1984-1986

Tim by the Replacements--one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

As I’ve alluded to in previous posts, for me personally the years 1984-1986 represented a massive transition in my musical tastes.  These years straddle my graduation from high school (in June 1985) and starting college.  To me its interesting to look at some of the albums I bought in 1984 and early 1985 and compare them to what I bought in 1985 and early 1986.  In 1984 I was still pretty heavily immersed in the sound of English new wave.  My favorite music was synth band new wave dance music and poppy mod/ska.  In addition to getting into Depeche Mode big time (see below), I also bought albums/12 inch singles by Bronski Beat (“Why” and “Smalltown Boy” were HUGE in the teen dance clubs that year), OMD (ditto with “Locomotion” and “Tesla Girls”), and the Psychedelic Furs (ditto again for “Heartbeat” but I also liked “The Ghost In You” and “Heaven”).  1984 was the year the English Beat broke up and Dave Wakeling and Rankin’ Roger formed General Public and released All the Rage. 

I also made occasional forays into English post-punk; for example, in 1984 I bought The Top by the Cure (I liked the song “Caterpillar”), Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen (I loved, and still do, “Silver”, “Crystal Days”, the psychedelic drug haze of “Thorn of Crowns”, and “Seven Seas”, but curiously was not particularly fond of what most people consider the best track on this album, “The Killing Moon”), Icicle Works’ eponymous debut album and Hatful of Hollow by the Smiths. 

Like all teenagers, I was also heavily influenced by regular pop:  I liked, and bought on cassette, Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA, Purple Rain by Prince, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Reckless by Bryan Adams (I still love “Run To You” and “Summer of ‘69”) and Berlin’s Love Life in 1984, and in 1985 I continued this by buying Centerfield by John Fogerty and No Jacket Required by Phil Collins (I loved “Long Long Way To Go” and “I Don’t Wanna Know” but hated “Sussudio” and “Don’t Lose My Number”).

1984 was also the year I discovered Depeche Mode:  it was the year when I was really into the new wave dance clubs up in LA and first heard the industrial clang of “People Are People”; in spring of 1984 I bought the singles compilation of the same name, which introduced me to other Mode classics such as “Everything Counts” (still one of my favorite songs by them), “Told You So”, “Get the Balance Right”, and “Leave In Silence”.   In late 1984 Depeche Mode released their album Some Great Reward, which was my absolute favorite album that year.  For some reason their mix of pop, yearning love songs, and industrial clamor just really appealed to me.  My favorite song was “It Doesn’t Matter”, which combined all three of these elements as Dave Gahan croons a sweet testimonial to the evanescence of love while the music clangs and twitters prettily behind him. 

In 1985 Depeche Mode released a second compilation, Catching Up With Depeche Mode, and even though I already had most of the songs on it, I (and everyone I knew at my high school) bought it anyway because it contained their most recent single, “Shake the Disease”, which, similar to “It Doesn’t Matter”, is a delicate love ballad layered with chiming industrial backing.  I eventually bought the 12 inch extended remix of this on cassette at an import record store (I think it was Zed’s in Long Beach). 

In 1986 Depeche Mode released their followup to Some Great Reward, Black Celebration, on which they continued to meld baldly confessional romantic lyrics to industrial beats.  The title song ,  “Fly On the Windscreen”, and “Stripped” are perhaps Mode’s apotheosis of industrial sounds—they came close to their heroes Test Dept. and Einsturzende Neubauten here.  The intro to “Black Celebration” is the most beautiful melding of industrial synth play they’d done since “People Are People”.  But much of the album is in the mode of the simple ballad “Somebody” off Reward:  “Sometimes”, “Here Is the House”, “World Full of Nothing”.  The album ends with “But Not Tonight”, which I considered then (and still do now) to be one of their finest, most hopeful songs, a perfect optimistic counterpart to the depression and gloominess of “Black Celebration” and “Fly On the Windscreen”.   

