Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (9 page)

I cradled my head in my hands the whole flight home. The next day, my mom took me and my little sister to the South Shore Plaza to see
E.T
. It had been a huge hit for weeks, but Caroline had waited until I came home so she could see it with me. She must’ve been the only six-year-old in America who would make a sacrifice like that for her jet-lagged big brother. The Saturday afternoon matinee was full of little kids, their parents and exactly one sixteen-year-old boy. It was basically a movie about a sad Muppet who thought he was David Bowie. Caroline broke down sometime during the opening credits. I put my arm around her and kept it there as she wept through the movie. The dialogue was all in English, yet drowned out by sobs, wails, chokes and snarfles. Everybody around me needed a tissue and nobody had one. Like
E.T
., I was home.

1982

 

 

 

 

MTV was, roughly speaking, the greatest thing ever. Everything changed when MTV came to town. All of a sudden, it was like “awesome” was a verb, and we were conjugating it all night long. I awesome, you awesome, he, she, it awesome! We awesome! They awesome! Okay, let’s do the Spanish second-person plural familiar:
Vosotros awesome!

The first time I bit into the M-apple was at my buddy Flynn’s house, where we trouped after school the day he got cable. The first video we caught was the Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty in Pink.” Hey, there’s a rock star walking across a checkerboard floor! Which gets reflected in his wraparound shades. And a mysterious yet alluring lady in a red miniskirt. If only we got to see a mirror shattering in slow motion, this would be the perfect cinematic experience of my young life. Sweet mother of Christ—the mirror! Perfect. I felt like Roddy McDowall at the end of
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
, when he leads the ape revolution in L.A. and announces, “This is the beginning of the Planet of the Apes!” Clearly, the dawn of a new era.

Flynn’s side of town got cable a few weeks before ours, but it wasn’t too long before the fateful hookup on March 16, 1983. I got my driver’s license two days later. Between MTV, wheels and the invention of the Walkman, I had more access to music than I had ever dreamed of. The day after I got my license, I cruised the ’74 Chevy Nova into Boston to go drive around with my buddy Terry just so we could play the radio. Okay, it was just an AM radio, no windshield wipers, no heater and a backseat floor that was completely rotted through. It was a car that had seen better days and crashed into most of them. My mom used to drive this car into the inner-city public school where she taught fourth grade. It still had little dings from all the rocks thrown at it. Her students were so appalled by Mrs. Sheffield’s car, they offered to steal her a Lincoln (much easier to steal than a Mercedes) as this car reflected badly on them. Hey, who cared? At least the
radio
worked.

But the combination of wheels and MTV exploded my musical universe. One Friday night, I drove to the dance in the high school gym, drove back home to watch the world premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video at ten, and then drove back to the dance so I could tell everyone how awesome it was and make my first pitiful attempts to copy that dance at the end.

On MTV, with the world watching, rock stars invented whole new ways to blow fortunes they didn’t have on fire-hazard hair, spandex pants, octagonal synth-drums, keytars, supermodels humping the hoods of foreign cars, and other garishly bad ideas. It was a night town world of bossy girls and swirly boys, animated by computer disco bleeps and the whiff of hair dye and one another’s pheromones. These babes had some battle scars, but they flaunted their scars and called them baubles. Boy George felt self-conscious about his wide hips, so he wore dresses that made it impossible not to notice them, and shook them back and forth, back and forth, turning them into an ornament for his inherent gorgeousness. They put on slap by the shovel-load and wore way too much face for any person’s face to hold.

They knew pop glamour isn’t something you earn by the rules, it’s something you steal and cheat and lie for, so a star like Boy George didn’t have to be conventionally handsome, or conventionally anything. They did evil deeds to get famous, did even more evil deeds to stay there, made their deals with the pop devils. No other genre would have wanted them, but new wave had to take them in because it was the island of misfit toys, with funny-looking people who decided to be gorgeous and boring-looking people who decided to be funny-looking. All these new-wave fashion tarts, all these radar lovers and data pimps and glitter-encrusted sex cookies crept out of my radio and took over my world, breaking on through to the other peroxide and feasting on the virgin sacrifice of my body and soul.

