Seventeen In ’88 – A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
Summer 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music
The baseball world is all up in arms because Oakland’s A’s catcher Terry Steinbach, despite a poor offensive first half, is voted in by fans to start the All-Star Game. Rumors of ballot-stuffing by over-zealous A’s fans abound, and plenty of commentators make it known what a travesty they think it is that a guy who’s hitting .220 is starting the mid-summer classic. Terry Steinbach then proceeds to drive in both runs in a 2-1 AL victory, including a home run off in-his-prime Dwight Gooden. For his efforts, he takes home MVP honors. Baseball is a wonderful thing.
Driving around. Where the hell did we go? In circles mostly, though we would inevitably end up driving down the two-mile stretch known as “the strip” towards either Burger King or the Mall, or both. Burger King is the hangout, man. “The BK Lounge”. Or, more commonly, just "BK". We go there and sit for hours loading up on refills of sugar and caffeine. We have what we think is an amusing little tradition of not cleaning up after ourselves before leaving. Years later when I find myself working in a fast-food place I realize how very un-amusing this little tradition actually was. Like the man said, karma’s a bitch.
Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. We’re always on the lookout for the next band that can fit into our world as a symbol, an avatar, a mirror to reflect back our better selves. Somehow, despite plenty of attractive traits – offbeat humor, rebellious spirit, crazy eclecticism - CVB never really took hold as part of our little pantheon. I wanted to love them – I mean, they had a violin player, just like Fairport Convention! Ultimately though, we tended towards bands who took either the heart-on-sleeve or seriously arty approach, with the Dead Milkmen as the exception that proved the bias. It’s a cool album, though, with a crazy-quilt mix of styles blended together by a keening fiddle and a good-humored sense of adventure. There’s the trad college-rock “Eye of Fatima”, the reggae-hued “Never Go Back”, ready-to-tango “Tania” and a non-ironic song called “Life Is Grand” which would provide a nice tonic for the darker days about to ensue.
Emily’s younger brothers are skateboarders. And they are obsessive about it. Partly under the influence of their enthusiasm and partly under the influence of the hardcore music he loves, Roger also becomes obsessed with skateboarding. Which means that the rest of us also take an interest. Usually, I avoid anything that might result in bodily harm, but I think I was drawn in by the brightly-colored designs on the boards, and the way the whole culture seemed to operate under its own code, with participants speaking a kind of secret outsider language. Like a youthful biker gang. Roger might have had a knack for it. He certainly wasn’t too worried about getting hurt – I had once seen him insist on continuing a game of backyard football despite an enormous gash that sent blood flowing down his forehead. While he and Emily’s brothers are always attempting gravity and bone-defying feats, my own excursions amount to little more than breezing slowly down an extremely straight sidewalk. Ultimately, my interest waned as the need for self-preservation prevailed, though I may also have been a little self-conscious about the fact that I preferred Bob Dylan to The Circle Jerks.
MTV has begun airing reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is the first time the show has been seen regularly in America since PBS ran it during the troupe’s seventies heyday. Back then, I was a small child and my parents would let me watch because I loved cartoons. The surreal quality of Terry Gilliam’s animated bits was lost on me, but I loved the show anyway. I associated it with being up late, and being in on something that was kind of adult and scary. In the years since I watched and loved the Python films, so I’m really anxious to see the show again. I watch a couple episodes, and at first I’m surprised at how boring I find it. This isn’t funny, I think. This is just nonsensical, disconnected weirdness. But I keep watching. Slowly I become attuned to the show’s rhythm, its peculiar language of absurdity. I find myself almost hypnotized by it, and the show’s air of weird chaos begins to color my days. I want to get lost in that strangeness, that irreverence, that craziness. I want to be immersed in it, and sometimes I feel as though I am. I begin to realize that indulging in nonsensical, disconnected weirdness may be the only suitable way of dealing with the bewildering, inexplicable world we live in.
