Background Music II

The Early 80s : Forever Young

“Dearly Beloved, We are gathered here today, To get through this thing called Life.”

~ Prince “Let’s Go Crazy”

I mentioned in my previous post Background Music Part One that it was great fun to be a kid in the 1970s. To be in your late teens and early twenties at the start of the 80s, and to be in love with music and dancing, well, it was a whole other level of fun. It was totally rad! That window of time right after high school graduation is both exhilarating and frightening: What do I want to do with this thing called Life? I attended one school from grades eight to twelve where I gathered a very close network of friends and left with a small peer-voted scholarship for the many years I dedicated to writing articles for our school newspaper. It seemed most everyone but me was convinced I was going to be an investigative journalist, setting the world on fire (or at least our community) with truth, integrity, and flowery prose by way of my electric typewriter that I named “Dylan” in homage to both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. Just recently I learned that Bob Dylan named himself after the poet. Now I’m wondering if perhaps I already knew that. No matter, I still carry deep feelings about their individual writings.

My graduating class picked up diplomas and our freedom in the school gymnasium to the wistful “Time” by The Alan Parsons Project drifting in the background. While I struggled to figure out which college classes I should take to become an important writer, my mature parents were already at the age where they were talking about taking early retirement from their jobs. They were around the age I am now, which in my mind meant they were really old (longtime grandparents, for crying out loud!) and completely out of touch with what it meant to be young and idealistic. Never mind that on the brink of eighteen my dad enlisted in the RAF and headed off to years of war. This was all about me. So what if I was the last bird to leave the nest? I was eighteen and nowhere near ready to soar! Hell no, I didn’t want to make writing a nice hobby. I certainly did not want to find a “good secretarial job” in order to support myself, just so they could finally retire and leave for parts unknown. So I lived at home, worked a part-time job, and attended a local college full-time, while my parents begrudgingly stayed put and held on to their jobs for a couple more years.

Two of my high school girlfriends attended a different college that was a little further away from where we grew up. Together they decided to rent an apartment that was close to their campus. It was a dump, but a glorious dump because it signified freedom from parental interference. The building was ancient and three-stories high with about eighteen units in total. Their one-bedroom top-floor no-elevator apartment was fairly spacious and we turned it into the best damn hangout in the whole world. There was a narrow hallway from the front door to the main living area. The first thing we pinned to that dingy hallway wall was a floor to ceiling black and white poster of James Dean with his finger pointing in the direction of the living room because that’s where all the fun began. Here it is –and it’s how much now? One more thing we should have hung onto instead of just the memories. But, oh, those memories.

MTV had just made its debut and for the first time we could actually see our favourite musicians instead of listening to them on the radio. There they were as if playing live in the living room, lip-syncing their lyrics, dancing provocatively, and acting out random movie-like scenes that often made little or no sense. Still. There they were! And there we were in that crummy apartment with MTV on in the background, dancing and singing and rightfully earning thumps on the walls from irritated neighbours. Saturday nights were for boyfriends or restaurant jobs, but Friday nights, at least in the beginning, were reserved for our highly sacred girls-only sleepovers. We’d show up to the apartment, anywhere from three to six of us, with bulging overnight totes, sleeping bags, and just enough pooled ingredients to make dinner and to inexpertly mix terrible drinks like Screwdrivers or the cheapest rum available to water down with ice and Coke. We thought we were so grown up and sophisticated. Ha!

We danced along to the Go-Go’s and sang our hearts out to Queen and Journey. Sometimes we’d make it a theme night and wear the clothing to best represent it. I remember two of those themes: come dressed as the first place you want to travel to when you have some money and your favourite song today. In the middle of winter I wore a flowered shirt, shorts and a plastic lei to the first party and to the latter a thrifted cat-print dress made out of faux fur and black pointy ears because “Stray Cat Strut” was my rockabilly jam that week.

Eventually things changed, as they always do. Some of the girls began making plans to marry their high school or college boyfriends, while a few more, like me, broke up with ours. The singles quickly grew bored seeing new stacks of wedding magazines every Friday night, so we’d leave the almost-newlyweds to walk several blocks to a college area night club. We just wanted to be young and dance the night away to really great music. I couldn’t imagine myself settling into marriage so soon because I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be. I’d seen my older siblings shoulder some pretty heavy responsibilities with wildly varying outcomes. The odds already seemed stacked against me, even while the expectation for most young women then was to figure it all out quickly and smartly. We grew up hearing we could have it all if we worked hard enough and made the right decisions. Problem was, my young adult life felt more like a multiple choice magazine quiz and the circled answer was always D: none of the above.

If I couldn’t afford to buy a drink I’d volunteer to drive us to the college night club in my first car that someone named the “Blue Bomb”. I think I was one of the first to have my own car. Most of the girls were still driving their parents’ vehicles. Mine was an early 1970s Datsun that I bought with graduation gift-money ($1,000 cash; it pays to have a large family) from a friend’s elderly neighbour, who was probably in her sixties. Everyone recognized that car for a few reasons: it was ugly, it was an electric shade of blue, and a bright yellow and black bumble bee stuffy hung on the rearview mirror, gifted to me by those same girlfriends who called me Sue Bee throughout high school to distinguish me from all the other Susans in our classes.

