be interested in.  Pop music, movies, and whatnot.

And that autumn, I took the next step.  I wrote a review of Flaunt It for the school paper.  One of my first pieces of writing where I put everything into it.  Oh, the Infamous War Novel was where I poured my emotions and insecurities, but this one review was where I would regale them with “DUDE. You MUST listen to this.  It’s NUTS.”  Or something along those lines, anyway.  I was obsessed with this album, and I wanted other people to know about it.

That Friday when the paper came out, I excitedly grabbed a few copies and tore through it.  My first real article I could be proud of!

And the general consensus of the review was just about as you’d expect in the halls of a small town high school in the 1980s: derision and crickets.  Those who were bothered by my weirdo sense of taste made fun of me for listening to freaks in fishnets and questioned my sexuality.  And the rest just shrugged, said ‘whatever’ and went on their way.

Just about what I’d expected.

But you know, my aim hadn’t been to try to fit in or make people like me for my new, improved and bizarre tastes.  And maybe there was a half-serious attempt to indoctrinate others who were on the verge of letting their weirdness come out.  But if anything, my real aim was to find out if anyone else in this town had the same tastes as I did.

At first I heard nothing, and that was what I’d figured.  This small town was getting too small for me, damn it all!  Sulking and frustrated, I turned back to the usual silliness with Kevin.

Jim approached me the following Tuesday.

“Hey, you’re Jon, right?”

Jim was a junior that I knew of and had seen around.  We didn’t hang out but I knew who he was.  He was one of the more outgoing students who were part of the Student Council, had been in a few school clubs, took AP classes, and got along fine with pretty much everyone.

I stopped and blinked.  No one ever approached me like that.  “Yeah?”

All at once he got excited.  “Oh, man!” he gushed.  “I saw your review last week!  Me and a few of my friends saw it.  I had no idea there were others here that liked the same music we do!  That was a great article!  Thanks for writing it!”

I stood there, dumbfounded for a few seconds.

Someone had liked my article?

Someone else knew who Sigue Sigue Sputnik was?

“Oh, that’s right,” he continued.  “You know Chris, right?  He says he used to hang out with you in junior high.  He says he’s related somehow.”

Wait, Chris?  Oh!  Yeah, that kid I hung out with briefly in junior high, about two years ago!  I’d seen him around.  He still listened to music as much as I did?

“Yeah!  I remember him.”

“So yeah!  Thanks for writing up that review!  We loved it!”

And with that, Jim waved and left, joining his friends at their table in the cafeteria.

Me, I just stood there for a second, trying to process what had just happened.  No one outside of relatives had ever commented on my writing before, but more to the point, I had not expected such a pleased reaction from someone else in this school!  I know I was the black sheep at this point, but the sudden acceptance threw me.

I may have dwelled on that — obsessed over it, more like — for the next few days, maybe even bothered Kevin about it (who took it in stride).  I really wasn’t quite sure how to proceed…should I insinuate myself into this new crowd?  Ingratiate myself?  This was new territory for me.  Or more to the point, it was new territory in that I wasn’t oblivious to whether or not I’d be accepted.

The answer to these questions came a short time later when I happened to run into Chris on the way through the cafeteria.**  After a few fumbling words of introduction and small talk about the review, he was more than happy to invite me into his circle of friends.

Life was about to change.

* – Yes, I know.  Basing my fifteen-year-old life on Sigue Sigue Sputnik?  Really?  Was I that sheltered from reality?  But that’s the way I was back then — I rarely took anything in that was half-assed or didn’t immediately gel with me.  This album was enough to put to rest my lingering feelings that I’d quickly outgrown my hometown already.
** – Everything happens there, doesn’t it?  The layout of Athol High School makes the cafeteria a main gathering area as well as a connecting thruway between the gymnasium and auditorium and the classroom hallways.  I’d run into pretty much everyone there.  Come my senior year, Kevin and I would start our days in the hallway just outside the cafeteria and would chat with everyone who stopped by.

