Waxing Nostalgic Connecting The Dots: Depeche Mode, “Black Celebration”

By Jeffery X Martin

The doom and gloom of Eighties music, which arguably began with the appearance of The Smiths (see last week’s article), stayed relegated to the underground for most of the decade. Bands like Bauhaus and The Damned morosely swayed around the borders of the Alternative Nation, not gaining widespread recognition in America until much later. Depeche Mode, a four-piece band from Essex, managed what seemed at the time to be impossible; not only did they gain the respect of the Goths and Gloomers of the time, they also achieved mainstream success through the heavy rotation of their music videos. The reason for this was simple.

They were pretty.

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: The Smiths, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”

By Jeffery X Martin

The Eighties came down like a back alley pummeling. When you’re young and impressionable, looking desperately for things to believe in, you can get caught in a strange whirlpool. Music, movies, and books all swoop down in a tsunami of ideas and perspectives, some totally new, some reinforcing things you already thought. Sometimes, these things simply served to enhance emotions you didn’t know how to express properly, and you find yourself identifying with people and situations you’ve never actually encountered or experienced. There’s a strange ability you have as a teenager to cut through the pretense and the art and find the base emotion, and you inhale it, and it’s like a medicine. It plugs in and builds a bridge between synapses, neuron pathways, and it burns down like acid blood, to a sub-atomic level and you absorb it. It becomes you. You become it.

“Park the car by the side of the road. You should know time’s tide will smother you. And I will, too.”

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: Steve Taylor/Chagall Guevara

By Jeffery X Martin

It’s 1983. I’m in one of my phases of really trying to give Christianity an honest go. I’m in a high school auditorium with hundreds of other Christian youth, watching a band called Petra. I will eventually see this band three times. Petra knows all the tricks. Founder and guitarist Bob Hartman has all the pedals and a basic understanding of the hammer-on technique. Their singer has a four-octave range. He wears a shimmering jump suit. His hair is long and blonde. The amplifiers wobble slightly from the force of volume. Dry ice fog drifts across the stage. Lights blind the audience.

This sucks. It is like a Journey tribute band without the lovin’, touchin’, and squeezin’. The show ends with an altar call. The altar call ends with a reminder that the merch tables will be open for another half hour. Something smells wrong here.

There’s an earnest desperation about mainstream Christian rock. Stylewise, it remains about ten years behind its secular counterpart. If it sounds like Train or Tal Bachman but it’s not, it’s probably a Christian rock song. It wants to be a viable alternative to secular rock. It wants to be uplifting and comforting. By doing so, it becomes bland and ineffective.

There was, however, this one guy . . .

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting The Dots: Jim Steinman, “Bad for Good”

By Jeffery X Martin

Let us now sing the praises of those who have gone previously unsung.

I didn’t get to see my sister, Winter, much when I was a kid. My dad’s daughter, she lived across the river in mysterious Ohio. I would get to see her once or twice a month. After she began driving and discovered the mysterious joys of high-school penis, it was even less than that. She was the one, however, who took me to see not only Purple Rain, but Grease 2. I’m not sure which one made more of an impact. Sure, Apollonia Kotero had amazing breasts, but I still remember all the words to “Reproduction” and “Do It for Your Country” from Grease 2.

Puberty sucks. Everything leaves its mark.

Winter’s musical taste tended towards the progressive and theatrical. I have never known anyone else, even to this day, who has owned a Marillion album. Winter did. She had every Electric Light Orchestra record. She had a love for the concept album that most certainly informed my own. There was one album in particular . . . and we’re getting to it.

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: Pat Benatar, “My Clone Sleeps Alone”

By Jeffery X Martin

Here it is. This is the first LP I ever bought. My first record!

Oh, I had gotten musical gifts before, sure. I got The Stranger by Billy Joel, and I still know all the words to “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” I had a copy of AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. I don’t know where that came from. I don’t remember asking for it. Regardless, there it was in my collection, “Big Balls” and all.

But, this! The first album I chose with my own amazing ten-year-old choosing powers! Empowering! Enlightening! Embiggening!

Women in rock and roll weren’t a new thing for me, even in such a male-dominated genre as Seventies rock. I was familiar with Janis Joplin, of course, and I knew that Blondie was the name of the band, not the lead singer.

