In one of these experiences I didn't actually meet the fan, I just read him gushing about Squeeze at length in Rolling Stone. I know, I'm going out on a limb a bit here, calling Squeeze a terrible band. Okay, so maybe they're not the worst, but they're certainly nowhere near the best either, and the way that this guy was going on and on about them in Rolling Stone, back in the early 1980's when their single "Tempted" was a hit, was grotesque. I wasn't tempted by their music, not even a little. But it was more than that. This writer also gushed about how handsome the guys in Squeeze were.
Now, this latter point may be just semantics: if one of the definitions of "handsome" is "attempting, by the use of very expensive clothes and very elaborate grooming, to conceal the way that Nature made you look like a potato or an elephant's knee," then, yes, Squeeze were very handsome. If handsomeness is a matter of the price of your watch -- and clearly, in many relationships, it is -- then Squeeze will always have most of us beat.
Or maybe the remarks about handsomeness were some sort of inside joke: maybe one of the band members said something like "Look, we know we're not handsome, and we're competing with freakin' Duran Duran, so maybe we just try a little harder with the music," and the interviewer said Oh c'mon now, and then someone said, Hey, why dontcha SAY, in the article, that we're ridiculously handsome, something like that? Just to see how people will react? And six months later they all had supermodel girlfriends.
But their music? One of the things about being a music critic at some place like Rolling Stone is that you have access to all of the music, and if you miss something, you're working elbow-to-elbow with a whole huge organization full of other music critics who can point out the best stuff which you may have missed, and so there's very little excuse for surveying the entire pop music landscape of the early 80's and deciding that its summit is -- Squeeze. Excuse me, but seriously, ewwww.
Then there's Crowded House, the Australian Band which formed in the mid-80's with members of the New Zealand band Split Enz, which had combined exotic costumes, hair and stage decoration with thoroughly mediocre music. Crowded House dropped all of the interesting visuals and concentrated on making the music mediocre. I believe their biggest hit in the US has been "Don't Dream It's Over."
In the case of Crowded House, I ran into an entire party full of passionate fans. I did this round about 1985, and I did it because I was taking way too many drugs, and crashing parties. I haven't crashed any parties except during this one period in the mid-80's.
One thing about crashing parties is that it can bring you face-to-face with an entire roomful of people of sorts you might otherwise rarely meet. Sometimes the experience was good, as when I crashed parties full of good-looking people who listened to the sort of Top 40 music which I and my friends snickered at. To my surprise, these good-looking people in the mid-1980's with their designer T-shirts and expensive sunglasses were very friendly -- to me. They were very nice. And the music wasn't all that bad, and frankly, it was a bit of a relief to be away from my friends' snobbism. Maybe I should've just stayed there, with the good-looking, sexy people with their unsophisticated tastes in clothing and music. Stayed there forever, kept my snarky opinions to myself, married a beautiful airhead, made beautiful babies, accepted the cushy idiot-son-in-law job and gradually transitioned from keggers to good Scotch and cigars.
But anyway, I didn't, and at another party, the people weren't especially good-looking, and the music was Crowded House. The music was ALL Crowded House. One Crowded House song wouldn't have been especially remarkable, what with "Don't Dream It's Over" being such a huge hit at the time, but three in a row was strange, and four and five in a row were starting to be really disturbing, and then I noticed that a bunch of people were gathered around a small, 1980's-sized TV, and then I realized that there was a Crowded House concert on MTV on the TV and that the audio was coming from the concert broadcast, and THEN I realized that the party was being thrown by fanatical Crowded House fans in order to celebrate, and to experience together, the premiere of the concert broadcast on MTV, and I fled in terror, as you might well imagine, looking for some other party somewhere full of sexy Top-40 fans.
Then there's Wang Chung, famous for their singles "Dance Hall Days" and "Everybody Have Fun Tonight." They're not terrible, but they're really creepy. They strike me as the kind of music I might really love if I were evil.
So I met this guy who was clearly neither evil nor a sophisticated music connoisseur, who talked about Wang Chung all the time. "Have you ever seen the movie To Live and Die in LA?" he asked me. "The whole soundtrack is Wang Chung!" Once again, I fled in horror.
Then there was the guy who couldn't stop talking about Ray Parker, Jr and Raydio. Boy, did he love Raydio. He explained to me over and over that Raydio was spelled with a y because Ray was spelled with a y, although I had thoroughly grasped the concept the first time he'd explained it. Need I say that I fled in deep fear?
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