Author: Spitz, Marc
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The Buzzcocks possessed a gift for marrying sweet backing vocals to leads that were at turns raw and sincere à la Richman (a key influence) and camp as a row of tents, as they say. Take the later single “Love You More,” one of their two dozen perfect three-minute pop songs. “After this love, there’ll be no other,” promises Pete Shelley, the band’s cofounder and the song’s composer, pale, weak-chinned, weedy but somehow romantic. He adds, “until the razor cuts.” Count Plath as godmother here too.
Steve Diggle, the alien-looking Howard Devoto, and teen drummer John Maher quickly sped beyond their heroes musically by marrying a boldly lovelorn, sweet, and unapologetically camp approach to standard Punk. The way Twee culture dominates, they are today the far more influential band, even if their name is not as well-known as the more firebrand Clash and the Sex Pistols. Every “pop-Punk” outfit with a sense of wit and romance, from Green Day to Fall Out Boy, owes them a tax.
By the start of the 1980s, Rough Trade was its own Indie label as well, signing undeniable acts like the Fall, the Young Marble Giants; the Normal’s seminal “T.V.O.D.” single, and Crass (and eventually the Smiths); artists who, like the Buzzcocks, were too odd, sensitive, grumpy, and strange to pass as Punks proper (while still maintaining an unmistakable Punk energy). Rough Trade also established an ethic that would inform the Indie publishing and distribution world of the ’80s. “The only thing we turned down were things we felt were sexist or racist,” Travis says. Jonathan Richman might have been the shock of the new (or the old, as it were), but Geoff Travis picked up the mantle and institutionalized a kind of complex, somewhat softer Punk culture; one where complicated, rumpled, shy, sweaty, oddball, proto-Twee heroes could have careers and have their say.
“Everything around Punk had expired and become its own cliché—bands sounding the same, zines looking the same,” says former Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon, founder of the Indie label New Hormones, who released Spiral Scratch in late January 1977 (before it was picked up by Rough Trade in London). Only one thousand copies were printed, a method later employed by Belle and Sebastian with their debut, Tigermilk—the whole less-is-more, “Can we find it in the shops?” strategy. If people know they can’t get something, they want it even more.
The Buzzcocks could not have come from London in the same way that Richman and Kaufman could not have been bred in New York City. A distance from the center of the action provides a different perspective. “There’s the cliché in England that ‘people are friendlier in the north,’” Boon says. “My maxim, as it were, was to make the place one happens to be living the place one wants to be living. In the inspirational fallout of seeing the Pistols in January ’76, we wanted to spread the virus and make something happen—in Manchester. With no real venues, there was no choice but to do things ourselves.”
The Buzzcocks, also like Richman and even Andy Kaufman, were Punks without wearing the Punk drag, which had already become a dreary uniform. You could see them lingering in the crowd before their shows. They were available and inimitable, sartorially anyway, years before the Smiths and later Nirvana made this seem revolutionary. “Pete would be approached for autographs,” Boon recalls, “so he took to carrying an autograph book himself, collecting the signatures of those asking for his.” This bred a fierce loyalty among the group’s fan club, dubbed the Secret Public, their logo borrowed from the post-horn graphic in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
“There was something about the blankness of their clothing and artwork and two-note guitar solos,” Paul Morley says. “They were more important than the Pistols or the Clash or any of the London bands. They also brought with them a philosophical attitude as to why they made their music—what it was about, how it wanted to appear and grow up—and therefore now they have a much bigger influence on the Brooklynization thing, the Indie thing.”
As scenes developed in Manchester, with Joy Division emerging soon after the Buzzcocks, as well as in Sheffield, Leeds, and Liverpool, down in the capital the rigidity of Punk was relaxing, like a Mohawk falling into unruly cowlicks. Well-read bands like the Raincoats, Marine Girls, and Young Marble Giants prized their 1960s Kinks and Herman’s Hermits 45s, shopped in thrift stores, and cultivated a soon-to-be highly influential “art school” aesthetic. The original Rough Trade record shop became a hub for defiantly Twee vinyl connoisseurs from all corners of the Isles.
