Stop the world I want to get off (and melt with you)

My friend Kammy gets free VIP tickets to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga through her work, and she recently asked me what I’d like to go see there for my birthday. I took one look at the list of upcoming acts and said, “Whatever is most convenient for you, Kammy.” That’s how I wound up at the top of that mountain at the “Lost 1980s” gig  on the hottest day ever recorded in the Bay Area, with Kammy, her husband, her father, her 11 year old and her 11 year old’s ASL teacher.

The music of the 1980s means a lot to me; it’s probably my most important era, but to the Mountain Winery, the”Lost” 80s doesn’t mean Dumptruck, the ‘mats and Mission of Burma, it means British synth pop and American New Wave. In the course of several hours at the top of that mountain, we saw the Flirts, the Motels, Naked Eyes, Wang Chung, Berlin and Missing Persons – in short, it was like we got jammed inside a radio set to KROQ circa 1983. In my memory, that kind of music – synth pop – didn’t get played all that much on the radio, but maybe I am mis-remembering, since a lot people in that audience acted like Wang Chung was Bob Dylan.

The guy in wang chung. Forget his name. Note dumb guitar.

As for me – I used to be a rock critic and I was completely unable to recognize any of the bands when they came on stage. 1980s new wave seems to be where my memory is going fastest.

Wang Chung was especially puzzling. What songs did they do again? I had to look them up on Wikipedia, and it said it was named for the phrase “yellow bell” in Chinese.

“It says here that Wang Chung means ‘yellow bell’ in Chinese,” I told Kammy, who is Chinese. She and her family consulted with one another for a while. No it doesn’t, was the consensus. 

So much for Wikipedia.

Those bands aren’t exactly worthy of a ton of sentient thought, but the show did give me a chance to reflect on two aspects of the 1980s I hadn’t thought about in a long time, namely, changing music technologies and the wretched “women in  rock” narrative that first reared its ugly head at that time.

Regarding the technology, suffice it to say that the evening was awash with synthesizers, saxophone, and those funnily shaped guitars, and boy do they sound old fashioned now! Sonically, they gave off the same whiff of moth balls that the men’s black peg leg pants and red tennis shows, skinny ties and – in one case – a slender silk scarf did.

Second, women. It was an era when a lot of that kind of music was made by men and sung by women.  Both Dale Bozzio, of Missing Persons, and Martha Davis, of the Motels, are in their mid 60s, and what I learned from watching them was that, as an aging woman in rock, you are supposed to wear a really large coat over your aging lady body, even if you’re a former Playboy Bunny, like Bozzio.

Dale bozzio. Big jacket

Come to think of it, I recall feeling infuriated at Bozzio’s bunny status, this being pre-3^rd wave feminism (!); the sight of her prancing around in a see through raincoat on MTV used to bother me, especially when male critics would justify it by saying, “but she used to sing with Zappa!”

The thing is, thanks to 3^rd Wave Feminism, I am no longer angry at her over that, because I no longer consider it to be her own fault. I still hate Berlin’s song “Sex. I’m a…” (“I’m a slut! I’m a geisha! I'm a little girl!” etc. etc.) but I can at least acknowledge that both Bozzio and Nunn were pretty good singers, indeed, last week they were far superior performers to the men in Wang Chung and Naked Eyes.

Still. Let’s face it, Dale Bozzio and Terri Nunn DID have a dampening effect on women’s role on MTV and subsequently in music – before them, you could be Christie Hynde, Patti Smith, a B-52; after, you had to boob it up all over the place. Honestly, the history of MTV and TV in general never ceases to remind me of that book “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart, in which kids in kindergarten are made to watch pornos and teenage girls wear jeans with cut outs over their crotches. Remember Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke? It feels that directional.

After Berlin, my friends and I decided to leave. It was a long way down the mountain and Cutting Crew and Spandau Ballet were not a good exchange for the giant traffic jam that was about to occur. But then, I was never going to wang chung, not that night, or any other. Later I posted a lot of nutty stuff about the night in twitter, and  people on social media suggested to me that they didn't actually like the music of the 1980s, that it was 'the worst time' for music. But I don't know about that. Sometime around New Year’s Eve of 1989, I was asked to appear on channel 2 news to comment on the music of the 1980s. For me, the 1980s meant REM, the Replacements and rap, but to the news station it meant Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson. Neither of us were exactly right, or rather, both of us were.

That night back in 1989, I remember, in honor of the decade changing into the 90s, Isabelle and I put on new romantic blouses and teased our hair up like Robert Smith of the Cure in memoriam of that style. We had, at that moment, already heard Nirvana’s “Bleach” – as well as De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising” --  and we were about to plunge, like human knives, into the heart of grunge and rap. The 80s were indeed long since lost to us at that moment. I would be happy as hell to recover them, but I have a very different playlist going in my head, and I bet you do too. What would be your idea of a great 'lost 1980s' bill?