The highly visible Blue Bomb became a dilemma for us single girls. If we took it out then so-and-so (usually someone’s ex-boyfriend or annoying sibling) could easily spot it in the parking lot and come find us. I’d try to park my car as far away as walking in heels would allow. Inevitably we’d return to find a note stuck under a windshield wiper. Usually it was from other friends telling us which Denny’s to meet them for a one a.m. coffee or fries. One time there was a long, rambling (nobody recognized the handwriting) love letter to me from an anonymous writer that was stuffed inside a bouquet of pink carnations. I had no idea who left it on my car and, honestly, right then I couldn’t have cared less. However, my friends were convinced I had a stalker or maybe a romantic secret admirer, who knew me well enough to know I loved carnations. My argument was who doesn’t love them? Dying of curiosity, they hatched all sorts of ridiculous maneuvers called “operation flower boy” to flush him out of hiding. The plan only resulted in a bad case of road rash for one friend when she tripped while chasing down an innocent, and probably terrified, teenage boy out walking his dog, who made the mistake of stopping to tie his sneaker right next to my car.

The mystery was never solved and the ridiculousness ended there, thankfully. I didn’t receive another love letter or more pink carnations until I met my future husband, but that’s a story for later in the 80s. And no, he wasn’t the mysterious flower boy, although that would be the perfect meet-cute in a rom-com. Speaking of cute, while on our first date we discovered that we went to neighbouring high schools and moved in similar social circles. It’s even likely we were in the same local clubs at the same time. There weren’t many back then and they were always overcrowded with twenty-somethings. He was more likely shooting pool and causing trouble while I was trying to Moonwalk, which probably explains why we didn’t meet-cute off the dance floor until five years later.

When it wasn’t in the shop for repairs, the Blue Bomb kept motoring along, and was often spotted at local beaches, windows rolled down with the one and only Prince blasting, while we girls suntanned on the blazing hot hoods of our cars instead of more sensibly on beach towels in the sand like everyone else. At that moment in time I wasn’t interested in serious dating or anything that got in the way of weekend dance parties. I was like Cyndi Lauper in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, kicking up my heels in party dresses with big costume jewelry earrings. The original video for your viewing pleasure, in case you haven’t seen it. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album was also huge and guys started putting in a little more effort to woo the ladies by dressing up in oversized two-button pastel blazers with shoulder pads and baggy pleated trousers. As much as I liked to dress up, for some reason it was always the witty, untidy boys who first caught my eye. If my young life was an 80s John Hughes film, then it would co-star messy Judd Nelson instead of preppy Emilio Estevez with a soundtrack by Queen or Joan Jett because according to me and Billy Joel, “new phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways…It’s still rock and roll to me.“

A couple of years into the 80s, I’d finally saved enough money to take that longed for spring break vacation to Hawaii. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more. Aloha! The Hawaiian-themed dance parties were for real this time. I spent days walking on sunshine and nights dancing in the dark. I cut my long, layered hair to look like Olivia Newton-John in her “Physical” years, only minus the headband because I just wasn’t the sporty type. Upon my short-haired, suntanned return, my parents announced they were giving me six months to get my life in order so they could retire and move far away. That moment was the metaphorical needle scratching across the record for me. In their defence they’d already given me more than enough time to get on track and I can see how they thought I was wasting most of it. Still, it wasn’t the way I saw it then. I felt ambushed. My bank account was now down to single digits thanks to the vacation and there was barely enough time to build it back up. The Blue Bomb had to be traded for a newer, more reliable sedan with a hefty parental co-signed bank loan. I put college classes on an indefinite hiatus and I went in search of full-time work, which ended up being the dreaded “good secretarial job” that I hated with the same driving force that Aqua Net hairspray was to big hair.

I searched for weeks to find an apartment I could barely afford on my own while also having to make monthly car payments. I collected cast-off dishes and furniture from family members and newlywed friends, and for the first time in my life I was about to live alone. I wouldn’t admit, least of all to myself, that I was terrified about this big life change. Still, I was going to prove that I could make it on my own and I didn’t need anyone’s help doing it. Hand me an ultimatum and I’ll respond by digging in my heels wherever I land. I’ve always been too stubborn for my own good.

Hit the pause button for now–the late 80s years are coming soon!

Below are Youtube links to the songs or music videos mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. Feeling groovy? Check out my previous post Background Music Part One: the 60s and 70s.

Let’s Go Crazy – Prince

Forever Young – Bob Dylan

Time – The Alan Parsons Project

Our Lips Are Sealed – The Go-Go’s (The best video for early 80s young women style!)

We Got The Beat – The Go-Go’s

Under Pressure – David Bowie & Queen

Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey

Tainted Love – Soft Cell

Stray Cat Strut – Stray Cats

Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant

Girls Just Want to Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper

Billie Jean – Michael Jackson

I Love Rock N’ Roll – Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Billy Joel

Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves

Dancing in the Dark – Bruce Springsteen

Physical – Olivia Newton-John

Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds (The Breakfast Club movie version)