Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (25 page)

“Thank you.”

“And you know how to freshen a girl’s drink.”

“We’re out of ice.”

She loved ordering me to beat people up for her. She didn’t want me to
mean
it; she just wanted to me to say, sure honey, even though she knew I couldn’t bust the proverbial grape in a fruit fight.

When Renee died in 1997, I could no longer fantasize about beating up people who were mean to her. It was like Lord Byron asked: “Let the object of affection be snatched away by death, and how is all the pain ever inflicted on them avenged?” Good question. After she died, she left her pain in the world, and I couldn’t protect her from it anymore. But then, I never could. I’d come a long way for her. And now I was somewhere new. From the start, I had to realize how helpless I was to protect her from her pain, and the longer we stayed together, the more I felt swamped with awareness of all the bad shit in the world from which I could not protect her.

When Renee had trouble at her day job, she kept a Robin Ventura baseball card on her desk. When steam came out of her ears, she would look at Robin Ventura and think, “Don’t charge the mound. Once you agree to fight, you lost already. Don’t start none, won’t be none.” It calmed her down, reminded her to keep her head. To anybody just passing by her desk, it looked like an innocent baseball card of the White Sox third baseman, a handsome jock, nothing more. But to her, it was a coded message, and it had to do with Robin charging the mound when Nolan Ryan hit him in 1993, and how a pitcher on a mound always has the first-punch advantage and it was a total no-win display of temper, even though he was right. Being right is no advantage in the fight—if anything, it’s a piano on your back, making you pitifully easy to put in a headlock. When Renee would feel her temperature rising, she would whisper the name to herself, “Robin Ventura,” over and over, and usually it would go away. Also, Robin Ventura had a righteous ass, which probably was also partly why she kept the baseball card.

Not being able to protect her from things was the most frightening thing I’d ever felt, and it kicked in as soon as we got together. With every year we spent together, I became more conscious that I now had an infinitely expanding number of reasons to be afraid. I had something to lose. You know the movie
Swamp Thing
? The mad scientist takes Adrienne Barbeau hostage shortly after her topless scene and uses her as bait to entrap the Swamp Thing. When the trap works, the mad scientist gives an evil laugh at the Swamp Thing and says, “The man who loves gives hostages to fortune.”

It was lonely, grappling with all those fears. Did all adult people worry about this? I didn’t know.

One Sunday afternoon, Renee and I ran out of gas in the middle of a fight, driving across Afton Mountain in my sister’s Granada. That car couldn’t claim to have a lot of road-worthy virtues, but it did have a functioning gas gauge, and I really should have noticed that the needle was on empty, except Renee and I were too busy sniping at each other about some topic that seemed incredibly important at the time. I honestly don’t even remember what it was we were mad about. The car stalled out and I nosed into the breakdown lane. We really wanted to sit in the car and keep fighting, but instead, we got out of the car to fight about which one of us would have to walk down the mountain in search of the nearest gas station.

We stood out there on the side of the road, leaning against the car, both of us staring bleakly at the traffic rushing by us. We began to understand how stupid we were to stay together. Neither of us said a word—we just stood there, our shirts flapping in the breeze like a couple of rags tied to the antenna. We were going to have to use our brains, but it was our brains that got us up here, so something else had to get us down. Is there anyone stupider, weaker, more helpless, but especially stupider, than two twenty-three-year-old kids in love?

Not stupid for running out of gas or even for fighting, but for staying together in the first place. That was the first moment I realized how fucked we were. For the rest of my life, I would have reasons to be afraid. I now had something in my blood stronger and meaner than I was. Two people leaning against a ’76 Granada by the side of the road, arms folded, staring at the gravel—this was a posture we could stay in forever, and nobody could protect us from it except each other. Like the Turk says in
The Godfather
, blood is a big expense.

As we stood there, I knew what “hostages to fortune” meant. Love can do whatever it wants to you. And it’s a lot meaner than you are. (And then love starts talking to you the way Kirk Douglas talks to Jane Greer in
Out of the Past
.) It won’t be quick. I’ll break you first. You won’t be able to answer the phone or walk around in your own apartment without wondering, is this it? And when it does come, it still won’t be quick. And it won’t be pretty.