Hardly, Not Even by Run Westy Run. Of interest to us because the band was from Minneapolis, like the Hüsker Dü /Replacements/Soul Asylum axis, and their album was not only released on SST, home to the Hüskers/Minutemen/Firehose/Meat Puppets/etc., but it was also co-produced by Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü. It was a perfect storm of greatness that of course couldn’t help but be a letdown. Although I don’t think we were so much disappointed by the album as we were confused. Run Westy Run sounded nothing like any of those bands. The music was sloppy, diffuse, as though performed by a drunken, deeply weird roots rock band. The titles give a decent idea of the sound – “Yolk Of The Dumbwish”, “Drag Planet”, “King Of Zebra Pants”. Loping, wildcat rhythms, the vocalist yowling and slurring over it all. It’s a strange, fiery, funny record, but given the expectations we didn’t really know what to make of it in 1988. It’s aged pretty well, though, and if you’re at all interested in the Minneapolis, SST or ‘80’s indie rock scene you might think of it as a minor classic.
Movies, movies, boy, do we love movies. Even crappy ones. A group of us went to the movies every Monday. Movie Monday, we called it, ‘cos we liked to give snappy nicknames to everything we did. 1988 was the year of Die Hard and Big and Bull Durham and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but the movie that sticks out in my memory as a quintessential Movie Monday movie is, of all things, Arthur 2: On The Rocks. I think it sticks out because I can’t really remember anything about it. All those other movies I can still give you a rough outline of the plot and the characters. Arthur 2, on the other hand, is just gone. Did he quit drinking? Lose all his money? Create an army of robot Liza Minnellis to wreak mascara-stained havoc on Planet Earth? I’m pretty sure one or two of those things happened, but I’m not about to watch it again to find out.
“Two Rivers” by The Meat Puppets. On its surface another sun-splashed exercise in jangle, the song changes tone midway through, Curt Kirkwood's voice a disconnected moan calling up deserts, valleys, rivers. Nature. Serene on the surface, maybe, but there is more than a hint of the ominous underneath. A foreboding. A streak of dark clouds. Impending, impenetrable strangeness on the horizon. A parallel.
The Play. Emily's mother drives us to Nashville to see a play directed by an older acquaintance. It's downtown, and everyone is dressed nicely. We feel sophisticated. Like real adults. Along for the ride is Randy Davis, who is a couple years younger than us. He's trying to figure out how to go about getting a girlfriend, and he asks Emily and I how we got together. The story we tell, fondly, amusedly, already seems a part of the distant past, as though we have been dating for many years. We have been dating for exactly three months.
“Pocahontas”, by Neil Young. A folk song with a big, pretty melody. Words evoking open plains, sky, canoes on water. Suddenly it’s a scene of grisly violence, as white men come to Native American territory with their wagons and their guns and their savagery. The melody is still big, still pretty. Which makes the action seem somehow even more real, more alive. And it opens you up for the surrealism of the final verse, in which Neil and Pocahontas are lovers, and they sit around a campfire with Marlon Brando talking about the Astrodome and teepees and Hollywood. Time doesn’t exist. Everything happens all at once, forever.
4th of July. Emily’s parents took us all to our favorite hangout - yes, Burger King - and we watched our town’s fireworks show. For a good part of the several weeks building up to the holiday, Van Morrison had been a regular presence on my turntable, singing about how it’s “Almost Independence Day”. That lyric is metaphoric, I believe, but the song still lingered in my brain when Independence Day actually rolled around. Despite that, the memory of this night is not colored by anything that hints of the ominous, or the dark. There is no haunted quality about it. Thanks to the generous spirit of Emily’s family, and with an echo, maybe, of Camper Van Beethoven’s “Life Is Grand”, this night really was good wholesome fun for all, and you take that where you find it.
The other side. One Friday night later on in the summer a few of us are sitting around on Emily's porch. It's hot. We're all feeling listless, not sure what to do with ourselves, with the evening, with the remainder of our youth. Talk turns to the previous summer, when everything felt new, exciting, touched by some kind of weird electricity. We look around at one another and wonder why that feeling is gone.
