Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1981
by Scott Miller

"T.V. Party" - Black Flag
1981 fired off the first salvos of eighties annoyance. The most deadly was the "new romantic" movement, where the romance was with drum machines, thin, washy synthesizers, grandiose, yelpy vocals, bad hair, and bad clothes. It was a terrible music year, and made me realize that I was capable of caring about hair and clothes fashion, when it was this bad. All of that was mostly a British thing. In the U.S., the myth that punk bands were just rock bands that couldn't play their instruments had spread around enough to start coming true, in the form of the "hardcore" and L.A. punk scenes. As this list will attest, that loose genre wasn't uniformly a sullen, undisciplined, and mobbish celebration of hate over love, but it must hold the world record. "T.V. Party" is one kind of important exception: it wasn't sullen. The lesson of Henry Rollins is probably that with a sufficiently engaging personality, the issue of technical merit will eventually take care of itself.

"Help Me Somebody" - Brian Eno and David Byrne
As with a number of 1981 selections, I'm not a hundred percent sure I even like this one, but I listened to it a lot at the time, and My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts would be a good candidate for the most influential record of the subsequent twenty-five years—inspiring a host of more recent musical developments I'm not even fifty percent sure I like.

"Under Pressure" - Queen and David Bowie
This isn't anything like a journey through several barely-compatible song ideas that ties them all up brilliantly or anything, but just the audacity of journeying through several barely-compatible song ideas submitted as a supergroup hit single is boisterous and refreshing. "Love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night" wants a little reeling in, but is a characteristic piece of Bowie (I'm guessing) right-headedness.

"Birds of Paradise" - Pretenders
When Chrissie Hynde goes soft, it's usually in a diminished chord, slow tremolo singing kind of way, not anything this sing-songy. I like the sing-songy; this is a fetching piece of intimacy about lost childhood ideals, with a particularly nice bass part.

"Super Freak" - Rick James
The tight, punchy, unforgettable riff of "Super Freak" is no less an instant signifier for night life adventurousness now than the day it was released. Not my scene—I feel sort of the embarrassed Amish patriarch in the presence of its playa majesty—but, job well done!

"On, On, On, On" - Tom Tom Club
Maybe exacerbated by digital reverb being so new and coveted, the sonic malady of 1981 tended to be muddy low-mids, and (sometimes, but not here) too much high treble, like 10k. This sort of has that sound—more so than the giant hit "Genius of Love." But it has a sort of marching, children's crusade melodiousness that wakes my ears up quite a bit.

"White Girl" - X
"I'll replace your drunk old man/Sit in the parking lot and hold your hand." I don't really get what about this is "white girl," except that there's a deromanticizing impulse in the romantic lyric choices that X may view somewhat humorously as a ghettoized phenomenon—like people who refer to themselves as "white trash." A little more tonally dark and varied than the L.A. punk debut (which definitely had its moments), this is a great, dramatic vocal performance from John and Exene.

"Love" - Robyn Hitchcock
Tuneful and stealthily deep, "Love" kept the ball rolling for the amazing Robyn Hitchcock outside of the Soft Boys' realm. Ghosts, animal deaths due to man's irresponsibility, Weetabix: it all adds up to consciousness-raising if you give it a chance.

"For Beauty's Sake" - Marianne Faithfull
Even better than Broken English, the lovely "For Beauty's Sake" addresses the object of unrequited love, getting a lot across in few words, like, "In your circle you hold supreme sway." Am I shallow for wondering: Jagger? "What are you taking for beauty's sake?" is by itself an oddly compelling refrain.

"Johnny's Gonna Die" - The Replacements
Here's another exception to the objectionableness of the "hardcore" genre: a group that could really play. And they'd better have some chops, ragging as they do on the chops of one "Johnny" (am I shallow for wondering: Thunders?). "Johnny always needs more than he takes/Forgets a couple chords, forgets a couple breaks" is winningly frank in its nerve. Pretty sophisticated chord textures going on here.

"From a Whisper To a Scream" - Elvis Costello and the Attractions
I guess this is about accelerated infatuation, especially when drunk. Apparently "the one over the eight" is, in England, the drink that gets you drunk. Glenn Tillbrook sounds great on this Stax-if-not-Doobie-Brothers-inspired duet.

"Confrontation" - Romeo Void
One of San Francisco's biggest deals at the time was Romeo Void, one of whose secret weapons besides vocalist Debora Iyall was saxophonist Ben Bossi. This dance-friendly number is a painfully open confession of someone's uniquely personal dysfunction. "What works for you don't always work for me."

