Music, Mullets, & Memories of the Eighties

3,896 words

Come with me on a trip through the past. I’ll season it with a soundtrack if you click on the links, so it will be a bit like a John Hughes movie experience, but with the subject of my less than stellar life some forty years ago. And with even better music, since I picked all of it!

I went to high school in the late 1970s. As I touched upon elsewhere, my American hometown wasn’t a bad place to grow up. I was one of those boys who liked school, at least for the first several years. Then, as you can imagine, from puberty onwards I found myself among the uncool. This ended for a brief period in 1976, when I spread the word to my peers about a newish rock group, Boston. For a short time thereafter, I was considered a musical authority, even though I didn’t play an instrument. But soon Boston and their mustaches fell into uncoolness too, as Punk, New Wave, and Springsteen went on the ascendant. Disco was still a thing, but not for clumsy nerds like me. So I fell back with the hoi polloi where I belonged.

I initially couldn’t wrap my head around Punk. Its attitude and fashion didn’t attract me at all. I suppose it was intentionally repulsive to rubes like me. Maybe some of you can explain:  was it a psy-op? I’m not alone with my suspicions. There’s no doubt that there were pretentious excesses in rock music, which Punk was supposedly reacting against. But I wondered if it was, as we’d say in later lingo, more astroturf than grass-roots.

Our high school vocational curriculum included a TV production program, and one of its students was allowed to choose a song to play each morning to the school, as the daily announcements scrolled across the TV monitors in our classrooms. This was in the days of Pong-level technology, mind you, so it was a big deal to have this fellow student appear for a few seconds up on a screen, and to hear his songs. One morning it was “Just What I Needed” by the Cars. My ears perked up. It was fresh and different, and I liked it. I learned that the Cars were New Wave, and realized that I should give such groups a chance, mustaches or no. When I first heard New Order on the radio a few years later, I was completely hooked.

My high school years flowed by pretty quickly. They were much better than middle school, where I was thrown in with a lot of Diversity. The latter was absent in the “gifted” high school classes that I qualified for. And there were only a few teachers back then who were pushing left-wing madness. Those who did were just out of college. Most of my teachers were fairly sensible, and included a number of war veterans.

By my senior year, I hadn’t settled firmly on what I should do for the rest of my life. How many kids can really do that with any wisdom? Dad thought I should be a doctor, but poking around the various parts of unfamiliar people didn’t appeal. I had always loved history, but the thought of teaching didn’t appeal either. At that time, in the mornings before school, CBS TV showed a series called “Sunrise Semester.” It was actual college professors giving college-level course lectures, and I became interested in its course on ancient Egyptian art. I had also been fascinated with the “Races of Man” article in our encyclopedia set at home, with its illustrations of various phenotypes. So I decided that in college I would major in anthropology, and become either an archaeologist or a physical anthropologist who worked in a lab.

In 1980 I was among the first cohort to register for the military draft, and my friends and I wondered if we would end up fighting in Iran. In the fall, I smugly voted Libertarian in the presidential election. I also started college that year, thinking I knew something about life since I was sure that I knew so much more about it than my parents. Colleges didn’t coddle students as much then, but there was always some adult around to help those who got a bit wide-eyed or homesick, like me. I started out in a grungy, tiny dorm room that I shared with another kid. Fortunately he was a nice guy. He got involved in a college production of Sondheim songs, and I enjoyed hearing him rehearse. I also was staggeringly grateful for my meal plan, which let me eat all the little McDonald’s-style hamburgers that I desired. That itself made college worthwhile.

I was still very much non-cool, though. Preppiness was big at this college, and I had had zero prior knowledge of that, coming from a steel town. I found a few other plebs to spend time with, and one of them talked me into going along with him to my first rock concert, the Grateful Dead, where I tried not to stare too much at the whirling, stoned Deadheads. To my surprise, I enjoyed the improv style of the music, with its blending of rock, folk, blues, jazz, and general Americana, so unlike the Springsteen-Foreigner-Billy-Joel crap that was dominating mainstream rock radio. But for the grace of God, I might have become a real Deadhead myself. Well, there are worse fates. This version of “Althea” captures the Dead doing things their way, with their unique music. I also remember the pot smoke wafting through the crowd, the mass-produced tie-dyed shirts, and all kinds of people present, from clean-cut accountants to lost souls to rowdy types. It was another experience that showed me there was more out there than I knew about. And later I realized that a lot of the preppies weren’t bad sorts after all. Whit Stillman portrayed them so well and poignantly in his 1990 film Metropolitan. Its characters Charlie, Nick, and Audrey were real, and I miss them.