“There was a shift in consciousness,” says Gina Birch of the Raincoats. “We didn’t dress up. We weren’t leather girls. We wore weird spotty dresses, big Madeira boots, and jumpers with holes in them. We didn’t brush our hair. We looked like we just got out of bed.” But the spiky, smart music they made earned them the respect of the “Rough Trade Brigade,” as well as powerful BBC DJ John Peel, who threw his back into supporting these new, oddly modest Indie bands, allowing them to have actual hit singles.
Being smart and shy was no longer a liability, and screaming had ceased to be a requirement: even Johnny Rotten had gotten murky and dubby with his post-Pistols band, Public Image. Then there was XTC, a four-piece from unfashionable suburban Swindon. Chief songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding weren’t toughs and couldn’t pretend that they were unclever or crude. They wrote pleasingly cathartic thrashes you could sing along to (“This Is Pop!”) and stinging satire (“Respectable Street” and, most famously, “Making Plans for Nigel”), but they also couldn’t pretend that they didn’t know the Kinks had gotten there first. They were Punk’s precocious and gifted children.
“XTC, Squeeze, Elvis Costello, even the Police, these were people who were clearly not droogs. They were sort of student-ish,” says journalist Morley. “They understood the ideological action that was happening around them and changed their hair and clothing and graphic design and presentation so they could look like they were part of the revolution without being part of the revolution.”
The violence at these shows was no longer kneejerk but became instead a sort of overgrown teen tantrum. The relatively dainty (when compared to Johnny Rotten) Pete Shelley famously hated being “gobbed at”—spat upon—by fans from the floor. He didn’t do the pogo, the hopping dance invented by Punk’s tragic cartoon Sid Vicious.
“You know I don’t like dancin’—and I don’t like to bop. Too much movement’s exertion makes me wish that I could drop,” he sneered on the early track “Sixteen,” from their debut LP, Another Music in a Different Kitchen. Released early in ’78, it would be one of two Buzzcocks tracks that celebrated being sweet sixteen. The other was “Sixteen Again.”
If the Buzzcocks were gleefully camp, Elvis Costello, the angry young man who didn’t wear the leather motorcycle jacket, did not seem to trust glee at all. “The main thing that came across when I first saw Elvis Costello,” says They Might Be Giants cofounder and future Twee culture hero John Flansburgh, who traveled overseas from his native New England as a teenager and caught a very early Elvis Costello show at the Nashville Rooms, “were not his Buddy Holly glasses but the fierceness of the vitriol. It was the internal violence of his songs.” Costello had no Malcolm McLaren or Vivienne Westwood to kit him out, either. He dressed like the computer puncher he was. “And he didn’t try to present himself as a particularly attractive person,” Flansburgh recalls. “He was very sweaty. The street-level quality of that new era was one of the most winning things about it.”
Rock now seemed to be a place where the angry nerd, previously bound to his or her bedroom, could be a star, and this began to manifest itself in post-Punk lyrics as well. Take Dexys Midnight Runners’ “There, There, My Dear,” from their incredible debut Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (if you only know “Come on Eileen,” for shame!): “If you’re so anti-fashion, why not wear flares instead of dressing down all the same,” front man Kevin Rowland asks. Flares, like long hair, were longtime Punk targets, cultural signals that one was living in the past.
Devo, who barely fit in with post-Punk, much less Punk (much less the human race), sang “We’re through
being cool” on their 1981 single of the same name. The Violent Femmes, discovered by late Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott while the Pretenders were on tour in Wisconsin, took their very name from slang for the American high school fag or femme, although this one was not to be pushed around. This one was “angry,” as lead singer Gordon Gano threatened in “Add It Up.” During the late 1970s and early ’80s, all of these misfits were signed to and had to reckon with Punk labels (in America the Femmes were on Slash, home to X and the Germs, and in the UK they were on Rough Trade). They filled their sets with not only acoustic but furious teenage blues. “The songs were instantly appealing and so was the sound,” says Ritchie. “Still, many people at the time refused to think of us as Punk or any kind of rock music at all, because we were not electric. Of course, they were ignorant slobs who had never heard Gene Vincent or early Elvis Presley. We had a few female supporters amongst the Slash staff who played our demo and the first album tape so much that the head honchos said, ‘All right, we’ll sign them if you stop playing that shit in the office!’ We got no advance. And they always treated us like a band that didn’t deserve an advance. And we were always an enigma in England.”