I’m not sure how long we stood there. A car pulled into the breakdown lane ahead of us. It was Renee’s friend Becky from Waynesboro, another paralegal in her office. Becky rolled down her driver’s-side window. “Yooo-hoooo!” she yelled. “Y’all look like you’re in a bit of a pickle.” She laughed a bit, then drove off to get us some gas.

“I’ll be right back,” she hollered before she peeled out. “You two don’t go anywhere!”

It took her about twenty minutes. But she came back with a can of gas from the station down the other side of the mountain. Becky taught me how to open a hood and pour gas from a can directly onto a carburetor, a skill I have never used again. Renee and I didn’t tell her we’d been fighting. Becky probably guessed.

We thanked her and told her we didn’t know what we would have done without her (that was true). She said, “Have a good night,” and we said, “We will” (that was a lie).

We nosed back onto Route 250 in silence and defeat. It took a few miles for Renee to turn on the radio again. I didn’t want to hear it.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too. I just don’t want to talk.”

“Smile?”

“Not now.”

“Come on. You know I love this song. Rox-ANNE!”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“Rox-ANNE!”

Pffff. Teeth still clenched. Slow exhale.

“Don’t leave me hanging from the Roxanne tree, darlin’. RAAAK-ZAAAAN!”

“Put on a red light.”

“That’s it! Rox-ANNNE!”

“Purrron uuuh RED! LYYYYY!”

“Yeah! Roxanne!”

“Purrron uuuh REEEEEH! LYYYYY!”

“Roxanne!”

“You don’t have to PURRRON UUUH REEEH! LYYYYY!”

“Roxanne!”

Miles go by, no red lights at all.

1989

 

 

 

 

Duran Duran celebrated the end of the 1980s by releasing their greatest hits album, which they called
Decade.
This was either their way of making fun of Neil Young, exactly the kind of old-school rock idol they had no use for, or their way of reminding everybody they’d stuck around five times as long as anyone expected. I thought I was Duran Duran’s biggest fan, but I never dreamed they’d still be making hits in 1989.

“All She Wants Is” was their answer to “I Know What Boys Like.” They sang, “All she wants is, all she wants is”—but they wouldn’t say what she wants! Duran Duran knew, they just wouldn’t tell me. That wasn’t fair. George Michael wasn’t coy about what the girl wanted from him (she wanted money) and neither was Billy Idol (she wanted mo, mo, mo). Girls want things—to have fun, to be free tonight, to dance—and that’s the engine that drives pop music. Nobody seemed more sure of what girls wanted than Duran Duran, and that was why I seemed to be still stuck with them. Now that I had a girlfriend, I needed to know more than ever.

It worked. They got my money. I waited in line at Plan 9 Records and spent my nine bucks for the
Decade
tape. That weekend, I took it to a grad-student party as a novelty item, but the hostesses put it on, inflicting it on everyone who showed up. The fact that Duran Duran left “New Moon on Monday” off their greatest hits album made my friends mad, so they pulled their twelve-inch Duran singles from the back of the pile, where they’d been carefully hidden, and slapped the records on. It was a long, sweaty, Duran-filled night.

Listening to it now is like a personally guided tour through my past. Every song is a time capsule full of things that girls want. So I keep listening.

Everybody knows who Duran Duran are, and everybody knows a few of the big hits: “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Rio,” “Planet Earth.” Some people also know the tiny hits, like “New Moon on Monday” and “Hold Back the Rain.” A few of us even made it to Side 2 of the Arcadia record.
So Red the Rose
—now there’s a poetic album title.

There are five Durannies, although some periodically leave the band and get replaced by nobodies. The replacements are never attractive, because the Durannies are too vain to share the stage with anyone as hot as they are.

