I always knew it was a cliché, but I thought it was one that applied only to other people. The one about turning 50 and suddenly needing to relive the past? Well, shockingly, it has started happening to us.
I've written before about the punk/new wave scene in Akron and Kent, Ohio in the early 80's. It was an incredibly fun and creative time. There were bands playing just about any night of the week. Everyone was making records. Even without the internet, MTV or iTunes, we managed to keep up with all of the latest music. It was pretty much all we thought about. It was our identity.
We were all 20-ish back then, and we're all 50-ish now, so guess what naturally follows?
Reunion gigs! Yes, let's get together to hear mangled versions of all our old favorite songs, and celebrate the fact that we're 30 years closer to death. Good times!
Recently, there was an event in Kent, called, appropriately enough, "The Debacle", that brought together a bunch of balding, paunchy, middle-aged guys (there were some chicks too, although hopefully they weren't balding) for the purpose of reliving the glory days. When you could wear skinny jeans (even without the benefit of Spanx) without looking like an overstuffed sausage. When you could sport a mullet without being a redneck. When you could mosh without injuring yourself. When you ruled the world and thought you would be young forever.
One of the bands on the bill, The Somatics, was the one that my husband, Jim, was in when I met him. I used to collect band flyers and tape them up all over my room. I still have the flyer from the night we met in 1982.
Isn't it cool? And it was made without a computer.
As you can probably guess, I have very mixed feelings about the whole "reunion" concept. Although I remember those years quite fondly, I don't know if I have any desire to see most of those people again. They reside quite happily in a special box of memories in my mind, and I take them out once in awhile, dust them off, and smile wistfully. They were stars in my little universe, and I want to remember all of us as we were, before marriage, kids, mortgages, routine jobs, illness and middle-age ennui drained us of our youthful splendor and turned us into, horror of horrors, our parents.
And truth be told, I'm not so sure I want any of them seeing me again either. Do I really want that guy, who had the hots for me when I was a sweet young thing, setting eyes on me after nearly three decades and mentally registering how much weight I've gained and how much of a toll gravity has taken on my face? Granted, time hasn't been horribly cruel to me, but I'm pretty sure I don't look quite the same as I did when I was 21, and we should just leave it at that. Why let flabby reality intrude on such a great memory?
So, although Jim and I couldn't, or didn't want to, make it up for the show (partly because of work commitments, but mostly due to the fact that he hadn't picked up a guitar in more than 20 years), he put together a CD of material from one of the more popular bands of the day as a souvenir for some of his old friends. (Jim was always the guy who recorded his own band, as well as others, so he had taken his 4-track tape machine to a couple of live shows back in 1981 or 1982, not realizing that they might end up some of the only live recordings in existence.)
The band was The F Models and they were the godfathers of punk in Kent. Bill Ferrell on lead guitar, Steve Fender on bass, Steve McKee on drums, and the enigmatic "Ig Nition" (aka Iggy) on lead vocals and rhythm guitar.
The F Models (clockwise from lower left): Iggy, Steve M., Bill, Steve F.
After he made the CD, Jim asked me to listen to it to see if I could remember the title of one of the songs. I hadn't heard this music in years, and it was like being put in a time machine and traveling back at warp speed. It was literally a physical sensation of shifting time and space.
To say that I found myself back at our old hangout, JB's Down, is no exaggeration. I could see, hear and smell the place. It was a disgusting hell-hole, but there wasn't anywhere else I wanted to be back then. I could taste the watered down $.25 draft beer. I could feel the cold dampness and see the peeling paint in the so-called "ladies room". And in my mind's eye, I could see that skinny girl with her spikey pixie haircut and her ironic thrift-store clothes, dancing with a wild abandon that she would never really feel again.
All that from a few guitar chords. Brainwashed. Reagan Roulette. Fallout. God Save Chrysler. I have to say that The F Models wrote some good songs. The sense memory of music is a lot like smell, especially music that you haven't heard for a long time. It can take you right back.
But there was something else. I got decidedly melancholy as I started thinking about Iggy, one of the truly enigmatic figures in our little scene. I don't think I ever spoke to him, nor he to me. I never saw him on campus, so I'm pretty sure he wasn't a student. I had no idea what his life consisted of. For all I knew, he lived under a rock, only to magically reappear on those nights at JB's Down or "The Rat" to play a couple of sets and get blindingly, staggeringly drunk.
How old was he? Was he smart? What did he think about those of us who showed up week after week to hear him play? How did he end up in Kent? Was he a "townie"? Did he have big dreams of making it in the music business? Did he love someone? Did someone love him? I still don't know the answers to many of those questions.
One Saturday when I was in my senior year, Jim and I were at a local music store, probably looking for new guitar strings or something that has long since ceased to hold any importance for us. We ran into a friend who worked there, Auggie Teagle, who was a musician in another band (for some reason, those guys always worked in music stores or record stores), and he just sort of said out of the blue, "Yeah, Iggy killed himself last night." At first, I thought that I had misunderstood, or perhaps failed to pick up on some alternate meaning of the phrase "killed himself", because it just didn't register. What, he got really drunk and did something totally outrageous? What else was new? But, no, it meant exactly what it always means. He had taken his own life. He had hung himself.
There was an impromptu "memorial service" at JB's Down. It felt surreal, but appropriate, and ended with drinking. A short time later, there was a benefit show to help with burial expenses. It was then that I found out that Iggy was from Canada, his real name was Robert Morningstar, and that he had at least a mother and a brother. I guess that's really all I'll ever know about him.