And yet, once The Violent Femmes was released in the spring of 1983, it seemed to ride a mainline into the lonely, horny, frustrated teenage psyche, the part of the brain that looked out at the world through a boxlike bedroom and said, “Why can’t I join in? Why can’t people see that I am beautiful and I see beauty?” It was, and remains, rock and roll’s Catcher in the Rye.
To continue the literary metaphors, with the uncaging of the Punk-fed student bands, geeks with guitars, it was as if Piggy from The Lord of the Flies triumphed in the end. XTC’s Andy Partridge is even described by Nick Kent in an early feature as “a grown up version of Piggy.” But as lumpen and student-ish as all these bands are (with the exception, of course, of the Police’s Adonis-like Sting), all these stars are still somehow beautiful. Most likely it comes down to the genuine innocence they wielded so powerfully in their songs. “I don’t know how to put it without boasting,” Partridge told Morley in a 1980 interview, “but I think I’m quite mature and intelligent. At the same time, I’ve kept the things I appreciated as a kid in my head. I think a lot of people lose that. And they lose a big part of their personality. I still love toys.” To be young in rock and roll, you had to be griping: the archetypal angry young man. Suddenly, one was able to express displeasure, frustration (sexual and otherwise), and disaffection in a more personal and honest way, as if the diary—not agitprop—became the new wellspring overnight.
Chapter 5
I’m a Loner, Dottie, a Rebel
1982–1987
In which the Angry Young Nerds of Hollywood (inspired by those of the New Wave rock and roll) evolve into new leading men and women, and their sensitive, shy, idealistic tendencies become, with the help of rock and roll and a horrible plague, somehow preferable to those of the swaggering jock or the shrugging tramp.
Cinematically, something would began to shift in the 1980s that would result in our modern strain of box-office heroes and heroines. Back then, they were called quirky or offbeat, and many of them were relegated to the “best friend” role. Today they are simply accepted as cinema stars, and most of them play the lead.
Beginning with the very early days of the AIDS crisis, Hollywood seemed to presciently churn out more and more teen-angst- or teen-confusion-based entertainment, featuring sex-terrified boys (Tom Cruise in Risky Business) on the cusp of manhood and confused girls (Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) on the cusp of womanhood. These characters became the surrogates for a new generation of teens who were experiencing similar emotions in their real lives. It’s as if the times forced films into frankness. New Wave music, which featured on many of these film soundtracks, was a step ahead (Sparks’ “Angst in My Pants,” the Gleaming Spires “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?”), but by mid-decade, the screen stars were all Devo. Nerds were ready for their close-up.
That’s not to say that AIDS, thought of as a death sentence at this point, had any bearing on what screenwriters were churning out circa ’82, ’83 and ’84—only that some bad moon was rising; it would be confirmed in 1985 with the death of former conventional heartthrob leading man Rock Hudson and the rise of anxiety-stoking AIDS tests. Slob comedies were on the wane and openhearted sob comedies full of the new Twee princes and princesses were about to become de rigueur.
On MTV, the sexy librarian wasn’t sexy until she let her hair down, took off the glasses, and kicked it with ZZ Top or Van Halen. But in film, the librarians were slowly winning out.
Part of the reason 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High remains, three decades on, the most transformative teen film ever made is that it highlights this shift in sexual power. This is embodied by the dynamic between Robert Romanus’s slick, strutting, fast-talking Mike Damone and Brian Backer’s molelike Mark Ratner, the hapless, virginal movie-theater usher. “Rat” is the only one who gets the girl in the end, even if they still don’t go all the way. Meanwhile Judge Reinhold’s Brad, a “single successful guy,” loses his job, and, in the film’s most famous scene, is sexually humiliated by Phoebe Cates when she walks in on him pleasuring himself. And Damone, as Cates’s Linda scrawls on his locker for all to see, is just a “little prick.”