It was all just teenage code for pretending to be somebody else, which is how I spent 99 percent of my waking hours, like any teenager. I would hear a Bananarama song and I would wish there were three of me so I could paint the letters
W O W
on my three asses and then bend over and do the Bananarama dances all day.

MTV had twenty-four hours a day to fill, and they didn’t have enough normal music to play, so they were forced to pad it out with all sorts of abnormal music. So when you tuned in to MTV, you didn’t just see normal music with pictures. Instead you saw there were lots of musicians out there who didn’t buy into the ’80s rock-radio consensus that rock was heavy metal and everything else was disco. You saw how they moved, how they posed, what they thought was cool. You found out what their names were, and what their latest albums were called. Maybe you were hooked, maybe you weren’t—there’d be another video on in a minute.

No doubt, MTV would have rather been playing normal rock, i.e., metal, all along. It certainly played the hell out of Zebra, Triumph and every other dodgy metal act that could be coaxed in front of a camera. But with so much airtime to fill and so little product to plug in, it was forced to play these clowns. And along the way, MTV did something it never planned on doing and most likely never wanted to do—it created a whole new audience. Because lots of us saw these new-wave bands and thought they were the greatest thing we’d ever fucking heard.

Teenage boys love to argue about things. It doesn’t even matter about what—we would argue about baseball, books, politics, whether
Scarface
was the greatest movie of all time or whether that honor belonged to
Vice Squad
. Without MTV to argue about, I’m sure we would have found some other topic to hash out over our meat loaf sandwiches. Who knows—maybe we even would have sat at a table where some girls were sitting. But with MTV exposing everyone to hours and hours of otherwise unavailable music, girls would just have to wait, because there was arguing to be done.

And since teenage boys love to argue about silly shit, my entire high school lunchroom became a daily debate over what was new wave and what wasn’t. Were ZZ Top new wave? Was Billy Idol new wave? Were the Clash punk or new wave? Was Spandau Ballet rock or pop? Was there a case to be made for Duran Duran? Needless to say, Duran Duran inspired the most venomous arguments. But there was always new shit to fight over, because MTV was always blasting new shit.

And all these new rock stars were battling it out for my soul. Joe Strummer (my hero) urged me to fight war and intolerance. Prince (the Joe Strummer of orgasms) urged me to join his sexual revolution. Men Without Hats warned me that friends who don’t dance are no friends at all. Cyndi Lauper advised me to find a bunch of cool girls and follow them around and do whatever they told me to do, because girls just want to have fun and boys without girls are no fun at all. This was a lot of Weltanschauung for one little altar boy to take in.

It can be hard to tell if a song is new wave or not. The debate got pretty intense in certain rarefied circles, e.g., Flynn’s mom’s basement. These debates still rage in the overstuffed and underoccupied crania of those who hold new wave dear. There are, however, a few telltale signs. If it’s a song about shoes, pants or hair, it’s new wave. If they have a funny name, it’s new wave. If the singer is German, it’s new wave, unless it’s the Scorpions. If you think the singer is German, but he’s really not, then that’s an extraordinarily rarefied level of new wave, and probably means a kind of new-wave satori has been reached. For some reason I assumed Peter Godwin was German because of “Images of Heaven.” He sounded totally German, especially because he was pining over a girlfriend who didn’t exist. (Songs about girls who don’t exist? Very new wave.)

I felt vaguely betrayed when I found out Peter Godwin was English, but he also wrote one of my favorite songs on David Bowie’s
Let’s Dance
, “Criminal World.” When you successfully fake being German, and Bowie sings one of your songs, you are probably one of the six or seven most new-wave people on the planet.

If you have a song about nuclear war, you are new wave. If you sing about gay sex and nuclear war, you are Frankie Goes to Hollywood. If you are a hot German chick and you sing about nuclear war, you are Nena. If you sang about starting a nuclear war via making out, you are Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. If you sing about nuclear war
and
girlfriends who don’t exist, you are scoring some serious new-wave points. (Why are you trying so hard, anyway? You must be Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark again!) If you start to sing the word “ass” but change your mind and substitute a drum solo, you are Huey Lewis, which is as far from new wave as you can get.

