My Favorite Bands (When I Was in High School)

The sad news about the passing of Paul Reubens (PeeWee Herman) sent me into a tailspin of of genuine grief and I don’t mind admitting it because it seems like everyone I know felt the same way. There I was, sobbing over the death of a clown. That’s a good clown that can make you do that. My good friend, the genius performance artist, musician, and sometime wedding officiantKilly Dwyer said “It’s check on an ’80s kid week” and I knew what she meant because we weren’t even done grieving over Sinead O’Connor. I was born in the middle of a decade, so the ’80s was the last of the three decades my youth straddled. As it happens I have my high school reunion coming up. Class of 1983 (you do the math). But I’d been hooking up with all kinds of very old friends lately anyway, because, I mean, are we all gonna die, or what? Lethal viruses, air full of smoke, Soylent Green level meteorology, people going crazy like distempered animals. Anyway, seeing these people from my past has reminded me of my version of Old Times. And as it happens, two of Peewee’s composers came out of two of my favorite bands when I was in high school, which is where I’m going with this.

By that I mean, bands that were then contemporary. For most people that would be nothing extraordinary, but in my case, as you can already tell from the contents of Travalanche, I was already spending a lot of time looking backwards as a kid. As a teenager I listened to a lot of dinosaur rock, British Invasion stuff, surf music, garage rock, as well even older things like Tin Pan Alley, certain old Broadway shows, and things like that on records I took out of the library.

As for contemporary popular music, the stuff most kids were listening to, there are no words for how much I reviled most of it. The nadir was probably 1982. Billboard‘s end of year Hot 100 for ’82 is a catalog of real shit, just appalling crap with a mere handful of bright spots (the bright spots for me being singles by The Go-Gos, Human League, Soft Cell, The Cars, The Motels, A Flock of Seagulls, Men at Work, Billy Idol, and a couple of others). But honestly about 80% of the other stuff was worthless, and hasn’t gained any charm over time. My critical bugaboos were obviously already in full bloom by then. It’s always made me sad. The expression we usually use for someone who doesn’t fit with the prevailing tastes is “out of step”, but I don’t like that phrase in this case, because it would imply that there’s something wrong with ME, and not the corporate diarrhea factory . And there ain’t nothin’ wrong with me (as far as that goes, anyway).

But I didn’t hate everything that was new at the time. There was some contemporary music that I loved very much indeed. Yes, that’s me scarfing a slice in the high school cafeteria in the photo above. And I think the pin I’m wearing says “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”. Haha, I meant it then, and I mean it now. It happens to be a lyric from a Dead Kennedys song. There were a lot of bands called “Dead” back then. The Dead Boys,The Dead Milkmen. (The Grateful Dead not so much my thing though). I was a member of my town’s first punk band (already written in about in my earlier posts on Providence and Kurt Cobain and Inside LLewyn Davis).

I liked punk, and still like it, and can appreciate it, but I have to confess that even then, as a teenager, though I have plenty of anger and angst, I never possessed the requisite ABANDON and dick-measuring machismo that kind of music requires to perform. In punk, you have to not give a shit. And I gave a shit. But I really, really, REALLY loved a lot of the music that lived right next door to punk and sometimes overlapped it, and that was the motley assortment of nerdy, funny, misfit music which the people who label things labeled New Wave. And I pretty much loved all of it, including scores of bands I won’t be mentioning in this post. The ones who made the cut for this little survey were among the most popular, both critically and in terms of record sales. You didn’t have to work hard to discover them, because kids played their records at parties. But I especially loved them because of the point of view the music expressed, which generally tended toward the satirical and the campy and the theatrical over and above the infectious noises they made. The stuff they attacked or ribbed or fucked with was the same stuff that stirred my own teen indignation (hardly a coincidence), things like mindless conformism, the idiocy and short-sighted greed of consumer capitalism, the suicidal blindness of nukes and the Cold War. Yet, it was all…kind of a big laugh? Because what could you do about it? Even the ostensibly “liberal” politicians seemed to be making no effort to rescue us.

The aesthetic lens through which much of it was projected tended to take the form of things like ’50s kitsch, which meant that the musicians were in some kind of dialogue with their own childhoods, slightly before my time. There was much to stir those memories in the trauma of two Presidents who bookended the era: Ike’s red-baiting VP Richard Nixon, and the even more hawkish Ronald Reagan. There is a detachment, an alienation from one’s own culture in the music. The spirit is not unlike that which John Waters infused his movies with, or New York’s gay community put into their camp musicals or National Lampoonand early seasons of Saturday Night Live. And of course — the late, lamented PeeWee.