This happened late in 1983. The punk scene was beginning to fizzle a bit anyway, and this kind of felt like our version of Altamont. I was about ready to graduate and knew that I was about to leave all of this behind, as much as I wished I could stay. In so many ways, it was a literal and symbolic ending to an era.
As Jim said to me after listening to that CD, trying to put it into some kind of perspective, "Just think of all the things we've experienced since then, how much the world has changed, how much we've changed. We've lived more years after it all than we had lived before it."
But 1983 is where Iggy jumped off. He didn't want to go any further. And yet, here I am thinking about him after all this time.
So, although nostalgia is definitely bittersweet (actually sometimes more like a punch in the gut), I'm thankful at least that I'm alive to experience it. But sadly, some, like Iggy, for whatever reason, gave up on life before they could get here.
Here is a video that Jim and I made yesterday, using one of his recordings of The F Models and some of the flyers from my collection.
Update: I just found an actual video of the F Models today. Here is Iggy, as he lives on in my memory.
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Comments
I have been reunited with my admiration for Patti Smith lately...watched Dream of Life, read Just Kids, listened to her interviewed on NPR. She continues to amaze, in her perspective of time, and her demonstration of how to move through the decades with grace and a maturing creativity.
I grew up on the North side of Lake Erie. In the early 80's I was playing in my own band. This music resonates for me. The F Motels - talented band. I hear The Stooges, The Pistols, Clash in this. The guitars rhythms and drums remind me of Teenage Head (a Canadian band from Hamilton). A steel town, kind of like our Akron, in that respect I suppose.
I'm sorry for Iggy; another casualty of the times.
Tom, I'm not sure what it means! Only the bad survive? :-)
Scarlett, thanks, as always. Akron was "Rubber City U.S.A.", so you can guess what kind of shape it's in now. And yes, you can definitely hear all those influences in The F Models' sound. Do you have any recordings of your old band? YouTube awaits... ;-)
aka, you can say that again. That's what the title of this post should have been
Anyway, I like your title for this blog. Nostalgia is painful...it is not a stretch to say you have to survive it!
Where I would disagree with you is in relation to the aging stuff. As someone a few days away from 48, I think there should be a sense of pride and celebration in aging, surviving, and still flourishing. And while I don't have all the energy I once did, I'm certainly not dead yet!
And the handbill is indeed swell.
His real name was Robert Morningstar, middle name Melvin after his father. He had a sister and a brother, both younger, both now living in Edmonton. His mother and father split up when he was 16, and his home life was pretty chaotic before and after that event. Was he smart? I certainly thought so, though often his behaviour seemed well-designed to get him kicked out of the house, school, his job, whatever. He was unconventional, and he never seemed too worried about it. His favourite movie was A Clockwork Orange.
For a while he fronted an Alice Cooper clone act. During our first gig the gallows we'd built for the purpose of hanging Iggy malfunctioned and he got some nasty rope-burn and briefly choked by the noose. He wore a neck-brace for a week. During our second and last gig (at the local Catholic girls' high-school gym) the nuns took serious offence at the hatcheting of a naked tomato-juice-filled plastic doll. They stopped the show before we could hang Iggy again but properly. The next morning our parents were treated to the following front-page headline: "Rock band told to leave stage after simulated rape-murder".
After narrowly escaping high school a couple years later we eventually moved to London Ontario (specifically because none of us had ever been there before) and started a band. It was called Go Jetter. We lived in shitty apartments and jammed until the police were called to shut us down. We squatted in a decrepit house where we set up recording gear and made demo tapes the local college station would play. We played at The York and The Blue Boot and wherever else we could get low-paying gigs and try out our material. We wrote dozens of songs, parts of which later found their way into F Models tunes. Iggy got arrested for public indecency after drunkenly (and nakedly) roaming the neighbourhood streets with a plate of spaghetti. He told the police he was "boycotting Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee".
Iggy was a front man. Cocky, unpredictable, often drunk. Hilarious at parties or dealing with hecklers. Not the best guitarist, but he wore it lower than anyone else, and he just looked Rock. Good songwriter, great singer. We couldn't keep it together in London so we headed back to the Falls, and in 1980 Iggy moved to Kent at the suggestion of a friend of a friend. I never saw him again. Chris and I moved out to Winnipeg and started a new band. Quite often over the next couple years he used to phone us on someone's "borrowed" long-distance plan. He' d tell us about The F Models and the Kent music scene and meeting Stiv Bators. He talked about getting together with us to play again sometime. He seemed fine.
When his brother called to say Rob had hung himself (with his guitar cord - is that part true?) I thought it was a put-on. There was a fair bit of bullshit involved where Iggy was concerned after all. Chris had stayed in Kent for a while in about '81, so he phoned the only contact number he had. The music store - closed due to "a death in the family". Fuck.
They had a funeral in Niagara Falls which I still wish I'd gone to. I miss him the way you miss being young. When I think of him killing himself it still makes no sense, because I thought he had a better sense of humour than that. Or maybe it was just another in a long string of drunken attention-getting stunts that went all the way out-of-control, instead of just mostly. Or he could have been far more troubled than he ever showed us. But he only ever showed us someone who wanted the music and the fun to just keep going. It was really not like him to leave the party early.