The Fab Five: Simon Le Bon is the lead singer, the one who wears towels around his neck and had a famous yacht wreck in 1985. He has always claimed Simon Le Bon is his real name. John Taylor is the bassist, and the foxiest member of the group. He did the theme song for the popular film
9½ Weeks
, “I Do What I Do (To Have You),” and starred in the indie film
Sugar Town
. Nick Rhodes is the keyboardist, who is (besides Simon) the only Durannie who has never quit the band. Andy Taylor, the ponytailed guitarist, was the first to quit and go solo. Roger Taylor, the drummer, was the first to quit and not do much of anything.

They first blew into my world in late 1982, when the radio started playing “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio.” I knew these songs months before I saw the videos—from the sheer sound, you could tell this was a whole new thing. They claimed they wanted to combine Chic with the Sex Pistols, and talked in lofty art-school terms about their fusion of punk, funk and glam. They wore makeup. They sang mind-humpingly bad poetry, every word of which I loved.

Oh, those fiendish Durannies, with their bat-shit pretensions and their preening pretty-boy bitch faces. Duran Duran, with their ridiculous feverish poetry about the mysterious Cleopatras who seduced and defanged them every few minutes. They made a lot of enemies as well as lifelong fans. Every time they come back and do a reunion tour, the adult women in my life turn into bobby-soxer battalions.

I’m a hard-core Duran Duran fan. I have followed them through side projects and solo albums. I have listened to every single one of their mediocre comeback albums, even the one that was called
Red Carpet Massacre
. I rented the 1986 movie
American Anthem
, a sensitive love story about two Olympic gymnasts, just because Andy Taylor did the pus-gushingly bad theme song.

Hey, I have my moments when I worry about how much I love Duran Duran. I’ve done things I’m not proud of and frequented chat rooms I won’t visit again. I realize they’re maybe not the most productive group in the world, or the most talented, or the most proficient. But it doesn’t matter. We share secrets, Duran Duran and I. I watched the Live Earth broadcast in 2007 just to see them save the planet. Simon Le Bon told the crowd, “Just coming here is not enough to get what’s got to be done, done . . .
but
. . . if we all sing . . . we might just make a stand, right here!”

And what song did Simon choose to save the planet? “Girls on Film.” That is why he is Simon, and that is why we love him.

Let’s not mince words: Duran Duran are famous because girls like them. If a few boys want to come along too, that’s fine with Duran Duran, they like the color of our money. But we are the fans they do not care about. They don’t need us. They have the girls. They know who keeps them in business.

They’ve always known this, even in their earliest days. In my collection of DD memorabilia, I treasure their 1981 interview with
Melody Maker
. Nick Rhodes announces, “I’ve just worked out why so many more blokes are coming to our gigs this time round.” Why? “Because they’ve heard that so many girls come.”

In most styles of music, there’s a stigma to having this kind of a female audience. When LL Cool J was having his rap battle with Canibus, the deadliest insult Canibus could say was, “Ninety-nine percent of your fans wear high heels.” In part, this is just jealousy, but there’s also some primal male fear involved. There’s the fear that if you have a female audience, male fans won’t touch you, and when the females move on to the next cute dude with a catchy song, you will be broke and lonely.

Of course, it goes the other way too. Ladies love LL Cool J—that’s what the name stands for, “Ladies Love Cool James”—whereas Canibus never had a hit in the first place. LL’s response to the high-heels line? “Ninety-nine percent of your fans don’t exist.”

Simon still sings in the high-pitched yelp of the pop idol. That can be a dangerous thing for a rock singer. It’s an old showbiz truism that a low voice has a longer career than a high voice. Even in the old-time radio days, if you were a lightweight tenor, it meant your audience would be female, and that meant you would have a short run. Frank Sinatra became an idol in the 1940s by crooning breathy love ballads to girls while their boyfriends were off fighting World War II. When the soldiers came marching home, Frankie’s career crashed—until he made his 1950s comeback with his deep new broken-down-by-love voice. Singers with high voices always try to aim deeper. As baritone Bing Crosby told tenor Dennis Day on
The Jack Benny Program,
“Get your voice down here where the money is, kid.”