Rolling Stone journalist turned filmmaker Cameron Crowe, then not too long out of his teens himself, went undercover at a real Southern California high school to deliver the book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, then later adapted the screenplay for Universal Studios. Bronx-bred director Amy Heckerling turned Crowe’s script into a teen comic and a Twee milestone that would inform every other teen film that came later, from Risky Business to the John Hughes oeuvre. Jocks were out. Geeks and proto-Twees were in.
“Cameron Crowe’s book set the tone,” says Eric Stoltz, who appears along with future Revenge of the Nerds star Anthony Edwards as one of Jeff Spicoli’s shirtless surfer buds, refused service at All American Burger (“No shirt, no shoes . . . no dice”). “It was rooted in the reality of the characters and situations. We were lucky enough to have Cameron on set every day, and he and Amy Heckerling were intent on making something true to life, rather than formulaic.”
“It’s no huge thing, it’s just sex,” Linda reassures Stacy as she prepares to lose her virginity, but everyone, even Linda (with her mysterious, off-camera, and possibly imaginary boyfriend), knows this is a lie. Hormones drive the film. Sean Penn’s Spicoli has ripped-out Playboy centerfolds taped to his bedroom wall; the film’s resident Buddha, zinc on his nose, has lust in his heart. Like the work of Seuss and Sendak, Fast Times is both sweet and, even with its occasionally broad, sketchy humor, painfully real. “If this film has a theme,” the powerful New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “it’s sexual embarrassment.”
“I can’t help doing what feels right to me [even] if it came out as awkward or sweet,” Heckerling says. “It wouldn’t occur to me to make those kinds of moments wacky.”
Many found the fumbling dangerous. Pre–wide release, Fast Times was rewarded for its groundbreaking content with an X rating and had to be recut. “I don’t believe it was entirely because of the nudity,” Stoltz says. “It was [also] one of the first teen films to deal with abortion.”
Fast Times could also be considered the first feminist teen film. The sex scene between Damone and Stacy originally featured Robert Romanus’s full frontal nudity, and not his partner’s. Heckerling’s options were to take a trip to Washington to fight the rating or cut the scene. She eventually folded. “The Reagan moral majority was in full swing,” she says. “That was the beginning of the just-say-no era.”
Heckerling’s power was limited—for instance, she wanted much more New Wave and less Jackson Browne on the soundtrack—but she was too young to have any fear or timidity when it came to fighting with the studio to keep the film honest. She was also too close to the characters to betray them, n
ot that any of this brave behavior seemed unnatural.
“I was a young person—I was just happy to be making a movie,” she says today. “I wasn’t somebody that knew all the formulas and the inner thoughts of people running Hollywood—I wasn’t that savvy.”
As with most future Twee films, from Heathers to Heckerling’s later foray into the world of unusually sensitive teens, Clueless, the adult characters are ridiculous. This is a very common Twee trope. In Fast Times, there’s Mr. Hand (Ray Walston), who greets people with “Aloha,” and is convinced that half his student body is “on dope.” There’s Mr. Vargas, who digs lustily into cadavers and has just switched to Sanka. There are coaches, absent parents, obnoxious patrons at fast-food joints.
“I wasn’t thinking I wasn’t going to do a movie that was different than all other youth movies or anything like that,” Heckerling says. “I can only do what I come up with or feel.” It’s really the “youth” that Heckerling mentions that make Fast Times different, the literal freshness of Crowe and Heckerling and their game cast of future superstars.
“Fast Times tested horribly,” Heckerling recalls of the advance previews major studios routinely do before releasing a film. “I showed the movie in Orange County, and it was unanimous. On all the cards, they said we were horrible Hollywood people making teenagers into sluts and druggies. And this is from young people—there were teenagers telling me this!”
Risky Business, which came a year later, in ’83, covered similar ground—AIDS-age sexual terror and a good measure of values questioning: “Doesn’t anyone want to accomplish anything, or do we just want to make money?” This is the question that still baby-faced Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen, a suburban Illinois virgin bound for the Ivy League (or so he hopes), asks. “Make a lot of money,” comes the answer. Ironically, Risky Business is much artier and darker than Fast Times, with a moody Tangerine Dream track, a surplus of fantasy sequences, and public sex (on a real train with the sultry Rebecca De Mornay), but it met with none of the grief that Heckerling’s film did. It became the surprise box-office smash of that year.