listen to me, listen to me

When I was eight years old, my paternal grandmother and my father's youngest sister moved in with us. The reasons for it were kind of complicated, but can summed up by saying that my grandfather wasn't nearly as good a scam artist as he thought he was, and when the bill for his various hustles came due he fled the state rather than face the music. It was left to my parents to pick up the pieces, which included cramming two more bodies -- an addle-minded stroke victim with delusions of misremembered grandeur and a teenage girl -- into our already cramped North Woburn apartment.

Though my parents' clashing insanities were the ultimate cause of my familiy's implosion, I've long held it was that fucked up domestic paradigm shift that sent things teetering down the path to disaster.

But the the point of explaining that chapter of my life was not to induge in a round of Dysfunctional Family Follies: The Weiss Edition, but to bring up an incidental aspect of the period. As I said, the new arrangement brought an instant older "sister" into my life in the form of my aunt, five years my senior. Prior to her arrival in the house, my musical tastes reflected those of my parents and childhood peers, which meant the Beatles, too much 70's singer-songwriter and soft rock, and AC/DC. Oh, and the Grease soundtrack, which was nigh-unavoidable in schoolyard circles back then.

My aunt was not a punk rocker or new waver by any stretch of the imagination, but she was a teenybopper who listened to a lot of rock radio at a period when bands in those genres could be heard fairly often on either the local mainstream rock stations or the fledgling local "alternative" station, WFNX. Because I was young, impressionable, and sharing the same confined space with my aunt, the songs and bands I heard then imprinted themselves indelibly on my subconscious mind. Not in a radical life- or taste-changing way -- I was too busy obsessing over X-Men comics and Dig Dug, and my punk fandom wouldn't begin until my late teens -- but in a true IPCRESS fashion, unexploded mnemonic ordnance lying dormant in anticipation of the correct trigger sequences.

It's why, when I bought a copy of The Clash's debut album in the late 1980's, I discovered that I already knew the lyrics and chord progressions by heart. It's also why, when listening to my custom new wave playlist on Christmas Eve, I felt like someone tossed me under the suppressed memory train after hearing these two tracks back to back:

The Swingers - Counting the Beat (from Counting the Beat, 1981) - Oh, what glorious cocktail of backbeats and understated elegance. Formed from the Phil (ex-Split Enz) Judd faction of New Zealand's Suburban Reptiles, The Swingers also appeared and performed in Gillian Armstrong's 1982 new wave musical Starstruck (which will be spotlighted in a upcoming post now that I have my USB turntable).

Fischer-Z - So Long (from Going Deaf for a Living, 1980) - One thing that's great about pop music is that a skilled performer can take a perfectly obnoxious concept like self-pity and turn it into a thing of genuine pathos and beauty...

...which a less musically talented person feeling similiar emotions can listen to while sobbing into his pillow, punching parking meters or writing incoherent, wounded screeds on his MySpace page.