After freshman year, I transferred to a university in a big city, where I learned about bag ladies, taking the bus, backstreet cruising zones for various inclinations, and cult members who accosted you on the sidewalk. In the ’80s, this particular city was a great, exciting place to be for a kid like me who loved culture and history. There were certain neighborhoods to stay out of, but downtown was still nice. A thrifty student could live in a basic, clean apartment in a safe neighborhood—in my case an ethnic Italian one—and walk or cheaply take the bus around for all sorts of interesting amusements.

An old theater in town played foreign and classic American movies every day of the week, and was one of my regular destinations. They gave us students a nice discount. Tree of Wooden Clogs, Das Boot, and Danton, were standouts, in addition to greats such as Gone With the Wind. Do any theaters like that still exist in the western world?

Rocky Horror Picture Show played regularly at another theater near campus, complete with rice-throwing, flashlights, and other rituals. I didn’t get it, but now I can appreciate that sort of communal fun. The main library at the university had a nice collection of classic movies on videotape, and it was a thrill to watch them there using a headset, since not many of us had VCR’s. I was going through a Stanley Kubrick phase, and watched 2001 and Barry Lyndon several times, which cut into my studying time, as you can imagine. In 1986 I saw Blue Velvet in a regular theater and felt numb when it was over. I knew that David Lynch was a force to be reckoned with.

In the early ’80s I got another apartment with some roommates, and we scrounged enough money to get cable TV. This meant we had MTV, which changed our life for better or worse. MTV was in its early days, when it was all music. Along with a variety of New Wave, pop, metal and hard rock, there was of course the novelty of music videos. The “VJ’s” included the cute girl, the trashy but attractive girl, and the hunk. I don’t remember politics being prominent, except in a few songs.

Mom surely wouldn’t have approved of Dale Bozzio’s outfits, or her singing, but dang! Missing Persons could get me moving, even if it was only some frenzied tapping of my feet. Down a musical tangent, I also enjoyed an annual festival in the city that featured European folk music and dancing. There I encountered a cougarish woman who invited me to a local folk-dance gathering, but I ruined my chances with her by stepping on the feet of several participants.

Some New Wave songs and videos had what seemed to be a European flavor, that was very exciting for a kid like me, who had loved European history and culture so much. It was much more interesting than the blues-rock that had long been dominant. Maybe I only imagined it, but as wild and American as Dale Bozzio was, something about her and her group exuded a kind of Euro-weirdness. Was it just LA weirdness? Anyway, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Through high school I had longish hair, but no mustache—that came later. A couple years into college, the hair got longer, which was out of step with the times, but I was inordinately proud of going against the grain. One day I decided my hair needed at least a trim. I had only been to old-fashioned barber shops before. Now, in the big city, I tried a “unisex” hair salon. The guy there talked me into letting him do a cut that he thought would suit me. It turned out to be a mullet. The next time I went home, Dad mumbled something about me looking like an Indian. I guess he had Tonto in mind. That might have been the same visit when I made Mom sad by telling her I didn’t have any heroes anymore. Higher Ed had done its thing on me.

On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb went off in the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut Airport in Lebanon, and 241 American servicemen were killed. The next day, as a roommate and I walked along near the campus, an old man passed us and growled, “Why weren’t you in Lebanon?!” I hadn’t been paying much attention to news at the time. Soon I did. America has been mixed up in that part of the world, to our detriment, for a very long time. At least Reagan pulled our Marines out.

I was never much of a bar person, but there were some local taverns that were fairly low-key where I felt comfortable. I’ve always been an Anglophile, and I would have appreciated some of the old-fashioned British pubs, where dogs felt at home. Bringing us back to ’80s America, a milestone in my life was when I actually got up from my table in a bar and made a semblance of dancing with “Jill,” the very cute supervisor in one of the university libraries. I think it was to “Der Kommissar” by After the Fire, which I had picked on the jukebox. It was a fun evening, but I went home alone as usual, feeling self-pity, and moaning What Have I Done to Deserve This?

Did I mention that I hate rap? I mostly do, but I gained some appreciation for Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” as well as “Der Kommissar.” They sound positively Mozartian compared to later stuff.

