Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1982
by Scott Miller

"From the Air" - Laurie Anderson
It wasn't until about 1985 that the bad eighties vanquished the competing possibilities; in 1982, there were still possibilities like the lavishly entertaining performance art rock of Laurie Anderson. With elements verging on stand-up comedy, jazz, techno, and weird
science from the Exploratorium, she was a master of bridging private rumination and public spectacle—the show from this tour was one of the five best I've seen.

"Little Red Corvette" - Prince
Another great but oddly isolated force in the eighties was Prince. Prince's blockbuster resolution of the world into the primary components of sex, technology, and God was in many ways influential, but insistent on Prince the person as its focus and only authorized practitioner, and Prince wasn't the autobiographical type. My conception of him was sort of a hologram, a back-formation from what he described intensely desiring. The very catchy "Little Red Corvette" was my first hint of all of that.

"Daydream" - Leinst
I wouldn't guess there are more than ten remaining copies of this mesmerizing little home recording in the world. It was on a fascinating cassette compilation called The Other (artist for track one: Jandek!), one of whose publishers George Parsons didn't have the song anymore when, having long since lost track of my copy, I tracked him down. I couldn't have heard this thing more than two times twenty-five years ago, but it clearly stuck in my head permanently. I was ecstatic to find it in a drawer at my parents' house this year. It's a pointedly (given the context) non-underground vocal harmony number somewhat along the lines of "All I Have To Do Is Dream" and is a perfectly captivating composition. "Leinst is Hank Lawson & Matt Brown"—that's all I know. If the writers want to contact me, I'll do my best to put out a cover version that this not be lost forever.

"Happenstance" - The dB's
Some significant percentage of my hope for music at the start of the eighties was pinned to the dB's. In 1980, I'd made friends at college with Steve Wynn, later of the Dream Syndicate, and having heard my 1979 indie single, he played me Stamey and Big Star, somewhat shocked that I hadn't heard any of that yet. It was certainly the first time I felt there existed an operative musical direction I wanted to be a part of. By 1982 the dB's were putting out great, inventive, profoundly musical records and the world wasn't buying. The writing was on the wall.

"The Message" - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
"The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On the Wheels of Steel" was the first hip-hop record I was excited about (wasn't much into the Sugarhill Gang), and after "The Message" I was all ears—not to much avail: I thought the genre deteriorated badly in the next several years. Besides the obvious lyrical appeal ("Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge" is immortal), the care that went into the network of little synth sounds and the subtle complexity of the beat are amazing. It seemed to have an immediate impact on the way other brainy funk people like David Byrne operated.

"White Wedding" - Billy Idol
Keith Forsey's production is an example of good eighties sound: a little more precise and gated than before, but still rocking. I have the persistent impression of there being some sort of dark, ominous irony to the nice day for a white wedding, but besides the odd appearance of the word "shotgun," I think it might be pretty straight optimism.

"Africa" - Toto
Liking a Toto song was unexpected, and what with the DX7 atmoshperic signifiers and Kilimanjaro rising above the Serengeti, this was teetering. Ultimately there's a winning lack of any kind of timidity, resulting in a good sense of climax—a virtue sorely and perhaps ironically lacking in the oncoming age of Madonna.

"Save It For Later" - The English Beat
The first time I played for a thousand people was opening for the English Beat in '82. Ranking Roger—very nice guy. The debut album had such a thematic impact that it's easy for others to get eclipsed, but Special Beat Service is really good, especially this off-kilter ninth-heavy clean guitar number with a straight, plosive rock beat.

"Suspended In Gaffa" - Kate Bush
The Dreaming was probably Kate Bush's strongest album, and she seemed to fit right into the arty end of the eighties I could get behind, sharing some state with Laurie Anderson and XTC. This far along in Kate Bush's career it's not unexpected for there to be a "she's nuts" impression after a verse or two—in this case it's sort of a child shrieking desire to "have it all" but feeling mired ("feet of mud" or, according to a web search I just did, caught in a web of gaffer's tape).

"Front Line" - Stevie Wonder
This is a rather obscure song from the somewhat head-scratching Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium, but a devastating guitar rock exploration of disabled veteran disillusionment that should remind everyone that Stevie is never far from being able to whip out something incredible.

