1982 (8 page)

My odd fashion combination was not entirely my fault. There’s only so inventive a kid watching early Spandau Ballet videos can be. I didn’t have the stylists or money or friends to know how to do New Wave properly. But I knew I liked Bowie. And he wore eyeliner. Wendy wore eyeliner, too. I decided I would be more New Wave if I wore eyeliner as well. In a serendipitous moment during the middle of Grade 9, I found an eyeliner pencil that had been left in Room 213, the theatre room. The eyeliner looked practically new! I decided to liberate it from the theatre room and make it mine. I stashed it in my Adidas bag. It was a fine acquisition, but there was a small hitch with my new eyeliner. When I pulled it out at home, away from the dark lighting in Room 213, I realized the colour wasn’t ideal. It was purple. Purple eyeliner. I knew that black was probably better than purple. But I had no idea how to acquire black eyeliner. And purple wasn’t too far off. I couldn’t ask any guy friends for black eyeliner. And I wouldn’t
ask a girl. Bowie certainly didn’t ask girls for his eyeliner. He just … had eyeliner. I was sure no one talked about where they got eyeliner.

One day, towards the second half of Grade 9, I woke up early and meticulously put on my new purple eyeliner. It didn’t seem to be making much of a noticeable mark, so I leaned my face in close to the mirror and liberally applied the eyeliner to make sure it looked good. I went to school that day convinced I was cooler than I had ever been. I was convinced I bore a striking similarity to Phil Oakey from the Human League. He wore eyeliner all the time. He probably wore eyeliner at home. Thick eyeliner. Sadly, my latest style coup was short-lived. I had been at school for less than an hour when Jane Decker saw me at our lockers in the second-floor hallway. She stared at me for a moment and then pointed at me with her arm straight and her index finger inches from my face.

“You’re wearing eyeliner! Why are you wearing eyeliner?” She said this at a volume loud enough to echo down the hall. Jane Decker obviously didn’t understand. Just like my father. But I had not put enough thought into those who didn’t understand cool, and I was utterly unprepared for this moment. There were no other aspiring New Romantics to be found to rally support. Instead, there was now a group of preppy kids and science nerds and jock types gathering around the lockers to see the evidence of the eyeliner, and the guy wearing the eyeliner. There was a pause before the floodgates opened. Jane Decker was the star yearbook editor and a future successful lawyer. She was turning this into a public inquiry and felt the need to pursue the truth by pointing out the facts, just like my mother would. Louder. Again.

“You’re wearing eyeliner!”

The crowd was growing larger. I saw what seemed like dozens of peers, enemies, and curious onlookers assembling. In my defence—and with the integrity of all self-respecting punks in mind—I said the first thing that came to mind upon being accused of wearing eyeliner: “I am not! I’m not … wearing … eyeliner.”

Now, let this be a lesson to all you fourteen-year-old boys out there who may find yourselves in this situation. If you ever happen to be wearing very noticeable thick purple eyeliner to school for the first time and someone calls you on it, denial may not be the most effective response. My voice sounded less convincing with each word. This was trouble. Jane Decker smelled blood.

“Yes you are! Look! I can see it. You’re wearing eyeliner! And it’s … purple. I can clearly see it. Purple eyeliner!”

The growing mob was now joining in with various helpful contributions to the outing of the eyeliner boy:

“Yeah!”

“He’s wearing eyeliner!”

“You totally are!”

It was hard enough to manage being the ethnic kid with the unpronounceable name trying to look like a white UK New Waver. Now, somehow my version of wanting to fit in had led me to a thick heap of purple eyeliner and an unwelcoming audience at the lockers. I needed to do something. Fast. The crowd had turned on me, and Jane Decker, as their leader, was feeling empowered. What would Bowie do? I couldn’t think. I resorted to the only action an aspiring glam-rocker could take: I denied it again.

“No. I’m not! And it’s not purple!”