Sure, all this new wave was pretty silly. Did we care? Nope. We liked it that way. “One cheap illusion could still be divine,” Peter Godwin sang in “Images of Heaven,” and by that theological reasoning, new wave was truly the church of the poison mind.

The elements of a cool video were far more simple: first, you needed a cool song, because if you were Tom Petty, it did not matter how much money you spent on your video, you were always just going to be Tom Petty. A hot girl in the video helped as well. But locations were really important. Guitar heroes had always aimed to sound like they were playing their guitar solos on a mountaintop. Now, you actually could stand on a literal mountaintop, wind whipping in your hair, and play that solo, even if you were the guy from Tears for Fears.

Now that you could play on a mountaintop, or some other stupid place, you didn’t really have an excuse not to, right? Echo & the Bunnymen did their guitar solo on top of a glacier. U2 played their guitars on a mountain in a blizzard. You could play on the beach in Sri Lanka (Duran Duran) or on a desert plain at sunset, like David Bowie in “Let’s Dance,” miming to a guitar solo that was actually played by Stevie Ray Vaughan. David Lee Roth climbed a mountain, but forgot to bring a guitar. Culture Club did “Karma Chameleon” on a Mississippi River steamboat. Their video had a plot. Plots were not very cool. But Boy George’s fingerless gloves? Cool.

Laurie Anderson complained that MTV was all “boys playing guitar in the shower, boys playing guitar on the roof.” But both of those ideas were fairly excellent. Dave Edmunds had a breakthrough with his “Information” video, playing his guitar solo while standing at the urinal. I guess someone had to try it. Bryan Adams was, I believe, the first to attempt rocking out in an empty swimming pool. Aaaaaaand the last.

There was an intense debate in our cafeteria over who would be the first rock star to make a video where he got crucified and sing his latest hit from up on the cross. Flynn thought it would be Ozzy. I argued for Billy Idol. We were both right: it was Def Leppard, in “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak.” (And Joe Elliott had the gall to get himself crucified on a boat, which Rick Allen seemed to be paddling down the River Styx. These dudes left nothing to chance, did they?)

If I’m not mistaken, the all-time standard in the “location, location, location” wars was set by Journey in “Separate Ways,” the one where they went to the lumberyard. Steve Perry sang about his broken heart while clambering over a stack of two-by-fours. Journey walked around the lumberyard feeling sad about their lady love, who (naturally) was right there in the lumberyard, strutting around in her leather miniskirt. How exactly did this girl end up there? Was she looking for her friends? Did they play a prank on her, calling to say, “Yo, Maureen, we’ll all meet up after school at the mall . . . I mean, Curly’s Lumberyard, over by the dock. No, rilly. Lumber’s hot. Wear those cute earrings!”

But the absolute absurdity of the surroundings just made the song better, proving beyond doubt that Steve Perry has no shame as he wails the lines, “We’re caught between confusion and pain! Paaaa-yeeeeen! PAIN!” Who knows, maybe Journey really just liked to go pace around the lumberyard when they needed to sort some shit out. I hope the carpentry community returned their love.

Thanks to MTV, the new-wave virus spread everywhere. Anybody could make a new-wave record, and everybody did when it looked like there was some money in it. I mean, Joe Walsh made a new-wave record. Herbie Hancock made a new-wave record. So did Van Halen, Phil Collins, the Bee Gees, the Who, the Stones, Donna Summer, Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, everybody. Hell, even Dean Martin gave it a go with “Since I Met You Baby.” In 1982, when a whole year went by without a new Police album, everybody tried making fake Police records, from Robert Plant to Rush.

As a new-wave aficionado, I thought that for most of these guys, their new-wave sellout record was the greatest thing they’d ever done. Gino Vannelli, a Vegas lounge singer, made the unbelievably great “Black Cars.” Billy Joel had a number one hit with “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” which inspired Weird Al Yankovic to make fun of him in “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me”: “Now everybody thinks new wave is super / Just ask Linda Ronstadt or even Alice Cooper.” Linda Ronstadt’s new-wave song, “How Do I Make You,” was pretty lame. But Alice Cooper’s “Clones (We’re All)” was really great!