Western Civilization still exerted its magic and appeal at my university, in quiet ways. Some buildings were filled with reproductions of Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic art. They made a mighty impression on me. One study area was built in a Gothic style, and that was the first place I went to when I wanted to study outside of my apartment. Not only were the physical surroundings appealing and soothing, but they caused everyone to speak in hushed tones, without any “Quiet” signs necessary.

The siren song of Leftism soon lost its appeal for me—I started hearing it clearly as the shrieking that it really was. Like many, I saw how Leftists treated individuals viciously, while professing to be for “the People.” My Leftist roommates held discussion groups on Howard Zinn’s pseudo-history, and I knew that it was all crap. Students and their faculty enablers built goofy little huts on campus—something to do with protesting Apartheid. It was obviously so much virtue-signaling, long before I ever heard that phrase. By this time, a lot of 68’ers and other leftists were entrenched in faculties, and I tried to navigate around the ones who graded according to their dogma. The anthropology faculty still included some good, scholarly holdouts, but they were on the way out.

As a student, I got a part-time job in the university main library. I was especially drawn to its hoard of history books. There were still thousands of volumes on the shelves that were pre-Political Correctness, and they called my name. As I browsed and read them they pulled me further back into reality. I also grew tired of my modish hairstyle, and went to an old Italian barber to get a traditional short cut. When I went back to my apartment I alarmed my roommates by telling them I had joined the Army.

Except for some leftists here and there, the artsy, bohemian world around campus was good for me. The far-Left hadn’t yet poisoned all of culture, and I found it easier back then to find kindred free-spirits. But things were declining. There were still some good, non-Woke museums to explore, but they were dwindling. AIDS activists were starting to make a big noise, as Milo Yiannopoulos recently described. ACT-UP and Pride Parades were on their way. A homosexual couple with whom I was friends didn’t like these loud developments, and they continued to focus on their own apolitical cultural pursuits.

After getting my bachelor’s degree I floundered around for a while, working at some part-time jobs and not really wanting to go to grad school. When I got my first full-time job, it did wonders. Paying all of my own bills was very satisfying. The job was in the music library at the university and it didn’t pay much, but I could support myself, I enjoyed the work, and was exposed to music that I wasn’t very familiar with. My boss was a scholarly, curmudgeonly older man, completely unlike the feminists who dominated the library profession. He and I got along well. We had a great LP collection of classical, folk, and jazz music, and through borrowing records I developed more of a liking for Wagner and other classical composers. I also learned about contemporary composers, some of whom leaned a bit into rock elements. And I started shifting into “alternative” rock. Other than the low pay, the only negative in the job was that occasionally I had to shush a voice student at a record player, who had broken out loudly into song while listening to an aria with headphones. Not only did I gain self-respect by working at the music library, but it had repercussions for my love life.

I liked some girls in high school, but things didn’t progress much beyond exchanging shy smiles. This pattern continued well into college, despite the supposed liberation of the Sexual Revolution which Professor Devlin has described so well. So “Only the Lonely” was a theme song, as I continued to feel sorry for myself. My first major dalliance was with an older grad student in theater studies, who came into the music library for an assignment. “Theater kids” were maybe a bit different in those days than now, but they lived up to their prior reputation for promiscuity. We talked in the library, we met after work, and she chewed me up, spit me out, and soon went in search of fresh prey. It was a learning experience. The next misadventure was with a quieter female nerd, who liked alternative rock (a little too much, since she ran off with a creepy guy in a hip, local band). My memory is a bit hazy, but I think I was with her when I saw Sonic Youth perform in a trendy bar that was described as a big, smoke-filled shoebox. After she bolted, even my very temporary interest in Einstürzende Neubauten wasn’t enough to win her back, but that was a blessing in disguise. There was more to life than female mavens of particular shades of rock.

Cocaine was big in those days. I didn’t try it, although it was offered to me. I was far from being a moral paragon. I smoked more than my share of marijuana for a while, and it had a very bad effect on schoolwork. Fortunately something within me dragged me away from it. It might have been my parents’ voices ingrained within me. It might have been the beginnings of what G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh both described as God pulling someone back to him with a twitch upon a thread. Or it might have been my stubbornness in wanting to do well academically. Finding and smoking pot was still generally a furtive activity back then. There weren’t cannabis stores in every other small town like there are in parts of North America today. I came to believe that it’s good to force people to be furtive about some things.

