All This Nostalgia is Clogging My Ears

  While listening to the “80’s Hits” station on Slacker radio at work the other day, I found myself singing along to Don Henley’s Boys of Summer.  You know the one, I can see you / your brown skin shining in the sun.  You got your hair combed back and your / sunglasses on, baby.

Oh God, how I hated that fucking song.  It came out in 1984.  I was 12, and radio stations played it to death.  Then MTV gave in an extended funeral, awarding Boys of Summer Video of the Year in 1985.  Three years later, some genius decided to resuscitate the song so they could play it to death all over.  The resurrection just missed the Top Ten.  From age 12 to age 16, I couldn't turn a radio dial without being served this sit sandwich at least once.  

Growing up, I watched my parents sing along with certain songs.  I always wondered if they really liked those songs or were just reminiscing.  No really, they explained in my imagination, I’m not so lame that I think this song is cool.  I just liked being eighteen and having the whole world in front of me, and they played this song a lot at the time.

Now I have my answer.  Here I am, singing along to a song I couldn’t turn off quickly enough when I was a teenager.  Maybe it’s because the song is about passing from youth into middle age and it finally speaks to me, or maybe I just liked certain things about my teenage years, something besides pimples, peer ridicule, and feeling perpetually outside of a joke everyone else seemed to get.  Whatever it is, I see a long-haired mullet boy with braces, odd clothes, boney limbs, and love-handles shaking his head at me in disdain.

        "Boys of Summer?," he mutters.  "Really?"

Flipping through some CDs to play while I cleaned house, I came across a pink one mixed in with the A’s.  I thought it was Tori Amos’ Under the Pink.  When it came into rotation and started to play, I felt like a drunk gremlin was trying to spit in my ear.  I gave the whole disc a listen, reasoning that I’d liked it enough to buy it at some point.  When I popped the disc out, I saw it was Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker.  

Now, I didn’t much go for Windowlicker when it came out.  Until I decided to write this post, I never saw the video.  If you’re billing yourself as an artist and video is your medium, bring it, but don’t fool around in the studio and tell me it’s music.  That came out pretty fucking cool; let’s put it on CD!  I threw it in the trash, because life’s too short.  The video?  Definitely worth a peep or two. 

I’ve listened to a disc and trashed it once before [POTENTIAL EAR-VIRUS WARNING], Chumbawumba’s Tubthumper.  You might know it for the single “Tumbthumping,” the one that goes, I get knocked down / but I get up again.  You’re never going to keep me down, on and on until your head implodes, a song on more worst-of and most-hated lists than I care to name here.  

It should be noted that I loved the shit out of Tubthumper when it came out in 1997, and played it to death for a few months (usually skipping the annoying single).  Then I heard it last year.  That’s what pop in the nineties was like?  Oh, dear lord, no.

I think my favorite you can’t go back (or “don’t look back, you should never look back” as Don Henley would say) moment came on my birthday, in 2009.  In the middle of a divorce, celebrating my first adult birthday as a single guy, I scheduled an array of events.  I didn’t expect everyone to come to every event, but I figured with four to choose from, my friends would find time for at least one.  It worked like a charm, and I had the best time.

After opening night of Where the Wild Things Are, we found ourselves trapped in a line of cars.  Inching our way around the parking garage, we decided it would be fun to play a CD I’d been given at the bowling alley a few hours before- Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite.  I still think it was a gag gift, but G insists she went to a thrift store and spent her hard-earned dollar on a genuine piece of nineties nostalgia just for me.  

We popped the CD in and were transported back in time nineteen years.  Trapped in the car, there was no escape.  Between signing along with the dated music, our running commentary, and the heavy emotions I’d been dealing with for the better part of a year, I couldn’t stop laughing.  I laughed until it turned into a fit.

“Man down!  Man down!” Amanda yelled from the backseat, while tears of laughter rolled down my face.  

I left that CD in Hilldawg's car, but it’s still one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever gotten.  

Finding EO

As I mentioned, Becky and I went to see the re-release of Captain EO at Epcot Center.  The first thing you see on screens outside the theater for Captain EO Tribute is, as the voiceover carefully points out, “the original introduction, exactly as it appeared in 1986.”  This let’s you know the movie itself is as dated as Aqua Net Hairspray.  

Seeing video from the eighties (and I mean genuine eighties, not The Wedding Singer or Blow) is like watching Japanese games shows- there’s an I-can’t-possibly-be-seeing-what-I’m-seeing splendor to the whole enterprise that makes it hilarious and cringe-inducing all at once.  I offer one example, a man who we assume is a formerly-human victim of the Supreme Leader.  Sentenced to be a robot frozen into a pillar, he’s struck with the awesome power of Caption EO’s love / song / life force and transformed - much to his astonishment - into this guy:

I'm like, totally human again.  Let's dance about it!

As a film, the in-theater smoke and lighting effects were precursors to 4D films like Muppet Vision 3D, It’s Tough to be a Bug, and Honey, I Shunk the Audience.  The design of the Supreme Leader, an unrecognizable Angelica Huston suspended in cables as a kind of cybernetic spider, led directly to Star Trek’s Borg Queen.  A few years removed from Thriller, the moves are very zombie-dancerific, and we get to see Michael Jackson's signature Moonwalk.  

The thing is, my inner thirteen-year-old didn’t care about the film; he cared about the phenomenon.  

When EO first came out in 1986, it was what The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is to Universal today.  People didn’t buy tickets to Magic Kingdom to see Magic Kingdom, they bought tickets to Magic Kingdom because it was the only way to get into Tomorrowland and watch Michael Jackson as Captain EO.  Many people waited for hours, watched the show, then got back in line to wait for the next showing.  Some extra-dedicated fans - probably the same ones who petitioned for Caption EO’s return - spent entire days at the Magic Kingdom that way.

I was a month shy of turning fourteen, living in Syracuse.  We were not poor, but my family didn't have money to travel.  Every night for weeks, news footage showed lines of people waiting to get into Captain EO.  Looking at still frames in the newspaper, watching the making-of documentary, listening to the few classmates who had been say it was better than Thriller, I knew the movie itself was something I’d never see.  Eventually Jean Claude Van Damme made Bloodsport, and I stopped caring.  

Bring me EO, and I will punch him.

I’m so glad I finally got to see Captain EO.  Watching Michael Jackson boss a team of robots and fuzzy aliens around (the only crew who could believably take orders from him anywhere outside of a recording studio), wake up from a space crash covered in garbage composed entirely of fake rubber food (most expensive film per-minute at the time and plastic eggs-over-easy is the best you’ve got?), and seeing magical dance moves transform menacing robots into extras from an Olivia Newton John video was the hilarious high point of my day.  

Does that mean I didn’t miss much?  I don’t know.  Had I gone in 1986, my gawky, braces-wearing, mullet-sporting boy-child would have loved every frame of Captain EO.  I would have  dressed as Captain EO for halloween, and been every bit as believable a Space Captain as Michael Jackson.  

Except I can’t Moonwalk.