Okay. So that last bit was a problem. Even as the words left my mouth, I realized that “it’s not purple!” was an awfully unnecessary detail for a guy supposedly not wearing eyeliner. And I
was
wearing eyeliner. And it very clearly
was
purple. There was another pause as the crowd waited to see how this would play out. I felt overwhelmed by the implications of what might happen if I started to cry. I imagined the way the tears would smudge my thick purple eyeliner. That would really exacerbate things. I wondered if there was any chance the running eyeliner would make me look like Alice Cooper. Like a younger, more ethnic Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper always seemed to have eye makeup streaming down his face back in the ’70s. Cool kids had liked Alice Cooper then. Maybe it was still cool to have smudged eyeliner. Maybe that would be rock. Or punk. But my streaming makeup would be purple. And purple probably wouldn’t count. And denial would be impossible if the eyeliner began running. It was all a disaster.

I needed to end this. I quietly closed my locker and clicked the lock without looking up. Then I ran down the hall with my red-and-blue Adidas bag. I could hear laughing. I didn’t talk to Jane Decker for a couple of weeks after that. And I didn’t wear the purple eyeliner again.

THE EYELINER AND THE SHOES
and the hair were all about being cool. I knew that Bowie was cool. And if I could just be more like him, I would be okay. And Wendy would probably start to notice me as well. It really came down to music in those days, and the divisions were profound. The rift was particularly
strong between the rockers and the punk/New Wave kids. The preppies had long made themselves irrelevant with their indiscriminate tastes. The preppies were into sugary pop stuff like REO Speedwagon and Air Supply, and that was just embarrassing. Some preppies liked Bruce Springsteen, and I secretly appreciated that, because I had liked Springsteen and I’d learned to play “Hungry Heart” on acoustic guitar in Grade 7. But now I didn’t really tell anyone I liked Springsteen. Springsteen may have been a working-class hero from New Jersey, but I didn’t know that. I just knew that the preppy kids liked him. Joel Price had gone to see Springsteen in Grade 8, and he was definitely a preppy, who would never wear second-hand clothes or pointy boots. Our gym teacher, Mr. Manly, made me wrestle Joel Price once in gym class in Grade 8. Joel pinned me right away and looked at me and laughed. I decided I didn’t like wrestling. And after that I wasn’t sure I liked Springsteen much, either.

If you were a New Wave kid or a mod in 1982, you liked the Jam, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the English Beat, and Bowie. In contrast, if you were a rocker, you wore a Zeppelin T-shirt with a “Zoso” logo that represented Jimmy Page, and you blasted AC/DC and you probably had a keen appreciation for Journey guitarist Neal Schon. I had empathy for the rockers, because I was a big fan of Rush. Rush was a legitimate rock band. And also, Toke had gone to see Ozzy, who was also a real rocker, and Toke told me about the concert in such detail that I pretended I’d been there and recounted the show to others. But now I was more New Wave. In fact, Rush was also trying to be New Wave, but no one was really buying it. There was no cross-pollination between the rockers
and New Wavers. Still, amongst all the divisions, the one thing that united all of us was a bitter disregard for any kind of manufactured-sounding stuff: corporate pop and rock, man. No one liked a rocker who became a commercial sellout. Joan Jett fell into this category. Her omnipresent song “I Love Rock ’n Roll” was a number-one hit in America in 1982. That would qualify as too popular. Her song was getting played in the wrong stores at the mall. She was definitely not cool.

In our teenage world, you were defined by the concerts you attended. I was intent on building my live music repertoire to establish my credentials. I had started going to rock concerts when I was eleven, and I’d got off to a bad start by alternative standards. The first real concert my parents took me to was Billy Joel. He wore a suit jacket and sneakers and sang “Just the Way You Are.” Later in life, I would decide that Billy Joel was a real talent. But at the time he didn’t seem very cool. Then, to really set back my reputation, my parents took me to see the noted Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Hill at the Ontario Place Forum. He was the “Sometimes When We Touch” nice guy. “Sometimes When We Touch” was a sensitive song that featured the following lyric at its dramatic conclusion:

I wanna hold you till I die

Till we both break down and cry

I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides.

You probably know that song and that end part. And that sentiment would strike a very poignant chord in therapy sessions a couple of decades later. But at the time it didn’t seem very cool. This massive hit had led Dan Hill to pretty much
define the middle of the road in music. He was very real and organic. He had a bushy beard and no gel in his hair. He wore baggy trousers, the kind that allowed for “room to breathe.” He also performed with bare feet. He probably didn’t have any pointy boots. Dan Hill was not very punk.