The first piece of the puzzle to fall into place was, again, Star Hits.  In particular, it was its penpal section.  It was the spring of 1986 when I finally decided to make the first move to wider pastures by putting in a listing.  I don’t think that one went anywhere, but I did have a brief correspondence with this one girl from London named Roberta who, at my request, gave me a mixtape of some of the BBC countdown.  We also got into an interesting conversation about being a punk, or at least a nonconformist — what it meant, and what it entailed.  She really opened my eyes on that.  It hadn’t completely occurred to me to openly and publicly embrace being a misfit.  It meant not giving in.  It meant being true to oneself.  It meant respecting others the way you’d want to be respected.

It was me going to the source, really.  I wanted someone to explain to me how the UK 80s punks and outcasts lived their lives.  I mean, other than the ones slumming and drugging up and lawbreaking, as was the accepted stereotype in the 80s.

So.

This meant me, being of sound mind and body, finally giving my old pathetic life a big fuck you and letting my freak flag fly.

I could get behind that.

Thinking back now, it’s not exactly surprising that I fell for alternative rock so fully and completely.  Betwee the nonconformity conversation, the change in social circles, and the quirky mix of popular chart music, it was only a matter of time before I started down that road.

My freshman year ended uneventfully, in that I’d survived a year at a new school, and felt a bit more mature because of it.  It was one year past the hell of junior high life, and I actually knew what the hell I was doing now.  My high school graduation was that much closer to being a reality.

What job did I have that summer?  I don’t even remember at this point. Maybe another season of working at the supermarket, I think.  And during that summer, I made it a point to Buy More Records.

Now that I knew more about college rock, and was armed with a shopping list of titles to look for, thanks to Trouser Press, Rolling Stone and Star Hits, I set about hanging around all the record stores whenever my family went shopping at the malls.  I knew enough that most of the titles I was looking for weren’t going to be at Mars or the Music Forum.  Still, that didn’t keep me from scooping those right up when I did find them.  Each time it felt sneaky, like I’d just found a pot of gold in amongst all the pop manure!  The Cure’s Happily Ever After at the record store in downtown Greenfield?  Sweet!  Depeche Mode’s “Shake the Disease” single in the cutout bin at K-Mart?  Yoink!  I loved it when I found these great titles in the weirdest places!

Another habit of mine that started up about this time was staying up way too late on school nights.  I mean, staying up until 1am, after everyone had gone to bed, door closed with just my bedside lamp on, scribbling away in my notebook.  I was on the back end of writing the Infamous War Novel at the time, so most of my late nights were spent listening to the radio or my new cassette purchases.  Happily Ever After and Standing on a Beach were on heavy rotation, which made the plot of the IWN that much darker in mood.  The characters weren’t just fighting a war anymore, they were fighting their own faltering sanity.

Picture courtesy nightflight.com

The late nights on the weekends opened up another avenue for me — cult TV.  USA Network had a four-hour show called Night Flight that featured all kinds of wild things — weird videos, video art installments, horror movies from the 50s, art films, and everything in between.  I’d stay up and watch it for a few hours, and later would tape them as well.  I’d been watching this show off and on since the early 80s, and by 1986 their episodes had gone from low-budget indie and public domain films to relatively recent art-house films and cult classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Fantastic Planet.  The weirder the films, the more fascinated I became.

Another show that would catch my attention, purelly by chance because they were playing a Woodentops track at the time that I loved, was MTV’s 120 Minutes.  To say I was gobsmacked by it from Day One would probably be a lie — at that time they were still figuring out the programming, and who would fit as the host.  This was well before the weirdness of Kevin Seal or the snotty hipness of Dave Kendall.  We had dorky Alan Hunter, old guard music fan JJ Jackson, and a few others.  The playlists were a bit dodgy as well, sometimes featuring Peter Frampton and Vanity alongside the Go-Betweens and Laurie Anderson. [Contrary to popular belief, 120 Minutes didn’t exactly start off as an all-alternative rock show; it was more an AOR-meets-progressive-radio mix inspired by another show on the channel at the time, IRS Records Presents the Cutting Edge.  The purely-alternative playlists would solidify by late 1986.  An excellent reference site for the show’s playlists can be found at The 120 Minutes Archive.]

