Revisionist History and 80's Records
1980s group Book of Love is back to touring. Not sure anyone saw this coming.
I do know the in '86 they released a perfect album. As I love to say, I think everyone had the tape or record. I’m 100% sure I bought the record, cassette, and I eventually bought the CD. It was that kind of thing.
A friend of mine sent me a pitchfork Link, which was a re-glazing of the record. They've been notoriously way off base when doing these older record reviews. They’re so of today and un-understanding of what it was like back then.
In my band Daphne Falls I was keyboards. It was honestly extra, but then the bassist and the drummer left, and now I’m playing bass and drums via MPC with light synth over the top, and as it always does, me coming from this area is really hitting home, which I believe I talked about yesterday or the day before. You cannot get it right-right without having been there.
By the time I knew what listening to my own music was, groups like Led Zeppelin were on the way out. Although I was essentially experiencing that music near real time—it wasn’t really so—but ’78 on, you bet I was paying attention, even though I was young.
Book of Love came out in ’86. This would’ve hit me at 14, 15. I didn’t have anything at all besides music at that point. We also had teen dance clubs, which I was surely hitting at this point. We would have heard multiple cuts for this each night.
It's is one of those records where I can close my eyes and go through the old music time portal and get right back to THE feeling.
I’m sure it sounds a bit corny today, and the Pitchfork review was all about people’s sexuality in the band. Fact: if you played synthesizers back then, we just assumed you were gay and that was it. We didn’t care.
I think today’s reading of the ’80s is very much revisionist, as if it was a bigger deal than it was. Once we got older, maybe it turned into a bigger deal. In junior high, I realized there were gay people. In high school and college, I knew who they were. Post-college, I worked in restaurants and had a roommate come out to me. I was sympathetic at the time, but in my head I was going, no shit—that was just the way it was.
We hit the gay nightclubs. Whatever—we went because they were more fun. Same with the record stores downtown.
Gay group singing about love, and that was enough. The ones that sang about gay sex, we just maybe didn’t connect with—except for Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Dead or Alive.
The point of it is, it just wasn’t a thing, and you can’t go back and make it a thing and revise what it was like at the time.
I remember reading a recent-ish article about the Pixies and they were talking about how underground they were—total bullshit. They were on the cover of every issue of Rolling Stone. I think it’s all they talked about. They got some MTV play, but we really got into it because of the articles.
It’s like back then, if you wanted to hear Soundgarden, you could read a little bit about them, but if you wanted to hear them, you just had to go buy the record. That’s how it was.
I don’t know if all this revision and stuff makes me mad or sad, but you just have to be real careful about what you read and what you think. I’m not sure what the point of that Pitchfork article was other than to support that these people are touring.
It’s an amazing album. I’m not sure how they’ll pull it off live—it’s very simple—and I hope they don’t add stuff to it. And if they get close, I’m going to see it. I love the music.
"Holds up." That's a long as the article needed to be, as a friend suggested.