To stop the truth from hurting you

This one hypnotized me in the fall of 85. 

I have this exact 12-inch, and based on when I bought it, where I bought it (most assuredly Record Bar in Turfland Mall), and where it’s from (UK import), I probably spent a lot of allowance on it. I had to be deliberate in my purchases before that next summer, when I was earning my own money, after having trudged back to the mall not to shop but to find a job, which, luckily, was within 100 feet of Record Bar.

Then, inexplicably, I heard it again while sitting in the hair salon chair, probably delivered to someone’s phone app by an algorithm seeking synthy 80s. 

But algorithms can’t identify the juxtaposition of word and sound that sounds like the longing you had at the same time as leaves whipped off of trees outside of your window while you were supposed to be doing homework.

Time got excited

Speaking of album openers (even though we weren't), the single drumbeat that kicks (ha) off the title track to the album that includes the hugely synthy and thrilling "Alive and Kicking" is ... I don't know what it is. It just works for me today.



It's also how the Minds' biggest--not greatest--Stateside hit starts. And they didn't even write it, though it was written with them in mind (ha).

[Ed. Note: listen to the demo embedded in the Spin article and tell me they weren't actually aiming for the Psych Furs and Richard Butler and not the Minds]

I was precisely in the target demographic, so, yeah, it worked. Consider me obsessed, and I probably viewed it not long after the 2/15/85 opening, and hit up The Record Bar straight after.

I also don't know if I'd agree with the subtitle "Poor Man's U2" for the band. Yes, they made epic, sweeping use-a-thesaurus-here songs, but these sprang, in my estimation, from straight from the heart ("I'd be with you/I dreaaaaam about you...I stay with you...tonight"), less filtered through the head. And embroidered with the keys and piano of Michael MacNeil, which don't cross between actual human hands plunking keys and chirps emitting from the turning of knobs. SM are synthy, but not Depeche Mode, for god's sake.

I'm glad The Breakfast Club pushed the Minds onto our shores, our record players, tape decks and for god's sake, into our minds.

The notes don't seem three decades old, though. Not at all.

Give It Time

Twenty-five years ago, I'd never have imagined that I'd see this performance.



Twenty-five years ago, I would have either had to be in Germany, or acquire access to videotape of this performance, or, more likely, I would be able to view photos of the performance. I would have had to purchase an imported magazine in a plastic sleeve, with the price tag in pounds still affixed, delivered to Turfland Mall Record Bar by truck from a warehouse from a jet misty from Atlantic rainclouds. Then, twenty-five years later, maybe the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I would have had to hold that magazine in my hands as I squatted in front of a tub filled with scribbled notes and mimeographed play programs and Happy Meal toys that once meant something and decide if I needed to keep it and transfer it to another, more decorative receptacle, or just throw it away.

Today, I am staggered by alpine heights of cultural detritus available to me. I can touch that mountain of ephemera in keystrokes, in seconds.

Today, the matter doesn't even have to be something that held meaning for me. It can be a song by a band that some of my friends might have liked that I'd considered buying recordings by but never got around to it because back then, when the mountain was real and unassailable, you had to set priorities, at least fiscal ones.

Now I can queue whatever that mountain yields to my keyword combination and look at it while I send emails to people, many of whom I have never spoken a single word to in person.