1982 (40 page)

Still, I had a growing group of champions for my ideas. The dynamics at the TSA had shifted. The motion for my ambitious countdown event was carried with the support of Jane Decker and Janelle and a few others. Jane Decker was now a leader at the TSA, and despite the eyeliner incident a year earlier and my desire to tell her to fuck off the way Siouxsie had told us all to fuck off at her concert, she had become a good friend. She supported me during the TSA vote, but then after the meeting furtively asked me if I knew what I was doing. I assured her that the countdown dance would work. I convinced her of this even though I had no blueprint to follow. I just knew I had always been fascinated by lists. I had been making lists since I was a little kid in England.

Anyone who has ever known me well knows that I love lists. When we came to Canada, my father facilitated my interest in lists by giving me a book called
The World Book of Rankings
. The title handily referred to the fact that it was a book of world lists. It had lists like “Country with Most Oil Exports” and “Most Murders per Year, by City.” I pored over the lists religiously, and tried to memorize parts of the book before going to bed each night. This may be an insight into my nerdy character growing up. While others were playing with model cars or fantasizing about girls, I was staring at international rankings in a book. Fast-forward to Thornlea a few years later, and this was my chance to compile an important list and have a popular event in the gym where a lot of New Wave music would get played. Besides, as much as I respected democracy, it may also have been the case that I intended it to be a cool list of New Wave songs regardless of the votes. Integrity at the polls needed to be compromised sometimes for the sake of a curatorial music policy.

Initiating my countdown event at the TSA was not inconsistent with a new bit of confidence I had in Grade 10. I was taking more responsibility around Thornlea, and I had the support of Janelle. She was quickly becoming a very beautiful presence in my life. And hitting the age of fifteen didn’t hurt either. You see, the good news about high school is that, for the most part, over the course of your time there, things get better. That is, you get older. And as you get older and move into the higher grades, there are waves of young new recruits who enter the school and struggle to build their courage and get their bearings the way you once did. So you can look at the younger students and laugh at them, and then you feel better about
yourself. That is what high school is ultimately designed for: laughing at others to feel better. And so, by Grade 10, I was no longer an insecure Thornlea rookie. No. I was more of an insecure sophomore with a year of high school experience and a briefcase instead of an Adidas bag. This was a big difference.

Aesthetically, I had also made progress by the fall of ’82. My uniform was certainly more solid. For all that I’d grappled with a fledgling New Wave image the previous year, I’d made major strides in my presentation. My days with Toke and our Lolas from Mac’s Milk seemed an eternity away. We were kids then … even if it was only the summer before last. Most of my clothing was now black, and my hair was longer and had more blond and jet-black streaks. I had a sleek black briefcase that I carried to school each day, and a few black shirts that I wore throughout the week. Concerts like the Police Picnic had taught me the look I was going for. And my involvement with Theatre Troupe at the end of Grade 9 had catapulted me into being considered one of the cool artsy students. This was important.

I was also honing my New Wave musical tastes in Grade 10 to include alternative rock and electronic groups like Gang of Four and Kraftwerk and Simple Minds. Simple Minds were a post-punk Scottish band with a charismatic singer named Jim Kerr who acted a bit like Bowie. No one could be Bowie, but Jim Kerr set a good example. I became a Simple Minds fan. Jim Kerr wore jackets with shoulder pads and black pants and black eyeliner. And he crouched when he sang. I was never sure why he did so much crouching. I assumed that’s what the latest trendsetting New Wave singers did. I started crouching when I sang, too—for a while, anyway.

By mid-autumn, I was doing fairly well in school, I continued making the morning announcements and was in the Vocal Group as well as other extracurricular activities. A good portion of my time between classes was spent with Janelle. She was in Grade 11 and considered by many to be a great catch. She was definitely a girl that a lot of the boys had noticed. She was diminutive and sweet and had a natural beauty. She wore very little makeup except for a touch of eyeliner. She was graceful from being a ballet dancer as a kid but also a strong athlete. She was soft-spoken and well-grounded. She had been an exchange student in Europe and now spoke French fluently. She was also one of the top students at Thornlea. She was the kind of person that gets one hundred percent on a science test. Those kinds of people are usually annoying. But Janelle wasn’t. Everyone liked Janelle. She was pretty much the whole package. And she was very nice to me.

