Albums That Mattered To Me: Upstairs at Eric’s

Tags

80s, albums, new wave, vince clarke, yaz, yazoo

I never got into Depeche Mode, except for their occasional radio hit. Ditto Erasure. The band that Vince Clarke started in between those two projects, though, which was known as Yaz in the US (Yazoo elsewhere), did capture my imagination for one bright moment.

Here are my memories of “Upstairs at Eric’s,” their debut album, still on frequent rotation in the radio station that is my mind:

I was 15 in 1980. My queeny best friend Marc was 13. He had come out early (I learned later that he had been molested by one of his cousins at the age of 8). We had met at Wilson Park in Florence Alabama, a gay cruising spot at the time. We were the two youngest guys around. Mostly our cruising consisted of driving around ignoring ugly old people and listening to music on my cassette player.

The very first time I met Marc, he had been walking along the sidewalk at the park. I picked him up and quickly decided he was too sissified for my tastes. But he liked my music (I had been listening to The Police at that particular moment). So we became friends. He introduced me to “Upstairs at Eric’s” that same night, I think. We drove squares around the park and bounced up and down car-dancing to “Situation.” I had heard synth music before, but never paired with such a joyous and muscular human voice as Alison Moyet’s. Even Annie Lennox, frankly, paled in comparison.

One time, we were sitting parked at the post office across the street from Wilson Park when a snooty old lady parked next to us and got out of her car. She started walking up to the post office. “Stop, stop upon me,” we shouted out the window of our car, in unison with “I Before E Except After C,” one of the more “experimental” tracks on the album. The vocal is very desperate and eerie, like an old witch on her death bed. “Yes, I’m all right … ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

The snooty old lady was unimpressed with us. I imagine she was about the age that I am now. I imagine that she was about as snooty as I am now.

Another time, I was by myself at a different gay park in a different town — Rushton Park in Birmingham, Alabama. I went down there sometimes. The bitches down there treated me like rough trade, just because I was from a rural town, I guess, and had not yet lost my accent. There was this one very elegant guy who owned a fashion store in Five Points, who never gave me the time of day. He was sitting on a bench listening to his Walkman. I asked him what he was listening to.

“You wouldn’t know it,” he said. “It’s Yaz.”

“‘Upstairs at Eric’s,’ or ‘You and Me Both’?” I said.

“Oh never mind.” He took the headphones out of his ears and walked away. I imagine he never listened to Yaz again.

My boyfriend in college also liked “Upstairs at Eric’s.” One time we marched around the Quad at the University of Alabama chanting “Midnight,” except that we had changed it to be in 4/4 time — quite a feat. At about the same time I was in college, Alison Moyet, the lead singer of Yaz, released her solo album, but we had zero interest in it.

My favorite overly melodramatic lyric in any song ever is from “Winter Kills.” It goes like so:

Pain / in your eyes / makes me crawl / makes me spiteful

Those are my memories of “Upstairs at Eric’s.” What are yours?

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Netflix Diary: The Nomi Song

Tags

80s, east village, klaus nomi, music, new wave, new york, post-punk, underground

If They Saw My Face, Would I Still Take a Bow?

Summer of 1983. Russellville, Alabama. My high school buddy Jeff handed me a homemade cassette tape with the non-word “Nomi” scrawled across the label. I don’t know where he came across it. I do know why he gave it to me. He and I were the “New Wave” kids of our class. We were also the class fags, though neither of us had acknowledged this obvious fact out loud to the other at the time. We passed hints by sharing music, I guess, a sort of flirtation via one-upsmanship. I had introduced him to Yaz; he countered with Laurie Anderson. I followed up with Nina Hagen. Deeper and deeper into the so-called “New Wave” so-called counterculture we went, borrowing records from older, hipper friends, making tapes, swapping them out, starting over. The B-52s gave way to Pylon. Romeo Void. Lydia Lunch. X. Lene Lovich. This “Nomi” thing was his final gambit before we both moved to Tuscaloosa, to go to college, and surrendered to the janglier, guitar-ier, more straightforward and straight tastes of our new surroundings — REM, Camper Van Beethoven, “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” blah, blah, the whole earnest gamut of pre-grunge hard pop that people called “college rock” back then.

For that one summer before college, though, I became obsessed with Klaus Nomi, the strange, strange (it is a simple word; there is no other word), strange performer whose life’s work was contained on that homemade cassette. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was in the process of dying, already, of AIDS — one of the first kind-of well-known people to come down with the disease, which most people still called “the gay cancer.”

I hadn’t thought much about Klaus Nomi since then. Every now and then one of his songs would get stuck in my head. The other day at work, I caught myself singing — aloud — his version of “The Twist,” while my co-worker Brian (who is not, shall we say, the New Wave kid of the office) looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I tried to explain Nomi to him, which led me to YouTubing some of Nomi’s performances, which, in turn, led to my finding out that this documentary exists. Popped over to Netflix, and sure enough, they had it, but only in DVD form.

Here is what I learned from the film:

• In the early eighties, St. Mark’s Place in the East Village was an affordable place to live for hand-to-mouth artist types. By the late eighties, (the first time I visited New York) this was no longer true, by the way.
• Cabaret performer and underground personality Joey Arias was just as ubiquitous a figure back then as he is now. Maybe even moreso.
• Klaus Nomi was a pastry chef when he wasn’t performing.
• Almost everybody who knew Nomi was pissed off at him when he died. He had “sold out,” taken on a record label contract, and dropped a lot of the musicians and other hangers-on who felt like they had gotten him to where he was. This is a common situation. Scratch any pop star and you’ll find disgruntled former associates — but Nomi’s death occurred at precisely the moment between cutting the hangers-on loose and finding new, more professional connections. So he had nobody. Presumably, Joey Arias (who ended up executing his estate) stayed close by, but his point of view isn’t represented on this subject, weirdly.
• Iggy Pop smokes big cigars and helps David Bowie make promises that won’t be kept. Surprise!

If you have an interest in the New York underground arts/performance scene as it existed in the “New Wave” period (that is, after the glory days of CBGBs, but before the rise of Soho) this documentary has lots of nice little historical bits for you. If you are a Klaus Nomi fan, of course, you’ve definitely got to see the thing. Otherwise, I’m not sure it has any value to anybody else. I loved it — but for purely subjective reasons.

Just a Limburger

Tags

80s, b-52s, cindy wilson, dance this mess around, lyrics, new wave, plinky, quotation

Plinky wants to know what my “favorite quote” is.

Plinky, Plinky, Plinky. I’ve already talked to you about playing the “favorite” card. It looks lazy. High-school yearbookish. But that’s not the worst problem with this question. Here, let me ask you a question, Plinky. You know that we’re all writers here, right? That’s why we use you? That’s why we ever know that you exist? Yes? Then why would you mis-use the word “quote,” when you clearly mean “quotation?” Are you trying to get on our nerves?

But on to the question that I know you meant to ask (which is, of course, what is a thing that somebody said that you think you could write an interesting post about). Here’s mine.

In “Dance This Mess Around,” Cindy Wilson of the B-52’s said, “Why don’t you dance with me? I ain’t no limburger.” What she meant by that was fairly clear, though it must be noted that later she backed off a little bit from this strong statement, by acknowledging that she (or somebody, or something, at any rate), was “just a limburger.”

Just a Limburger, and Some Bread

Why is this my favorite quotation? When I was in middle school, and heard this song for this first time, it made me realize strongly and emphatically that nobody would dance with a limburger. I immediately resolved never to become one.

This is the only reason I was ever able to dance, and I love to dance.