But Black Celebration was my final Depeche Mode album; while I’ve respected their longevity and their forays into more conventional rock with albums like Violator and Music For the Masses, by the summer of 1986 I was going in my own musical direction.  As I mentioned in a previous post, sometime around 1983-1984 I watched the movie “The Decline of Western Civilization” on videocassette and soon after bought the soundtrack on cassette.  This was the first music I bought that can truly be considered punk (aside from my early purchases of the second and third Blondie albums, which many people don’t consider true punk anyway).  Initially I bought it for the belligerent antics of the group Fear, who made the biggest impression on me and my friends from the movie with their confrontational stage style.  But more and more I started listening to the other songs on the album, particularly the tracks by the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and the by-then defunct Germs. 

My second-ever true punk musical purchase was 1984’s Change Today? by the seminal punk band T.S.O.L.  T.S.O.L. were from Long Beach and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing “T.S.O.L.” spraypainted on walls or adorning black leather jackets.  In those days punk bands sprouted up around local beach communities and developed an almost gang-like devotion from their local adherents; bands like China White and the Blades, both from Huntington Beach, had similarly devoted fans.   At around this time I also purchased Sleep In Safety by the horror punk band 45 Grave. 

So as 1984 segued into 1985, my musical tastes were shifting form cutesy danceable new wave more and more to harder, more authentic punk.  But two albums in particular marked my permanent entrance into the world of post-hardcore American punk and independent music:  Zen Arcade by Husker Du and Tim by the Replacements.  I’ve already discussed Zen Arcade in a prior post, and how it blew me away with its sprawling ambition and incredible diversity.  Tim did the same exact thing for me; I still believe this is one of the greatest albums of the 80’s and of all time.    I was absolutely astounded by how good this album was.  What was even more astonishing is that it knocked my socks off even though at that time I had almost no appreciation for rootsy hard rock, which was what formed the basis of this album.  Like the Rolling Stones, the Replacements were well versed in musical Americana, and Tim showcases their explorations of everything from blues to folk to country.  There’s really not a single bad song on this album, but the highlights to me are “Hold My Life”, “Kiss Me On the Bus”, “Dose of Thunder”, “Bastards of Young”, “Left of the Dial”, and “Little Mascara”.  This was music to get drunk to, to get in a bar fight to, but also to cry in your suds to.  The emotional range was just astounding.  I can still remember the cassette of Tim taking up almost permanent residence in my mom’s Ford Capri when I borrowed it. 

It was around this time that I was also exposed to another seminal SST band, the Minutemen.  I saw the video for “King of the Hill” from their 1985 EP Project: Mersh and was shocked by the jazziness and funkiness of their sound.  I also loved their 40 second blast through Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” off their massive and highly touted Double Nickels on the Dime double album.

As mentioned in my post on SST bands, 1985 also brought me exposure to two other SST bands reaching their creative peak at this time:  in fall 1985 I saw the Meat Puppets in concert supporting their album Up On The Sun (their breakthrough album, Meat Puppets II, had been released in 1984).  While I never became a huge, rabid fan (probably because I’ve never been a huge fan of country music, and at this point the MPs’ music was very countrified, particularly live), I always respected them and their eclectic desert mix of punk, country, and psychedelia.  Instead it was Black Flag’s Slip It In that really cemented my love of American post-hardcore punk.  The looping, twisting, feedback-drenched solos Flag guitarist Greg Ginn unleashed (in combination with the roaring power chords) on the title track and “Black Coffee” blew away the last vestiges of my interest in English new wave and put me forever on the punk path. 

Several other releases I purchased in 1985 and early 1986 were along these same lines.  In 1985 Plan 9 released the Misfits retrospective Legacy of Brutality; this is still my favorite Misfits album and another album I consider the best of all time.  Also in 1985 the Jesus and Mary Chain released their amazing debut Psychocandy.  Its hard to convey how influential this album was at the time, but now looking back I see it as a real landmark.  Their mixture of sweet love song lyrics over feedback-drenched atonal music was really nothing the Velvet Underground hadn’t been doing in the 60’s, but in 1984-1985 the influence of the Velvets was arguably at its nadir.  Indeed, it was only with the release of the post-Velvets compilation VU that the Velvets returned to the musical map.  For people like me, it was primarily through the influence of bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain that I got into the Velvet Underground at all.  Just as important, J&MC also set the stage for a staggering array of followers, everything from the tortured wah sprawl of Dinosaur Jr., the art damage of bands like Sonic Youth and Big Black and Scratch Acid, to the 90’s indie shoegazing pop of bands like My Bloody Valentine and Blur. 