My crush on Janelle felt strangely mature. I felt little of the nervousness and insecurity that had come with Wendy. On one of our first occasions alone in the hallways of Thornlea, I had spontaneously kissed Janelle on the lips outside the photography room. I remember her looking quite shocked and commenting on how I had some gall to do such a thing. I wasn’t so sure where I’d found such confidence, either. But soon we were seeing each other regularly.

Janelle had a calm demeanour and was a good balance for my outgoing and neurotic personality. She was what others would see as an ideal partner. But we didn’t actually become boyfriend and girlfriend in the fall. At least, I never fully acknowledged us that way. She asked me on a couple of occasions if I was her boyfriend, and I changed the subject. Maybe
Janelle was just too good for what I was ready for. She was not my sexual fantasy girl or ersatz New Wave role model. She was solid and real. That probably scared me. And Janelle really didn’t have the background in punk or alternative music that I valued in a person. I needed to change that. I set out to try to educate her with mix tapes.

THE TRUE MEASURE
of your affection for another human in the 1980s was in making a mix tape. It’s different now. These days, you can throw together an iTunes playlist in a couple of minutes. You can make a playlist without caring very much. It’s not so much of an investment. But in the ’80s, the mix tape took time and consideration and creativity. The right amount of space left between songs on the cassette was not unimportant. The flow of the music was paramount. The choice of the material was key. And writing meticulous and artful liner notes was also a major element. The all-important title of any particular mix tape could make the difference between a regularly played classic and something that got tossed in a shoebox with other cassettes. Making the right mix tape was never easy.

One of my primary goals with Janelle was to instruct her about Bowie. This might sound like some kind of attempt at indoctrination. I assure you it was. I was on a mission to teach Janelle everything I could about my idol. I couldn’t very well be attached to a girl who didn’t know much about Bowie.

I called the Bowie mix tape “Scary Monsters Mix” as a nod to his 1980 album featuring “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion.” Here is a list of the songs that appeared on Side A of the mix
tape I made for Janelle in the fall of 1982, including the year Bowie released each song (as I outlined on the cassette liner notes):

“The Laughing Gnome,” 1967

“When I Live My Dream” (
David Bowie
), 1967

“The Secret Life of Arabia” (
“Heroes”
), 1977

“Five Years” (
Ziggy Stardust
), 1972

“Cat People” (
Cat People
soundtrack), 1982

“Please Mr. Gravedigger” (
David Bowie
), 1967

“Karma Man,” 1967

“Fashion” (
Scary Monsters
), 1980

“Speed of Life” (
Low
), 1977

“Breaking Glass” (
Low
), 1977

“What in the World” (
Low
), 1977

“The London Boys,” 1966

“Wild Is the Wind” (
Station to Station
), 1976

As you can see, I wanted to include a lot of very early David Bowie on this mix tape, to demonstrate my credentials as a true fan and for Janelle to be aware of his beginnings. I also balanced things by taping “Cat People” and “Fashion,” some of his latest work. I got some of the information wrong on my liner notes for Janelle. As a case in point, the gorgeous cover song “Wild Is the Wind” is from 1976, not 1978, as I had labelled it. But I didn’t have the advantage of Wikipedia back then. And nor did anyone else. So details like this mattered less.

It made sense that I started the mix tape for Janelle with a quirky little song called “The Laughing Gnome.” It went the furthest back for me. The first time I was introduced to
David Bowie was in England. I was five years old. I mean, I wasn’t actually personally introduced to him, but I was made aware of his voice and his music as it emitted from the radio in our house. We lived in a house on a street called Beacon Close. Beacon Close was in Middlesex, a suburb of London. Middlesex was like the equivalent of Thornhill in England, but with less heating and more peas.