One fellow student got sucked into cocaine. “Phil” had an apartment in a building that had been a tycoon’s mansion, built ca. 1900. It was divided up into several units, and was among a long row of beautiful old homes on a street that radiated from the university. Walking by those mansions always revitalized me. One evening Phil invited a few of us to a bull session in his place. I admired the beautiful woodwork and marble in the entryway, stairway and halls, and I gushed over how fortunate Phil was to live in such a place. As we chatted in his rooms, I realized that he had gotten quite paranoid. He was not only convinced that the house was haunted by malevolent spirits, but that fellow students were sabotaging him. My attempts to reassure him didn’t register much.

Speaking of Waugh, surprisingly I missed the great 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited when it was first broadcast. Many years later I read the book and then watched that ’81 series. The latter helped inspire Young Fogeys on both sides of the Atlantic, and both book and series are now among my favorites. The series itself is filled with so much visual beauty that its painful, reminding us of what has been lost. Its soundtrack by Geoffrey Burgon is also gorgeous. The story helped me understand Christianity, and there was much more to its unforgettable Sebastian Flyte than an alcoholic dandy who sported a large teddy bear.

If you had told me circa 1980—me, a devotee at the time of Black Sabbath and Rush—that I would ever willingly listen to music that might be played under the big, glittering disco ball… well I probably wouldn’t have done anything more rude than rolling my eyes and cranking up Ronnie James Dio. I certainly wouldn’t have believed you. I was a sympathizer of the infamous “Disco Demolition” event in Chicago in 1979.

But, within a few years of leaving home, “The Look of Love”, “Be Near Me,” and “Poison Arrow” by ABC were among my faves, along with Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days”. Sometimes change is good, and this stuff was exhilarating. In the ’80s my friends and I were still too nerdy to go to a disco. To be honest we thought we were above it, even though I liked some of the music. Looking back I can understand the attraction more. Stillman’s movie The Last Days of Disco portrays it in an idiosyncratic way, and again with some mostly likeable preppy characters. It also effectively shows the ravages of the Sexual Revolution.

What’s that you say? Something “doesn’t compute” here, as we used to say in the age of Fortran and green-and-white printer paper. How could a metalhead fall for this other stuff?! Well, ABC et al didn’t prevent me from still enjoying Dio and the Doors. Or Wagner, Chopin, Thomas Tallis, and Arvo Pärt. Who says we far-Right racists don’t have broad horizons? One of the joys of Counter-Currents for me was discovering the music of Nick Drake, whom I had never heard of before. Ed Dutton said in a recent Millenniyule that Right-wing males tend to be more tolerant than other groups, so HA!

Many people have noted that stylishness returned in the ’80s, however clumsy some of the attempts were. Don’t think that we artsy types were immune. I remember seeing some local bohemian guys walking around in long, trim dress coats—slimmer than the old-fashioned trenchcoats, and giving off a mystique. When I learned the price tag for those coats, I wondered if there was another way to enhance my outer appeal. At least I could enjoy a bit of style vicariously via ABC and Roxy Music videos.

Ronald Reagan had his shortcomings, but he really did give us a “Morning in America” after the miserable ’70s, which I sensed even during the fogginess of my Leftist phase. But the perennial evils were also present. Later in the decade I had a very violent encounter with Diversity on the city streets. It was a good reminder of what the real world was like. And now that city lies in dust, metaphorically.

I did very well in school, but I didn’t have a lot of STEM skills. I usually tried for jobs that looked interesting, and worked on the fringes of academia for many years. By the time I felt inspired to go back to grad school in history, Political Correctness had taken over, so I decided not to take the plunge. Ever since the ’90s, I witnessed anti-white-male bias rearing its ugly head in my fields generally, particularly in human resources and job hiring. So despite the impression that developed after the recent Jacob Savage essay, this did not all start with the Millennials. Contrary to what Savage says, some of us older white males were not “already established” by 2014. Some of us did “hit the wall” earlier. He’s right that the problem did become more widespread when Millennials were coming of age. I know that finding a decent job is harder now than it was for me.

And for you young‘uns out there, I also know that the dating situation has gotten worse. One quality I was blessed with was persistence. I also didn’t shy away from “office romances,” despite the risks. After various highs and lows, I found a good woman in my dotage. Not that you’ll have to wait that long. There are signs that things are slowly shifting in your favor, as Dutton also mentioned.

So I hope that someone takes comfort from the experiences of an awkward kid who sometimes lost his way, because that kid eventually regained a bit of sense. We sometimes despair at the Normies, Wiggers, and others around us, but if I can come back to reality, others can too.