The Underplayed (Part Three)
The B-52s. Elvis Costello. Night Ranger. Duran Duran. The Moody Blues.
When you attend as many gigs as we Gen X dawgs do, sometimes you’re bound to impulse buy tickets for a rando gig, perhaps not one of our favorite bands, but a cultural flashpoint dealio nonetheless. Such was the case for several of these bands we’re touching upon today.
The Moody Blues. Meh. I know, I know! Why I am writin’ about ‘em if I don’t particularly care for them? Look, I realize the white satin knights are a divisive taste. Some people worship them, others burn the band members’ effigies outright. It might surprise some loyalist Show readers to learn your webbie isn’t really a progressive rock sorta fella. Sure, his second favorite band of all time is Rush, but he’s of the op-ed that Rush are their own animal, part rock, part prog, part pop, part uniquely Canadian nukepunk.
Yet most all the rest of the progfathers, outside of Genesis and Peter Gabriel? Pink Floyd, Yes, Dream Theater, King Crimson? Blaggh. (I make a hard exception for Yes’ seminal record 90125, a coming-of-age record for your webbie that still stands the test of time). The Moody Blues are admittedly a shallower end of the prog pool, and they went pop later on, but I attended one single show of theirs during their latter day career in the mid ‘oughts, and well, let’s just say I was underwhelmed. But I’m not a core fanboy. Honest to gods, I knew exactly one Moody Blues song from memory, and yes, it was Knights in White Satin. I appreciate their earned role in the pop culture lexicon, and that’s where my Moodie fanship ends.
I have a distinct recall of Elvis Costello’s Watchin’ the Detectives playing over and over and fucking over, sometime in high school under the influence of too many bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth beer and low grade stems and seeds brick weed. I was in some kid’s basement or a college apartment, and I remember staring at the infamous blue poster of Paulina Porizkova’s Playboy swimsuit cover shoot, a nearby pool table leaning on its side, its felt ripped to shreds, and a whole bunch of passed out brethren sleeping on the floor…and Costello’s Detective anthem playing on repeat. Everyone was too wasted to deal with changing the record EP on the turntable, including me. Yes, I’m old enough to remember active vinyl.
I like Costello’s tunes. I’ve seen him twice in concert, once a solo acoustic gig at the Arlington Theater here in town, and another time when he and the Imposters opened for the Police at the Hollywood Bowl in 2008. I enjoyed his sets, but I admit, the supposed rumors about his social lenses might’ve made my filters more discerning. He’s used racial slurs from time to time, and while he stopped playing his hit Oliver’s Army because he used a racist slag for Irish-Catholics in its lyrics, he’s still of that old school British generation that struggles in their old age to reconcile the sociological trappings of their past. Eric Clapton and Van Morrison suffer from the same elder statesman affliction, what with their racist horseshit and anti-vaccine stances. Even my favorite Stones Glimmer Twins Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sometimes find it difficult to overcome their inabilities in reconciling past and present (though they too, retired their fairly racist track Brown Sugar, something Stones fans continue to mourn). Important to note, it’s not an absolute impossibility for the old guard to let go of their less-than-chivalrous beginnings. McCartney and Plant seem to do just fine in that regard.
Night Ranger is probably my one guilty pleasure when it comes to glam metal. Full disclosure, I only bought that cassette tape at Tower Records because I thought their debut title Dawn Patrol and its bitchin’ dystopian album cover were cool. Yup, I went with aesthetics, hack metal wannabe notwithstanding. Turned out, on that first record at least, the San Franciscan five-piece made a pretty good go of it, with bassist Jack Blades’ impressive vocals and Alan Fitzgerald’s keyboard finesse, but their bedrock lay in the stellar showmanship and techniques of guitarists Brad Gillis and Jeff Watson.
To this day, whenever their anthem Don’t Tell Me You Love Me comes on the radio, usually courtesy of Sirius XM channel 39’s Hair Nation, the tandem duel of guitar solos between Gillis and Watson is something I crank up to eleven every time, literally since I was 12 years old. It’s probably my most air-guitared piece ever, rivaling my favorite Van Halen songs. Their most beloved track is of course Sister Christian and I can’t stand it. The consummate hair ballad. Yuck. I was no fan of any of their future works after Dawn Patrol. Just the one and done. I’ve seen ‘em twice only in opener capacity, and they were great, but I was listening solely for Dawn Patrol tracks.
