Gargoyle Sox and That Song

Posted in Music, Pop Culture Holy Grail |

By Less Lee Moore

Anyone who’s discussed music with me at length knows about the box of dusty old tapes I’ve kept since I was a teenager. Back in the day, when my music taste was heavily informed by WTUL New Orleans, I would spend hours taping songs from the radio. In fact, I didn’t buy a whole lot of albums at that point because buying blank tapes gave me more bang for my broke teenaged buck.

After moving across the country a few times, I eventually condensed this collection of what used to be almost a hundred tapes to about thirty of them. Many of them don’t even have cases, meaning they don’t even have track listings. Yet, I’ve heard them so many times that I can name at least five songs off each one just by looking at the tape. (One, a blue cassette of Barry Manilow Live, was painted over with silver paint pen and just thinking about it reminds me of Bronski Beat and Cabaret Voltaire.)

Another has a reconfigured recipe label on it to cover whatever was on it before and this is one that has That Song I Really Like But Have Never Known Who Sings It.

Part of the problem was that the DJ who played the song was ending his shift and never stated who the artist was or what the song was called and didn’t tell the next DJ, either. Plus, he’d forgotten to change the RPM speed from the previous song before he put this one on. This resulted in the first 1/3 of the tune being veeerrrrry slllloooowww and warped, thus making it that much more difficult to identify.

I started playing the song on this tape for people in the early ’90s, when I was attending the University of California in Santa Barbara, but no one could identify the song. For the next ten years, whenever I’d meet someone who seemed to have a deep knowledge of 80s music—particularly of the Goth persuasion—I’d play the song for them, each time hoping they’d know what the hell it was. I actually liked the song (at least the part that was normal speed) and it drove me batty not knowing who or what it was.

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