Just like the college station I’d found, my reaction to 120 Minutes was “Ah…this is kind of cool.  I’ll have to remember to check this out more often.”  I toggled between it and Night Flight for a few months through out the summer of 1986, taping episodes as time (and blank tapes) permitted, learning and listening as I went.

This wasn’t about me trying to find a scene, though.  It was never about that, because I knew that didn’t exist, at least not in my small home town.  The punks and the nonconformists you saw in the movies and on television — even if you knew they were quickly-crafted stereotypes — didn’t exist in my town.  We had the jocks, the geeks, the band nerds, the smart kids…but really, there was no alternative scene.

And I was okay with that.  For now, at any rate.  I had all this new music I could immerse myself in, and that’s all I needed.

Speaking of high school dances, these were probably my one true link to my fellow classmates outside of my neighborhood and outside of school hours.  I looked forward to hanging out with my buddies, listening to tunes, and maybe even getting in a dance or two.

I wasn’t exactly a wallflower.  I just didn’t have a girlfriend for most of the high school years, for varying reasons.  I had a few female friends and a few who were willing to slow dance at these shindigs, but as far as a love life was concerned, I was on my own.  I had a few short flings in junior high, none lasting more than a few months.  I didn’t know what these relationships meant then, just that I didn’t have one and was, to be truthful, a bit lonely.

The school dances may have fostered a few ‘maybe’ relationships — including a kind of brief one with a girl I actually had a crush on in fourth grade — but nothing permanent.  More often than not I’d be hanging with my guy friends on the bleachers, chatting and listening to tunes.

Yeah, that was me.  I actually went to these things because of the music.  I went to those things all the way up until my senior year, because why the hell not?  A fun scene, good times, and I got to see friends outside of the school day.

I mention this because I was not the most outward person outside of school.  I rarely went out with friends for the first couple of years of high school, for whatever reasons I’m still not exactly sure of.  Maybe it was laziness — I couldn’t be bothered to hang out at someone else’s house when it was a good couple of miles away.  Maybe it was my level of connection — I was an acquaintance of many, but not really a close friend.  maybe it was that my circle of friends up until 1985 or so remained the few people I knew in my neighborhood

And I knew I was moving away from them by that time.  There were three of us at one point, partners in crime, but as I got older I realized it was more of a single-kid-in-crime with the two of us following along out of boredom.  After a few close calls of dumbassery, I realized enough was enough and cut the connection cold by the end of summer 1986.  I’d grown out of my safe neighborhood.  I needed to expand my universe pretty damn quick.

And that I did.

1986 was an excellent year for quirky pop music, both American and British.  On the week I discovered college radio, the American Top 40 featured the following:

• Prince & the Revolution, “Kiss”
• Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love”
• Pet Shop Boys, “West End Girls”
• The Bangles, “Manic Monday”
• Van Halen, “Why Can’t This Be Love”
• Falco, “Rock Me Amadeus”
• Whitney Houston, “The Greatest Love of All”
• Level 42, “Something About You”
• Janet Jackson, “What Have You Done for Me Lately”
• Force MD’s, “Tender Love”
• Sade, “Never As Good As the First Time”
• Dire Straits, “So Far Away”
• Madonna, “Live to Tell”

That’s quite a cross-section of popular music there.  Multiple genres, multiple generations, multiple countries!  It was a fine time to branch out.

And Star Hits was the magazine I gravitated towards for this sort of thing.  Hip enough to talk about all the music I liked, simple enough for my fifteen-year-old sensibilities (I really had no interest in professional music magazines at the time).  And this is where I started to realize, where it really became clear, that my interests in music were close to the level of my friends’.  That is, I was already completely and hopelessly obsessed with music at that point.  I was leaving everyone else in the dust.

So.  There I was, stuck in the middle.  Moving on from the crowd I used to frequent just a few years previous, and moving towards parts unknown.  Obviously I didn’t fit in with the jocks.  I don’t know if it was that I really disliked the dudebro attitudes of the time, or that I seemed to get along with the girls a little to well, or that I was just stick of trying to be someone I wasn’t, or no longer was.

Time to take the next step.