I finally had the chance to see Duran Duran, after all those high school days of glory and the endless swooning of my female classmates over Simon LeBon. A big part of my motivation was, again, the lure of truly underrated axe man Andy Taylor. LeBon and Taylor were more front and center for onset 80s zeitgeist than George Michael, and, uh, the other guy, in Wham! They created some of Gen X’s most signature riffs and anthems, including Rio, Hungry Like the Wolf, Girls on Film, The Wild Boys, and Save a Prayer. Me, my favorite Duran Duran track was always A View to a Kill, the title soundtrack song to Roger Moore’s shittiest Bond flick. That actually changed, when in 2004, they dropped a new single called (Reach Up For The) Sunrise, and I think it might be Duran Duran at their finest moment, a weird thing to conclude indeed after all those 80s hits. I went to that show at the Bowl in 2008 almost solely to hear Sunrise live. Lucky me, they closed with it, and it was fantastic.
But what touchstone I really want to herald today are the B-52s.
I friggin’ LOVE the B-52s!
They’re quite the contradicting force when it comes to seminal eighties New Wave. Some folks idolize them, like me, some folks can’t stand them, like virtually every single one of my high school and college clan metal hard rock buddies. Conversely, I’ll note most all those same metalheads loved Oingo Boingo and I never quite understood why the leap from Boingo to the B-52s was too big a distance for them, save for one rudimentary possibility. Back then, in the Reagan and early Clinton eras, it was frowned upon to fanboy over any icon rumored to be gay, and Fred Schneider was one of the first openly gay pop singers, backing LBGTQ rights since the late seventies. You can’t imagine the despair of too many of my core metal pals when Rob Halford of Judas Priest came outta the closet.
Me, I thought it was stupid to alter your playlist just ‘cause someone or another was gay, or bi, or trans. I never cared one iota about my preferred cultural icons’ sexuality, or gender identification, or really anything sociological whatsoever, as long as they weren’t racist. (Clapton’s a serious dick in that regard, thusly have I avoided attending any shows from one of the world’s most talented guitarists of all time).
I surfed a good deal of the New Wave wave, so to speak. The Cars. The Police. Depeche Mode. Devo. Talking Heads. INXS. Yet my deep dive into the B-52s was entirely based on repeated exposure, thanks to a certain young lady I met in my high school years while I was exploring the theater side of the humanities. It might not shock you that 80s drama geeks were into the B-52s. That girl I knew worked part-time after school at a local ice cream shop and was one of the first people I met in our small town redneck of the woods who was a true legit alternative counter-culture hipster, with her cotton candy pink or electric blue dyed hair, her distressed overalls, her sandals, her outspoken views on the patriarchy and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and the world at large, her love of the Wizard of Oz, Clockwork Orange, Monty Python, and Catcher in the Rye.
Naturally her musical leanings were reflective of her alternative standings, ranging from The Smiths to Siouxie and the Banshees to yes, the fucking Moody Blues, and most of all, the B-52s. She was aces. Carla, if you ever stop by here to dive into the Substack depths and read this, I owe you a great debt of gratitude, for many things, not the least of which was free ice cream scoops, as well as being the only underground shoulder on which to weep when circumstances were too taboo for all the other rednecks about us. The trio of Fred, Cindy Wilson, and Kate Pierson provided a constant soundtrack whenever I hung out with her and her eclectic posse, most notably the first night I hooked up with my childhood sweetheart.
We were lounging in Carla’s VW van outside her folks’ apartment, about five or six of us, smoking cloves and drinking a lot of apricot brandy and Bartles and James wine coolers. I mentioned I grew up in the 80s, did I not? :) Me and my soon-to-be girlfriend were lying on the van’s floor, huddled up in a bulging, economy-sized bean bag . It may have been the 80s, but Carla and her beanbag-furnished, shag-carpeted VW van were decidedly 70s in flavor. We spent hours whispering to one another our mutual background stories of parents and school and friends.
Eventually everyone else passed out, and that’s when we first kissed, blossoming into a full blown make-out and heavy petting session that, I shit you not, lasted from 3 AM ‘til sunup, only taking breaks to flip the tapes in the cassette boombox aside us, which as you’ve surmised, were the first two B-52 records, the self-titled debut and Wild Planet.
Planet Claire, Rock Lobster, Private Idaho, Quiche Lorraine, Strobe Light. I can recite those songs verbatim, so prevalent they were in my first two years of high school. A lot of the mainstream knows them through their latter day era songs Love Shack and Roam, and those are great, but if I’m diggin’ late stage B-52s, I’m going with Mesopotamia, a kickin’ tune reminiscent of the vibe on Wild Planet.
I saw ‘em live twice, both times at my local Indigenous casino venue, and they brought the ‘wave-punk funk both times. I am seriously considering attending their co-bill this fall with Devo at the Hollywood Bowl, one last dance-jam with the power trio from Athens, Georgia.
Yes, I dig the B-52s because of a foundational sentiment crafted in the fires of young love and teenaged angst.
I’m gonna guess you’ve done the same, in some regard, with some artist.
Let me kiss your pineapple!!
