Waxing Nostalgic: METAL MAYHEM! with Night Ranger, “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me”

By Jeffery X Martin

When did the Eighties really begin for you? I like to think that, if you were alive then, you had a musical moment when you knew that decade was going to be different. Maybe there was some kind of herald, a psychopomp guiding the Seventies to its disco-dug grave, a ray of strange black light that entered your ears and dug into your soul. Maybe you had an epiphany.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Martini Ranch, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?”

By Jeffery X Martin

The Eighties were self-referential as soon as they began, simultaneously creating and copying themselves, everything instantly ironic and dependent on everything else. The determinedly plastic and disposable nature of most American New Wave music showed this better than most things; helium songs, with the fluffy substance of a dandelion spore, floating through the earholes of bright girls with side pony-tails and chunky necklaces.

Cleverly, the band Martini Ranch took this aspect of the genre to task in their 1986 single, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?” The lyrics take a firmly humanistic, proletariat stance. I am a human, I am not a number, yet the demands of the modern work-a-day world keep me from ascending Olympus and becoming the god I am destined to be.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Roger Waters, “5:01 AM (The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Part 10)”

By Jeffery X Martin

Here’s a bit of rock and roll heresy for you on this fine day. I don’t care a whit for Pink Floyd. I believe them to be overexposed, overplayed, and overrated. Their music is the background of every “classic rock” radio station, mostly because of people whose parents were fans, folks who still think it is astonishingly weird and semi-artsy to hear machinery noises and people speaking backwards on a musical record. I don’t think smoking pot has anything to do with it and you don’t need hallucinogens to be bored by Pink Floyd. We have been told for decades that the Floyd is an amazing band, one to be treasured, and we believed it. There must be something in our brains, some incredible desire to hear an open D note, staccato plucked, over and over and over again.

To hell with The Wall, to hell with Dark Side of the Moon, and to double hell with The Final Cut. I am reasonably sure I am not alone in this opinion. I’m also sure the comments section will let me know if I’m wrong.

Here comes the big “but.”

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Waxing Nostalgic: Cliff Richard, “Wired for Sound”

By Jeffery X Martin

I posed a simple question on Twitter to my British friends. “Friends,” I asked, “what is a Cliff Richard?” My friend Sam, who runs a film blog in the UK, answered, “(noun) A type of person, not from The North.” I feel this answer is much funnier if you’re British, which I am not, but Sam’s a good man who has made me laugh before. I’m sure this response is hilarious.

It’s vague, though, and I get the impression the Britons are afraid to speak of him aloud, like he’s some kind of demon. What happens if you say Cliff Richard’s name five times while staring into a mirror? None have lived to tell.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Devo, “Beautiful World”

By Jeffery X Martin

Americans were all primed for the Eighties. It was a decade where something was supposed to happen. Perhaps we all had a touch of Orwellian paranoia, a sense of not knowing which way to lean or who to trust. It was like a great atmospheric pressure swell that needed to break, dark heavy clouds heralding the coming shitstorm. We lived under the constant threat of nuclear war, fearing the goose-step marching of fascists and neo-Nazis down our tree-lined suburban streets. We also went to see The Cannonball Run enough times to make it the sixth highest grossing film of 1981. What were we thinking? Even now, it is hard to believe that anyone needed escapism that badly.

I realize that, if you weren’t there, the Eighties seem shiny and gleeful, like a candy cane on a Ferris wheel. That’s bullshit. Doom and gloom surrounded us and we continued to distract ourselves from it all with whatever we could find. We had to. Nobody wants to wake up every single fucking morning, facing their own mortality! Hell yes, I’ll take that Rubik’s Cube. I’ll play with the colors and make weird geometric designs, whatever, man, just don’t let Reagan push that Big Red Button!

Should we deal with the clear and present danger or should we play with the cool shiny distraction? We’ll take that distraction every time. And why?

We’re devolving.

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Waxing Nostalgic: The Pretenders, “Tattooed Love Boys”

By Jeffery X Martin

We have to talk about sex. I know this makes some folks uncomfortable. I’ll try to be gentle. However, if you are, or plan on, becoming a regular reader of this column (and golly, I hope you do), please realize this is going to happen once in a while. I write about music from the late Seventies and all throughout the Eighties. Those were formative years for me. Music is intertwined with those emotions and those memories. I would be surprised if the same were not true for you (and golly, I hope it is).

For instance: in the year 1980, I was eleven. Sweet, innocent, a little on the chubby side and completely unprepared for what was going to happen when she walked into my life. This woman would both destroy me and make me feel alive. She made me feel things . . . all the things. I had to look up words and ask other people—older people—what her phrases meant.

I’m talking about Chrissie Hynde.

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Music Review: Todd Rundgren, State

By Jeffery X Martin

Todd Rundgren has been making music since before most of us were born. His first solo album came out in 1969. He was huge during the early Seventies, riding the wave of his radio hit “Hello, It’s Me.” He resurged during the early Eighties as not only a musician, but as a video software pioneer. The video for “Time Heals” was everywhere back then. He resurged again in the Nineties, re-inventing himself as the first interactive musician, inviting folks to remix his tracks and play his music with him in his interactive music pod at PepsiStock ’94.

Then he started recording Samba versions of his old songs. This seemed to be a lateral move.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Alice Cooper, “Clones (We’re All)”

By Jeffery X Martin

Oh, my gods, you guys, it’s 1980! There’s robots and test tube babies and shit! The New Wave is here, and guitar strings are quickly being replaced by wires. Dynamic stage shows are becoming starkly lit installations of performance art. Humanoid beings stand behind keyboards bathed in shadow, soundtracking Dystopia before your bionically enhanced eyes. Science fiction is now science fact and music has embraced it, just like they did the Crybaby pedal and the phrase, “Hey now, mama.”

It was a scary time for traditional rock and roll. Normal rock fans were scorned and mocked, gathering in the alleys at night like Morlocks, forced to live on the streets in makeshift shelters composed entirely of Rumours and Frampton Comes Alive! gatefold album covers. If rock and roll wasn’t dead, it was in a coma and we knew, we knew it was serious. We also knew if anyone could save us, it was the Son of Satan himself, Alice Cooper.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Robert Hazard, “Escalator Of Life”

By Jeffery X Martin

As a writer, I am in love with the English language. It’s my tool, it’s my crutch, it is my weapon. While I hate to see the language abused and used poorly, I enjoy it when other creative people grab hold of it and whip it around, make it snap and do things it normally wouldn’t. This usually happens in the area of analogies, similes, and metaphors. And I must admit: I love ’em when they’re bad. If you can take a bad comparison and make it work on your behalf, make it seem credible and acceptable, then you’ve accomplished something. It’s a dubious and weird thing, but a thing, nonetheless.

Let us ponder, then, the most excellent badness of Robert Hazard’s “Escalator of Life.”

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Best Of 2012: Jeffery X Martin

2012 was a better concept than an actual year. Perhaps that’s why the Mayans scheduled it to end early. It’s not the end of the world, but a sincere cry to get on with 2013. This year really was an “everything louder than everything else” year (Prometheus! Avengers! The Dark Knight Rises!) and that much noise makes me want to hide under my bed, which has no frame and sits squarely on the floor.

There were some things I really did enjoy, things that made sense and resonated, above all the yelling that permeated the year.

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