Most of these bands had their peak or were reaching it during the very same years of my adolescence, from Junior High through just after high school (roughly 1977-85). And many or most of them had started out just a few years earlier, almost exactly 50 years ago, another reason for the timing of this post. I freely acknowledge that an enthusiasm for these bands doesn’t make me the world’s most original creature. I’m just talking about what I like and why I like it, providing some cool backstory that’s less widely known than the music, and talking a little about the meaning of what they did, since their political and social messages were generally implied rather than overtly expressed (and were sometimes unclear even to the artists).

So here they are, some of my favorite musical artists — from my own time for once.

Devo

I’ve come close to posting on this band on three previous occasions: when Bob Casale passed in 2014, on Mark Mothersbaugh’s birthday (May), and on the group’s 50th anniversary, which was in April. Most people know them solely through their only hit single “Whip It” (1980) and the later MTV video, which is also how most of their subsequent fans discovered them. Listeners find the song funny, intriguing (is it about masturbation? S/M? nitrous oxide?), and perhaps a little (or even a lot) annoying. Fewer surely know that they released a half dozen LPs in which every single song had those qualities. Their LPs tended to sell better than their singles.

The band consisted of two pairs of brothers: Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Gerald and Bob Casale, plus the drummer Alan Myers. Hailing from Akron, Ohio, the members were art students at Kent State, and were formed in 1973 at least partly as part of the student reaction to the Kent State Massacre (1970). It seems to me that they were instrumental in the solidification of and popularization of the concept of “nerd” (which had dated to the early ’50s and then became widely popularized by its derogatory use on Happy Days). At the time Devo launched, guys like them (short-haired, bespectacled techno geeks) couldn’t have been less fashionable, especially on a college campus. It was the age of, oh, The Allman Brothers, and these guys looked like science teachers or junior Nixon staffers. But the gay artists who invented camp showed that the best way to live with being part of a marginalized group is to OWN who you are, to celebrate it, and more than that, laugh at it harder and smarter than the oafs who ridicule you. That’s my takeaway. Devo very cleverly did that, while also having a good laugh at the mainstream of society as well.

Their name is short for “de-evolution”. They cooked up a whole humorous, somewhat vague mock science fiction playbook in which humankind was basically returning to ape status, probably by way of technology and other consumer culture “boons” that made it unnecessary to think or solve problems any more. And in language that mocked advertising, propaganda and motivational gobbledy-gook, they were the pseudo-Fascist cheerleaders for the process (ironically, of course). In this, they much resembled, visually and lyrically, the faux religious art project known as The Church of the Sub-Genus. Their first single — Ye Gods — was “Mongoloid” (1977), and what you fear is indeed true; it was not about Asians. “One chromosome too many” is right there in the lyric. Each new record put some new twist on their look and their sound. On their first, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978), whose title refers to a quote from the 1932 horror movie Island of Lost Souls, the boys are dressed in haz-mat suits and their sound is hard, more industrial and electric guitar driven than most of their later work, which also relied heavily on synthesizers. (We should mention that they were absolutely cutting edge in bringing electronic elements into popular music — way ahead of the pack in bringing those sounds to the masses). Then came Duty Now for the Future (1979), Freedom of Choice (1980), New Traditionalists (1981), Oh No! It’s Devo (1982), and Shout (1984). They also did the theme song to the Dan Aykroyd movie Dr. Detroit (1983)

In addition to their own highly original songs, most of their LPs would feature one ironic, robotic sounding cover version of a well-known classic rock tune, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” (which basically contained the message of their whole act, though expressed very differently), as well as Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man”, and Allen Toussaint’s “Working in a Coal Mine”. When they finally gave that treatment to Jim Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?”, complete with a video in which a zombie Hendrix emerges from his casket to play the guitar solo to throngs of puppet-like hippies who seem just as moronic as the suburban bubbleheads Devo also made fun of, the bloom was off the rose and Warner Brothers dropped them. (Incidentally, Frank Zappa, spiritual godfather of many of the bands we discuss in this post, had also placed hippie culture in his satirical sights).