"More Than This" - Roxy Music
The arctic beauty of Avalon was an unexpected and freakishly lucrative resolution to a misfiring half a decade from Roxy. Maybe not overall as good in my book as the 1977 Ferry solo In Your Mind, "More Than This" was a higher high point—edging out "Love Me Madly Again." There's a sadness in, I don't know, Mackay and Manzanera not being wild animals anymore. But, certainly, hats off.

"Senses Working Overtime" - XTC
This is perhaps the last moment in eighties pop when bigger was still better—when without the hissing 12k of a Lexicon digital reverb, it was not certain a studio was adequate to the production of music of standard listenability. Later in the eighties it became increasingly illegal to be arty and sound good. Not to pass personal judgment, but there was clearly such a thing as a market sector that gave a pass to Psychocandy because it was sonically problematic, and as a matter of dalliance, evaluated it as music. English Settlement was arty, but big, and good—the sonics were legitimately awesome.

"Dream Away" - George Harrison
Some might know this best as the closing theme of Time Bandits. George had become used to communicating in a spiritual master mode, which I find highly enjoyable, but appreciate introduces something of a Yoda factor—and there's a weird rubbery texture to the production. Ultimately Harrison music of this vintage is so unbeholden to any for approval that it establishes its own island of catchiness and pithiness, with lines the like of "all you owe is apologies."

"Wolves, Lower" - R.E.M.
These last five songs had a powerful personal impact on me as I experienced my first real involvement in the music business. On the first occasion of getting Pete Buck sufficiently trapped in a room with me, I hit him up to teach me the open-string arpeggiation of "Wolves, Lower" (he cheerfully indulged me)—a key element in R.E.M.'s domination of indie guitar pop of the eighties. They practically single-handedly authored the school of no keyboards, no fuzz on the guitar, organic drumming, lyrics about fields. Michael Stipe emerged as pop's best singer on Chronic Town, and as abstruse as they were, his lyrics bespoke a vast talent and a new dimension of paracultural reflectiveness.

"Beyond Belief" - Elvis Costello and the Attractions
I was unshakable as an Elvis fan for life when this came out, but I had struggled a little with Get Happy!! (eventually to really love it) and even a little more with Trust (eventually liking it well enough but no more). I thought with "Beyond Belief," he rocketed back to unquestionable greatness. It's such a bizarre composition. The major/minor shift is borderline uncomfortable. He already did too much with the rapid-fire figures of speech, and this upped the ante considerably. Damned if it doesn't all click.

"Tell Me When It's Over" - The Dream Syndicate
By the start of 1981, I had become convinced Steve had a terrific album in him, and we'd had some discussions about my producing it for him (the only eventual manifestation being a track from the "15 Minutes" release I engineered). It was a bit of a shock when he abruptly moved to Los Angeles and within months had the biggest buzz in southern California—with a sound that was oddly unlike what he and I had been toying with. A year into it, it became a facile critical response to call the Syndicate derivative of Lou Reed or Dylan, but at the time it all read to me as putting a stake in the ground for music he liked and that was not really being done with any commercial success by anyone. "Tell Me When It's Over" is a feast of gravelly, slashing, impolite guitar in service of a strangely lilting, affecting melody.

"Everywhere That I'm Not" - Translator
From the jazzy, almost dissonant opening riff to the absolutely unforgettable chorus, this is one of music's most glaring should-be-classics. It got attention enough around San Francisco; would that David Kahne then had the clout to put 415 releases across. "You're in Tokyo, but I'm not/You're in Nova Scotia, but I'm not/Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not." Take my word for it: whoever you are, you need to hear this song.

"Shelley's Boyfriend" - Bonnie Hayes and the Wild Combo
Bonnie Hayes fronted an SF punk band called the Punts, but had a musical adeptness that outstripped the genre. She signed to Slash and put out the very enjoyable Good Clean Fun; since then I've lost track, except she has been fairly successful writing for other artists. Lyrically, "Shelley's Boyfriend"—a carry-over from the Punts—is a message to a younger girl to be herself in the face of bad influences; musically, it's one of the more brilliant exercises in restraint, and subtle but powerful variations on simple themes. The lines are longish, and there tend to be the setup lines, which hang on one note for a long time, and then payoff lines—the likes of "It was not all that she led him to believe it would be" that play on your not easily predicting where they're going to wrap up (the example of "my mother told me to pick the very best one" springs to mind). Apparently featured in the movie "Valley Girl"—about which I know nothing—it's a shining example of power and intelligence behind a veneer of simplicity.