By the time I was five, my mother had taught me to record sounds that came from the radio by pressing the two top buttons on our new Panasonic tape deck. It was a portable tape deck that was also a radio. This device was a technological wonder. It could do it all. It was the cutting edge in the early ’70s, and my Uncle Boyuk had brought it from America. Actually, he had brought it from another part of the world and then from America. My Uncle Boyuk always had the newest gadgets. He would get them from Japan or Germany and bring them to the United States, where he lived. Then he would deliver them as gifts to us in England when he visited. It probably would have made more sense for Uncle Boyuk to just send the gadget gifts straight from Germany to England, but it was more glamorous this way.

The Panasonic tape deck required alertness and quick reaction time. The way it worked was that you inserted a cassette into the player and cued it up to a blank part and then left it there. If something was on the radio that you really liked, you could then press “Rec” and “Play” simultaneously, and whatever sound was on the radio would transfer onto the tape. It took skill to do the double-press at the appropriate moment. You had to be physically ready for any possible taping opportunity. And so the problem was that if you were on the other
side of the room—say, eating pistachios, or thinking about eating pistachios—you would have to run to the tape deck to catch the song just as you heard it come on the radio. This might explain why there is a generation of people walking around who don’t remember the first ten seconds of most radio songs of the 1970s. Those parts just didn’t make it onto their cassettes. But mix tapes were popular and became very much the norm. Of course, it was easier to make a mix tape when you were recording music that you owned on vinyl. But when it came from the radio, it posed athletic challenges to get to the buttons on time.

On one occasion, at the age of five, I accomplished the aforementioned taping mission with a David Bowie song. Actually, my mother told me to do it because she’d heard the song once before and recognized it when it came back on the radio. That was my introduction to Bowie. And I owed it to my mother. And once it was taped, it also became the first time I owned something by Bowie. Later, people would deem this kind of unlawful acquisition of music to be “piracy” or “stealing.” But no one cared about that when we were young. You didn’t really need the internet for illegal downloading back in the day. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was just called “taping stuff.”

The song that I ran over to record was that Bowie ditty from the late 1960s called “The Laughing Gnome.” Years later, it became the first song I put on that mix tape for Janelle. It features Bowie interacting with a laughing little gnome. I know. If it sounds a bit silly, that’s because it is. The gnome has a high-pitched, helium-type voice that sounds like Alvin from the Chipmunks. I’m not really sure if this is the way gnomes
sound. I’ve never heard another gnome speak. But I didn’t question this as a kid in England.

“The Laughing Gnome” is an enjoyable and cute song that ends up with both Bowie and the gnome laughing quite hysterically. The whole thing sounds like a children’s tune—which may have been regrettable to some, including Bowie himself. But I loved it as a kid. And given that I had recorded it on a mix tape my mother had started that also featured kids’ performer Rolf Harris and the costumed band of furry creatures called the Wombles, I assumed for many years afterwards that David Bowie was a children’s performer. I thought he just made kids’ music. This might have led to a surprising encounter if I’d actually been introduced to Bowie as Ziggy Stardust doing cocaine and eating red peppers in the mid-’70s, but as a boy I didn’t have much access to that Bowie.

My Bowie addiction continued through the 1970s as I discovered songs like “Young Americans” and “Space Oddity.” Then my interest grew in the early 1980s, especially after the advent of video channels. In Grade 8, as I’ve told you, I ended up performing “The Jean Genie” with the Wingnuts, with little awareness, as a suburban, middle-class thirteen-year-old, that I was singing lyrics about a drug and sleaze fiend. By 1982, I played “Ashes to Ashes” at Thornlea with my older friend and mentor Mike Ford. I would then go on to use a Bowie quote as my final graduating words in the Thornlea yearbook, and all the time in between I would do anything and everything to try to follow in Bowie’s footsteps. Of course, this ambition mostly manifested itself in embarrassing and unfortunate ways, but you already know that.

Janelle promised me in the fall of ’82 that she would listen
regularly to her new Bowie mix tape. Despite her predilection for more mainstream pop music, she told me she was becoming a big Bowie fan. This was important news for me. And the chances of some kind of future for us as a couple were growing more realistic.