The band returned in the late ’80s on a smaller label and with a much more straight-forwardly commercial sound, but with little success. Who wants that from Devo? And they have reunited many times since then. Their best known member, Mark Mothersbaugh (and this should have been our lede) became a popular soundtrack composer for film and television, making his initial splash with PeeWee’s Playhouse, and later such things as Rugrats and other kids cartoons, as well as the movies of Wes Anderson and others.

The B-52s

This Athens, Georgia band, founded in 1976, probably did more to popularize kitschy gay aesthetics than anyone else. When I think of my favorite movies from the 1980s, they all sort of LOOK like The B-52s. Like a lot of people from the hinterlands I was pretty oblivious about the band members’ sexual identities when I was a youngster. (Case in point, I always assumed, naturally enough, that the name referred to the World War Two era bomber plane. But it does so only indirectly. It was also the nickname for one of those heavily hairpsprayed beehive hairdos the girls in the band wore, since it was hard, round and pointy like an airplane’s nose cone). Like most people, I just knew they were irresistible and infectious, so much so, that their singles, like “Rock Lobster” (1978), “Planet Claire” (1979), “Private Idaho” (1980), and “Mesopotamia” (1982) were, along with The Vapors’ “I Think I’m Turning Japanese” (1980), among the few things that would ever induce me to get on to a dance floor, where I would proceed to cut up with embarrassing abandon. Their eponymous debut LP (1979) and the 1980 follow-up Wild Planet would be played in their entirety at parties.

The band was only political by implication — I think of their lyrics as surrealist or Dada (and fun, obviously). They were simply matter of factly queer. Didn’t hide it, didn’t sing about it, at least in any kind of stridently obvious way. It was brought home however, when their incredible guitar player Ricky Wilson died of AIDS in 1985. At that point I assumed they were sunk. Wilson’s catchy, kitschy hooks and riffs were so central to their sound. But so was Kate Person’s spooky organs and her close harmonies with Cindy Wilson (Ricky’s sister) and Fred Schneider’s Southern Gentleman speak-singing. They not only persevered but had their biggest hits at the end of the decade with “Love Shack” and “Roam”.

The Ramones

The Ramones are generally categorized as punk rather than New Wave, but they actually straddle both worlds. Most punk is on some level overtly political and metaphysically combative. At least that’s how they did it in London and L.A. By contrast, this Queens-based quartet, formed in 1974, sought to epitomize what they loved about rock and roll. That it was simple, fun, fast, and above all brief. As with most teenagers, their rebellion seemed more like a role they were playing, and in retrospect it strikes me as almost adorable. I find them so innocent, I gave their “greatest hits” CD to my kid for his 10th birthday. I’m one of the many who believe that in a rational and pure world, The Ramones’ singles would have been Top 40 staples like those of their CBGBs colleagues Blondie (whom I also love). The fact that they didn’t seems a reflection of music industry corruption — for real. Or, it may have something to do with a truth my best friend in high school used to say: Joey Ramone is the ugliest son of a bitch who ever lived.

For all their posing, The Ramones were as much influenced by the mainstream brand of pop as the Iggy kind. They did Girl Group covers, and took their stage name from a pseudonym Paul McCartney once used. They specialized in catchy anthems, usually with a element of humor. The titles of their singles tell the story: “Blitzkrieg Bop” (1976), “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” (1977), “Rockaway Beach” (1977), “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (1979, the theme song to a movie!), “I Wanna Be Sedated” (1980), “The KKK Took My Baby Away” (1981), “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” (1985, about Reagan’s unfortunate graveside remarks commemorating the dead of WWII), and the theme song to the original screen version of Stephen King’sPet Sematary (1989).

Above all, The Ramones cast a long, long shadow, and some even credit them with being the FOUNDERS of punk, though that would depend on your definitions of the words “founder”, “punk”, and if you’re Bill Clinton, probably “of” as well.

Talking Heads

It can also be claimed that Jonathan Richman was the founder of punk. I’m saving him for his own post, and in any case I didn’t discover his music until a couple of years after high school. I mention him here because keyboard player Jerry Harrison started out in Richman’s band TheModern Lovers, before joining The Talking Heads with David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz a couple of years after they formed in 1975. As I mentioned in this earlier post, they were art students at RISD in Providence, before finding fame as part of the scene at CBGBs on the Bowery. I first became aware of them from their 1979 SNL appearance; and that same year my aunt bought me their then-new LP Fear of Music for Christmas, for which I am eternally grateful. I played the hell out of that record trying to ferret out its secrets. Like all the bands I treat of in this post The Talking Heads are funny, ironic, satirical. But The Talking Heads are also subtle and enigmatic, and highly inventive musically. They seemed to want to thwart you figuring them out.