But the first time I heard “Heartbreaker” on FM radio, it hit me hard. It was one of the rockingest things on the radio that year, when the airwaves were filled what fools believe and grown men asking if I liked piña coladas. “Heartbreaker” was a much-needed boot to the head.

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting The Dots: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours

By Jeffery X Martin

1977 changed everything. Whether you think of it as The Year Punk Broke or The Year Star Wars Came Out, 1977 flipped the game, changed the rules, and destroyed the playing field.

It was released on February 4, 1977. I don’t know precisely when Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours entered the household, but once it was there, it seemed like it always had been. It settled in, immediately becoming part of the fabric of the house. It was the aquarium. It was the faux brick finish in the kitchen. It was “Second Hand News.” It was the green shag carpet. We put the album on, made it a pot of coffee, and sat down around the kitchen table for donuts, gossip, and “Gold Dust Woman.”

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: Kansas, “Carry On, Wayward Son”

By Jeffery X Martin

I grew up listening to the Moody Blues, so I was no stranger to pseudo-mysticism and lyrics that some people would consider “heavy.” In third grade, I knew what The Lost Chord was. I understood revolution in the streets as well as how to call occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary, craft. Was I a weird kid? Were all pre-teens in the Seventies like that?

Maybe we were all weird kids, regardless of when we were born.

Carry on, my wayward son . . .

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting The Dots: Al Stewart, “Year of the Cat”

By Jeffery X Martin

At the age of eight, I stopped hearing music and began actively listening to it. Matching artists with their music became a thing of great importance. I needed to know lyrics. I began learning the names of everyone in a band, not just the attention-hogging lead singer. It was the next phase in becoming a real music fan. I wanted to listen to as much music as I could, as many different kinds as possible and all of it, faster than now.

At that age, I developed more fears than I conquered. There were certain songs that, for reasons difficult to pinpoint and harder to explain, scared me. My abandonment issues and fear of sounds in the night were blooming like nightshade. My love of music corresponded with that and mirrored it. Good thing I didn’t collect creepy porcelain dolls.

This brings us, strangely enough, to Al Stewart’s seven-minute pop opus, “Year of the Cat.” The song is a weird fusion of smooth jazz and progressive pop. The lush orchestration belies the stark piano part that takes the spotlight shyly, almost with embarrassment. This is secret music, played from far away.

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting The Dots: Mary MacGregor, “Torn Between Two Lovers”

By Jeffery X Martin

1976 was the year of America’s 200th birthday. We walked smugly around our little town in ugly red, white, and blue shirts. We shot off fireworks while Europe rolled its eyes and told us to stay the hell of its lawn. Jingoism, patriotism, and parades were the order of the summer. Eagles and sno-cones, commemorative quarters and flags, colors that refused to run. We picnicked under the shadow of thousands of unseen missiles, our thin windbreakers and bravado enough to shield us from the chill of the Cold War.

As fall crept in and the charcoal grill fires slowly died, something insidious began to snake its way through the country. I see it now as a virus, its simplicity masking its evil intent. By the time winter rolled around, we were all infected. We wouldn’t be the same for years.

You know what 45s were, right? They were like full-length vinyl records, except they were singles. One song per side, and they had to played at a faster speed then LP’s, for reasons that I don’t know enough science to fully comprehend. The first 45 I ever bought was Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers.” I was seven years old.

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: Maria Muldaur, “Midnight at the Oasis”

By Jeffery X Martin

When the Sixties ended, they made a noise like a whoopee cushion. Peace and love were replaced with polyester and The Sierra Club. Even The Beatles said to hell with it and bailed out before the Seventies really got rolling. A lot of people got tired of Serious Rock, and in response to the backlash, the music business gave us a lot of bubblegum pop. It was sweet and nice with nary an iota of substance. We got lots of one-hit wonders this way.

The first time I remember hearing “Midnight at the Oasis” was in a hair salon. I was waiting for my mother to get whatever the hell she was getting done, done. I was five years old. I could already read at a high school level (math was a different story), and I had already flipped through all the magazines that interested me. The hairdressers were yammering on about what pains in the asses men were. Hairdryers hummed away.

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