It was the summer of 1981 and I had just completed my freshman year at Pitzer College in Claremont. My Dad was still living in Brussels, Belgium, my older sister was in a small apartment in San Francisco and my older brother was living with a roommate in San Diego. My Mom had passed away the previous May and I was a bit adrift. Thankfully my father had a fraternity brother from his days at Stanford in the late ‘50s living in Long Beach and they agreed to take me in for the summer, I have been a Long Beach resident ever since.
That was when I met Scott, he was their youngest son and a little older than me. He was home for the summer from his sophomore year at Stanford and also present was Scott’s girlfriend, Kathleen. She was from New York, Greenwich Village. Of many memories that summer, one that has a recurrence is the sound of Kathleen; she loved the group Squeeze and through the summer I too became quite a fan of the group and its music. During the period other British groups were once again invading America; Dire Straits, Sex Pistols, Ramones, The Beat, and more were filling the air waves of KROQ and causing kids like me to buy albums. Hard to believe but many reading this today do not remember the arguments of whether Maxell or TDK was a better tape; nor do they know that a Maxell 90 minute tape could get an album plus two or three songs on each side. Most of my friends did not have tape players in their cars and the Sony Walkman was a luxury. We taped our albums and traded them with friends. I had a couple of tapes that were Squeeze songs and albums. To this day when I hear “Black Coffee In Bed” or “Annie Get Your Gun” or “Good Bye Girl” I think of Kathleen and Scott and that summer.
On Wednesday night Leslie and I went with her sister and brother in-law to The Orpheum in LA to see Squeeze in concert. If you want to validate you are middle aged, go to a concert for a band that you were introduced to over 25 years and 25 kilos ago. Because of the strong memories that the sound of Squeeze has created within me, attending the concert really allowed me to compare where my life has gone since 1981, and also that of my fellow mid-to late forty and early fifty year olds. Allow me some comparisons observed last evening.
To start is the start; an 8:00 show is much better for me today if it is 8:00 AM and not PM—I get up early and generally am asleep by 10:00 after a brief nap on the couch. When we arrived at 8:00 I was on stimulants, as I probably would have been in 1981, but instead of perhaps a few drinks to get me in the mood I was on two Diet Cokes and some Excederin to have some caffeine in me so I could stay awake through the sets.
Surveying the crowd, my peers, my generation, I first noticed that the crowd was whiter than the Republican Convention in St. Paul last week. Middle aged, Southern Californian, white at a rock concert for a group whose lyrics we learned in our early twenties. Most of us could not remember what we had for dinner the night before but we knew, “And I feel like William Tell, Maid Marian on her tiptoed feet, pulling mussels from a shell” whatever the hell that ever meant we sang along. The crowd in 1981 would have had Levi 501’s, on Wednesday we were in Relaxed Fit jeans and Dockers. There would have been a fair share of ponytails back when, and there were on Wednesday as well, except with balding foreheads and grey hair—those not using Grecian Formula; some chose to forego the ponytail and go with the comb-over instead.
In 1981, before the no smoking laws in California, The Orpheum would have been replete with the smell of clove cigarettes and pot from Mendocino; in 2008 the scents were of expensive perfumes and cologne and a few guys who smelled vaguely of the cigars from Cuba they were smoking out front. Undoubtedly the drugs of choice for my fellow concert goers were not cocaine, pot and mushrooms from the ‘80s but rather Propecea, Viagra and estrogen—our drugs in the ‘00s.
A guy by the name of Jim Bianco opened for Squeeze; I liked his sound and his presence but his lyrics were a bit wacky—so I decided to read the Wall Street Journal On-Line on my Blackberry and just listen to the music; nothing says middle-aged like the WSJ Opinion pages at a rock concert, eh? At one point early in Bianco’s set someone in the crowd yelled “Freebird” and it struck me that we were closing down high school dances to that Lynyrd Skynyrd classic before Bianco was born—maybe before his parents were born.
In a room filled with people who had AARP cards in their wallets and bifocals on their faces, it is getting harder to read our tickets to find our seats, we saw none of what I presume the twenty-something set of concerts goers look like. There were no tattoos or piercings and plenty of sagging breasts (“they are natural honey—you get them feeding kids and growing old,” Leslie told me) on women and double chins on guys with untucked Spooner shirts over bulging bellies—there are those 25 kilos. While women spoke about sales at Toys R Us and the men spoke about mortgage rates we all anticipated hearing a band that would transport us back to our more carefree days before carpools, slumber parties, ballet rehearsals, mortgage payments and 401(k) performances. Some wore earplugs and some had hair plugs, but we all had a desire to see a band from our youth plug us into our memories.
And so we joined together, filled with blood pressure medicine, Metamucil, and Lean Cuisines and sang about stains on our notebooks and black coffee in bed, albeit decaf—we made it through the heartbreaks of first loves, through the grind of starting our careers, through the nervousness of becoming parents for the first time and through saying good bye to our children as they entered kindergarten. We celebrated being adults still able to remember being kids, and danced the goofy moves I call 8th Grade Boy dancing, shouted mumbled and misspoken lyrics and cheered the sound of our memories.
I haven’t seen Scott in almost nine years and Kathleen in over twenty-five—since they broke up while still in college. But I saw them both Wednesday night at The Orpheum; a little grayer, a little thinner on top and thicker down below, wrinkles that don’t go away when the smile stops—they were there and it was the summer of 1981, we were in our early twenties without a care in the world.
There’s a stain on my notebook
Where your coffee cup was
And there’s ash in the pages
Now I’ve got myself lost
I was writing to tell you
That my feelings tonight
Are a stain on my notebook
That rings your goodbye
Squeeze – “Black Coffee In Bed”
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