"Waiting On a Friend" - The Rolling Stones
"Start Me Up" is a fine song, but "Waiting On a Friend" is by far the significant achievement of Tattoo You. For one thing, you pretty much have to be the Stones to be able to phone up Sonny Rollins to play your sax solo, so bless them for doing so, and it's a gem of an appearance. Also, this is Jagger at his lyrical best. All the lines are good, but "I'm not waiting on a lady/I'm just waiting on a friend" in isolation has a maturity and gentleness that is genius.

"Nobody Told Me" - John Lennon
Hard to know where to situate this. It was finally released in '83, but three years after he died is weird placement. The cut is as frustrating as it is impressive, because it shows Lennon's promethean spark returning. Double Fantasy was a fine album for lucidly enumerating his values as father and husband, but "Nazis in the bathroom," and "Always something cooking and nothing in the pot," and a passage or two of five-star songcraft—that's late Beatles level stuff.

"We Got the Beat" - The Go-Go's
Another placement conundrum. I like the 1980 indie single better, but 1981 is a lot more needy. I guess I'm okay with the bigger production. I sure do miss that little answer vocal: "They're walking in time" "They're walking in t..." "They got the beat." What possessed them to axe that? One day I'm going to use ProTools to somehow isolate that from the single and add it back in. That will show them.

"Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" - Soft Cell
Oh, about the complaining I did about New Romantic stuff. This one gets a free pass. People love this song or they hate it, and I absolutely love it. It's not exactly an ironic exercise, but certainly there's a value to opening with, "Standing in the doorway of the Pink Flamingo crying in the rain," that isn't strictly a flood of shared emotion. It's a sort of magic level of camp that allows the song to have it both ways, both lyrically and musically. The music is as certifiably beautiful as the production is kitschy; the story of cutting it off with a trampy and embarrassing lover is played for laughs at times, but moments like, "We're strangers meeting for the first time, okay?/Just smile and say hello" have a dramatic facility that makes me really aware of the other person's heart getting broken here. Some of the singing goes painfully out of key at the end—just part of the charm—almost.

"The Million Year Picnic" - Nash the Slash
Nash was a Ralph Records guy who apparently wore a mummy outfit and a fedora on stage. That's about all I know. It's a square wave synth lover's paradise—just a little instrumental not unlike "Popcorn" by Hot Butter, but one that really soars. And for me, it's significant as representing the dawn of the era of Dan Vallor's influence on my tastes, exposing me to then obscure material that accompanied me to becoming, to my limited extent, something of an insider in the biz for a while.

"That's When I Reach For My Revolver" - Mission of Burma
One of the most memorable songs Dan introduced me to was this Boston scene staple, whose stock has risen steadily since, to the point where Mission of Burma can now tour successfully on their reputation. The way I take this very curious set of lyrics is that our culture of self-actualization ("father taught us boundaries beyond which we must go," "the spirit fights to find its way") subtly teaches that when you have to choose between yourself and others, your duty is to prevail. So people go around ready to reach for their revolver. That is, I think the song is against reaching for your revolver. Sadly, not a given in the music business of my adult lifetime.

"Tearjerkin'" - The dB's
Nothing was sadder than watching the dBs' Swiss watch precision sense of the progression of music history get lost on a generation that just wanted to dress like Adam and the Ants. "Tearjerkin'" sounded like every cool record from the past rolled into one. The beat is a sort of souped-up "Be My Baby," there's Mysterians keyboard, some Beach Boys harmonies. Chris Stamey's lyrics of this era were at their most playfully disturbing: "You can take a photograph/Take another one of those/You can take off your clothes/Take the covers off the bed/But don't take back what you said." I think it's time for history to realize the dB's were on kilter and a whole lot else was off. (And also time for me to stop repeatedly underestimating the world's desire to dress like pirates.)

"Radio Free Europe" - R.E.M.
The crown for writing the new song that all bands would want to cover was just sitting there, for a long time, waiting for someone to pick it up and wear it, and no one was. There were some punk-era candidates like "Roadrunner," "Blitzkrieg Bop," "God Save the Queen," "Don't Fear the Reaper," but they were all some combination of deal-breakingly artist-specific and not as easy to pull off as everyone started out thinking. Then along came "Radio Free Europe," a fantastic song that's not only playable after one listening, but: it doesn't matter that your singer doesn't know the words, because neither does anyone else in the world. "Wall to wall David Janssen/Wall to wall David Janssen/Radio free Europe!/Radio free Europe!" gets it done. Or probably "Me catch the ship across the sea," for that matter, wink. I'm the right age for one of my earliest memories to be those commercials for supporting Radio Free Europe where the Russian-speaking guy winds his way to a secluded D.J. booth and announces the Drifters' "Broadway" (hey, bet you can find that on YouTube now). And, now that I'm chatty, another childhood memory they tapped was a mesmerizing Boys' Life magazine article about sleep states such as R.E.M. in terms as poetic as archetypal Jungian and biblical dream imagery.