Another hugely influential 1985 release by an English band was Love by the Cult.  The fusion of post-punk musical mannerisms, intense, Doors and Stooges influenced psychedelia, and hard/arena rock was an absolute revelation.  I can remember “She Sells Sanctuary” being one of the hottest singles in the summer of ’85.  But so many songs on this album are outstanding, including “Nirvana”, “Big Neon Glitter”, “Love”, “Hollow Man”, and my all-time favorite Cult song, “Rain”.  In a year or two the Cult would move more forcefully in the metal/hard rock direction and release their under-rated followup, Electric, and the less well regarded Sonic Temple (wherein their metallic tendencies coalesced into stereotype). 

And 1986 saw the release of the Cramps masterpiece, A Date With Elvis.  This was another album that was HUGELY popular with me and my friends; its mix of punk and rockabilly and the raunchy, sex-drenched lyrics were incredible.  Side one of that cassette—“”How Far Can Too Far Go?”, “The Hot Pearl Snatch”, “People Ain’t No Good”, “What’s Inside a Girl?” and “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog”?—is still my favorite stretch of Cramps songs of all time.  Ivy’s guitar never sounded better than on “Hot Pearl Snatch”, and “What’s Inside A Girl?” might be the best x-rated rockabilly song ever recorded.

By early 1986 I too was moving in a more metallic direction musically myself.  It started when I got into English hardcore by buying Midnight Madness and Beyond by G.B.H. and Totally Exploited by the Exploited.  This was arguably as extreme as I got on the hardcore punk end of things in the day.  But these bands, like many 80’s punk-influenced bands, were now starting to incorporate more metallic aspects into their sound, and indeed the whole genre of crossover/thrash was emerging at around this time.  It was because of my love of these albums that I bought the first heavy metal album of my life:  Ride the Lightning by Metallica.  I’d read a couple of articles on Metallica, who were starting to achieve a major buzz as a support act on Ozzy Ozbourne’s 1986 tour.  In the article both the writer and the band discussed the influence of bands like the Misfits, Black Flag, G.B.H., Discharge and the Exploited on Metallica’s sound.  Deeply curious, I went and bought a Metallica album, but unfortunately for me I chose their heavily Iron Maiden-influenced second album, Ride the Lightning.  To me I could hear absolutely nothing punk about their music, it was pure heavy metal to me, and I basically put it away for a year or so, when I could better appreciate it.  I DID end up appreciating it a lot but I often wonder what might have happened if I’d started with their MUCH rawer and more punk influenced first album, Kill ‘Em All, which I didn’t end up buying until 1988 or so. 

In recent years the 80’s have undergone a renaissance of sorts.  For awhile there was a general feeling that the vapidity and greed of the Reagan years was reflected in music that was slick, over-produced and banal.  This is undoubtedly true for pretty much all 80’s hair metal, which represents a low spot in the history of rock.  And even a couple years ago NPR had a show about music where the guests debated whether the 80’s were the worst musical decade of all time, where many admittedly terrible musical crimes were presented as evidence, including “We Built This City” by Starship, “Broken Wings” by Mister Mr., and so forth.  Yes, these truly were awful songs by awful bands, but I would argue that every decade has its high points and its low points.  And to me, the mid-80’s saw a true plateau of musical high points.  Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, Tim by the Replacements, Black Flag’s Slip It In, Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen, Up on the Sun by the Meat Puppets, Psychocandy by the Jesus and Mary Chain, Reckoning by R.E.M., Love by the Cult, and a Date with Elvis by the Cramps (as well as Project: Mersh by the Minutemen, In My Head by Black Flag, Flip Your Wig by Husker Du, Meat Puppets II by the Meat Puppets) all represent to me the pinnacle of 80’s music and reflect my own conversion from cutesy new wave dance and novelty songs to a more sonically nutritious diet.