Early singles like “Psycho Killer” (1977) and “Life During Wartime” (1979) made the Hot 100 but just barely. A portent of things to come was their 1978 cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River”. As with Devo’s covers their arrangement and performance of the song reimagined its meaning entirely, from some kind of a gospel baptism thing into an ominous scary place — the river as the sort of a place where people find dead bodies. But it was rhythmic and danceable and reached #26 on the charts. I’ve always thought there was a good bit of anthropology in their process, the incorporation of world music, in addition to their witty, impressionistic lyrics.

MTV loved them of course, and they finally became a major Top 40 act in 1983 with “Burning Down the House”. In the mid ’80s they were everywhere with tunes like “Road to Nowhere”, “And She Was” and “Wild Wild Life” and their amazing 1986 movie True Stories. After “Sax and Violins” which was used in the 1991 Wim Wenders movie Until the End of the World, they disbanded. But they all already had side projects anyway, Frantz and Weymouth had another band that was nearly as popular, Tom Tom Club. Harrison’s 1988 solo single “Rev it Up” reached #7 on the charts — higher than any Talking Heads single. I saw him perform live in support of it that year at a club called The Tree in Portland, Maine, where I worked as a busboy. I visited the site a couple of years ago; it’s now a Chinese restaurant. (Chinese restaurants are very important to New Wave. The B-52s were formed in one). And obviously front man Byrne has always had his own projects. This probably merits its own post. I always loved Byrne’s gentlemanly yet edgy and unsettling persona and that strange, strangled quavering voice.

The Cramps

Though they were founded in 1976, I’m quite certain I first became aware of The Cramps from their appearance in the 1982 documentary Urgh! A Musical War, which I saw with my friends at the Cable Car Cinema, a Providence art house. The Ramones may be minimalists, but The Cramps make them look like purveyors of pompous prog rock. The core of the band is the husband-wife couple of Poison Ivy and Lux Interior. They’re pioneers of the sound known as psychobilly. Poison Ivy plays hypnotic tremolo-saturated riffs evoking surf music and of course rockabilly; her husband is a scary sounding talker-singer in the Iggy Pop tradition, but with a bit more retro irony to him. They’re also associated with the aesthetic of bad ’50s horror movies. They’ve always charted better in the UK than here; ironic, because they are SO American — they met in California, spent some time in Akron, and made it in New York. Like ya do. Their better known tunes include “Human Fly” (1978) and “Goo Goo Muck” (1981). I love their cover of “Mule Skinner Blues“! Their sound influenced so many 1980s movie soundtracks it probably can’t even be mapped. And I can’t imagine that The Stray Cats ever would have existed without them.

Oingo Boingo

Oingo Boingo evolved out of a surrealistic musical street theatre troupe called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo founded in L.A. by Richard Elfman circa 1972. When his brother Danny joined it became increasingly more of a music project. Horns were added. Sometimes their tunes were in a ska vein like The Specials and Madness, but they could also sound like an old tin pan alley record from the 1920s and some of their earlier punkier stuff sounds like early Devo. They hit a little later than most of these groups. Their biggest charting single was the theme to the 1985 film Weird Science. Today front man Danny Elfman is one of Hollywood’s most successful soundtrack composers. He has had a long association with Tim Burton, and he’s one of the motivating factors for this post, because obviously, he wrote the soundtrack for PeeWee’s Big Adventure (1985)

Okay, I need to wrap this up. Honorable mention goes to Sparks, and Pere Ubu (my first introduction to Alfred Jarry — but if you think about it, so were half these bands). And countless others, some of whom are long overdue for their own posts, which, knock wood, we’ll get to.

1988 is roughly where I clearly lost touch with contemporary music, in any but a vague, half-aware way — that long ago, believe it or not. Naturally that has gotten worse with every passing year. My wife will talk about music from the ’90s when I was still quite young, and in many or most cases I’ll have never heard of it, as though I had been abducted by aliens for a period or something. Anyway, this post goes out to her. It’s our wedding anniversary!