My father was impressed that Dan Hill could perform a whole concert of songs by himself. “The Dan Hill! He ees on stage for two hours! He ees playing all of the songs heemself! For two hours! Honestly, it ees great!”

My father called him The Dan Hill. He didn’t really know any Dan Hill songs. I’m not sure he had heard much of Dan Hill before the concert. My mother had told him that Dan Hill was a very nice new singer and that with admission to Ontario Place we wouldn’t have to pay extra to see him—so it became a family outing. But my father was clearly impressed with Dan Hill’s stamina. The Dan Hill. I saw my dad’s point, and I decided Dan Hill was impressive, too. But when I told Toke about Dan Hill and how he had played for two hours, Toke told me his older brother said Sabbath had played for longer. And regardless of his stamina, I would soon renounce any appreciation for Dan Hill. He was not New Wave. He was not cool. Of course, many years later, I would decide Dan Hill was a very good songwriter. Just like Billy Joel and Joan Jett. Cool can change.

When I turned thirteen, I finally graduated from going to concerts with my mother and father. I knew it was important to curate my personal gig calendar. It was simple: if I went to cool shows, I could tell other kids that I had gone to cool shows. Part of the trick was to try to always smell like smoke. If you had a jean jacket or a mod army shirt that smelled like smoke,
and especially if you were a non-smoker, other kids would know you went to a lot of concerts. I was not a smoker, but in the early ’80s all concerts were filled with older people smoking cigarettes and pot and hash. Mostly they smoked cigarettes. This was cool. Smoking meant that you understood music better and that you had a carefree but serious vibe. It was also sexy. Bowie was holding a lit cigarette on the cover of
Young Americans
for precisely this reason. And so, even though I was an asthmatic and didn’t smoke, I tried to smell like smoke.

It was impossible to go to a show in the early ’80s without getting caught up in wafts of cigarette exhaust. Even in big places like Maple Leaf Gardens, the whole concert would be blanketed in clouds of smoke. This was not just manufactured by machines onstage the way it is today, it was the power of the collective, sucking on their cigarettes and blowing. If you were a young teen who wasn’t savvy enough to sneak into bars, concerts were the main place to go if you wanted to come home reeking of smoke. This was an aspiration. Two decades later, smoking would be banned at live shows for health reasons. This made sense. It was much better to go smoke free for health reasons and for unimpeded sightlines at gigs. But it never felt the same as when everyone was lighting up and being unhealthy. That was real cred.

I started going to concerts with my friend Murray Foster, who was playing in our band, the Wingnuts, in Grade 8. I was the singer and drummer of the Wingnuts and Murray was the guitarist. Rob Mundle was the third member of our band, and he also played guitar. He was a year older, so he had a good amp. We didn’t have a bassist, because both Murray and Rob wanted to play guitar and refused to play bass. In
a strange twist, Murray would go on to be an excellent bass player. But back then we were confined to the guitar-playing roles for Murray and Rob. Two decades before the Black Keys and the White Stripes, the Wingnuts were unwittingly the first band to feature only a drummer and electric guitars. The big difference was that we really didn’t sound very appealing. But Roxy Anslow and another girl from Mr. Mackian’s class named Katie made Wingnuts T-shirts and wore them to our gig. We only ever played one gig. That didn’t matter. It was a big one at the school gym towards the end of Grade 8. And we had girls wearing T-shirts with the name of our band on them.

Murray was really not very New Wave in junior high and Grade 9. He had nice blond hair that was parted in the middle and he wore large, white-ish running shoes and shorts and athletic socks. But Murray was a bit taller than me and he had older brothers, so he was less timid around the tough punks. Murray’s mom made really good chili, and lots of kids made regular trips to Murray’s house to have some of his mom’s chili. She seemed to always have chili ready. Murray’s house became known for his mom’s chili. Murray was well liked, but his mom’s chili made him even more popular.

Murray and I started accumulating our concert credentials by going to as many shows as we could afford. We saw New Order one night, the Jam a few weeks later, and then the punk female-led British band Siouxsie and the Banshees. Siouxsie and the Banshees were getting a lot of spins amongst the coolest New Wave occupants of the theatre room at school. Their song “Happy House” had become an anthem for some of my sister’s friends in Grade 12. I had a sense that Wendy
was probably a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees. This was an important concert to attend.