Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk

N.B. — This disc is part of the Aeroplane Flies High… boxed set.

A couple weeks ago my wife sent me an article from Columbia College Today titled “Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties” that illustrates how a campy, “retro” version of the 1950s supplanted the dull, grey realities of that decade.

A choice nibblet –

Marcus was coming to the same conclusion: The idea of the Fifties that America still holds — the happy, “greasy” Fifties — was an “invented History.” Up until 1969, quite an opposite cultural memory held sway. When Americans remembered “the Fifties,” they thought of Joe McCarthy witch hunts, of an “age of anxiety,” of the “shook-up generation” diving under their desks during A-Bomb drills, of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit selling out and Holden Caulfield cracking up, or Allen Ginsberg ’48 and Jack Kerouac ’44 too “beat” to fight back. Nothing to get nostalgic about there. In a section titled “Re-inventing the Day Before Yesterday,” Guffey describes older critics, who remembered the decade only too clearly, “shocked at the happy-go-lucky imagery” of what Horizon Magazine protested as the “newly-minted” Fifties. Cultural critics had already agreed the decade was “a national pre-frontal lobotomy.”

“The replacement of the Beat with the greaser as the emblematic 1950s rebel” had, Marcus reports, consolidated its hold on American “memory” within a very few years, by the time of Happy Days and Fonzie.

As any regular visitor to the Record Desk might notice, these sorts of concerns are right up my own personal alley. And being the self-involved type that I am, I began wondering if my own glorious work here at the Desk might be contributing to the creation of some kind of invented “Nineties.” It seems that in blog after blog I am extolling the virtues of the years that coincided with my teenhood like the worst kind of aging blowhard. And my own self-mythologizing (not just here, but also in the blood and guts “real world”) about the horrors of competitive marching band and my angsty little crushes on girls named Erin and my preoccupation with my “forgotten” sixteenth birthday which just happened to be the day that everyone found out Kurt Cobain was dead – all of this emotional bric-a-brac could be part of a pattern of justifying my own melodrama by projecting it onto the times.

I could very well be cherry picking the most maudlin, adolescent examples of ‘90s popular culture in order to build my own private “Nineties” wherein my adolescence is enshrined as pure and true. As much as turning 30 has helped me get over myself in some ways, I remain a grown man who identifies intensely with music meant mainly for teenagers. And yet I am now undeniably “old.” Perhaps my little retreat into the “Nineties” is a way to shore up my identity like those Grateful Dead fans who invented a version of the “Sixties” and never left. Maybe my so-called life was never as quintessentially “Nineties” as I like to think. Perhaps I’ve become hopelessly nostalgic in my dotage.

I’ll be your Jordan Catalano

Still, one of my very favorite this-record-saved-my-life albums is Quadrophenia, which after all is the sound of a self-aware thirty-something rocker waxing nostalgic about a youth movement he was never a part of, to which he was connect only by a calculated band-management decision to stake out the Mod audience. But still, this kind of almost-phony backwards-looking pining hits me right *there.* (Imagine that I’m pointing to the spot beneath which my heart ostensibly lurks.) Perhaps I’m the sort whose programmed to like things the most once they’re safely tucked away in the past. Maybe I just labored and self-conscious enough to like the revival of the revival most of all.

Like any crisis of conscience worth its crippling waves of existential dread, my over-concern re: my involvement with the imaginary “Nineties” sent me directly to my record collection in search of something that I could pretend was wisdom. Instead of soul-correcting insight, I found the Smashing Pumpkins.

As anyone knows, Billy Pumpkin is the patron saint of pretentious, inauthentic, careerist rock star narcissism. He also happens to have turned out a number of very fine alternarock records. In many ways – and this could just be me over-remembering the cover of “Join Together” that the band did at the Aragon show I was at – Corgan is a bit like Townshend. They both mix pop with spirituality while making blustery, over-the-top proclamations of their own brilliant intents. Also, neither man can seem to keep his band broken up.

Being a smartipanced fellow myself, I have a certain affinity for Corgan and Townshend. So it was none-too-surprising when I realized that Billy Pumpkin, too, was in the business of inventing the his own little past just like me.

Take for instance “1979,” a song that by virtue of being a teenager in the Chicago suburbs upon it’s release is pretty much THE SOUND of the “Nineties” in my mind. Still, if you can listen to the song with new ears after umpteen “Twofer Tuesdays,” you’ll realize that the song is actually a great little bit of imagined nostalgia. Young William Corgan was all of twelve in 1979. A little young to be “hanging down with the freaks and ghouls” and shaking his “zipper blues” while contemplating his own ennui and mortality. If anything, the song reads like a dorky kids hyper-romantic vision of what the older, cooler kids were up to. Pair this with the vaguely new wave but-not-in-a-late-1970s-sort-of-way arrangement and what you have is a song that “suggests” the past while not being an actual remembrance. It’s an invented sliver of time – one that was quite appealing to teenagers circa 1995 to whom the kitschy “Seventies” was the very stuff of cool.

Also look at stuff that was packaged along with “1979.” The highly-rotated video was the perfect picture of “Nineties” meets “Seventies” cool – muscle cars, combat boots, Clerks-style shenanigans, and vintagey sweaters commingle.

Couldn’t this pass for a “That ‘70s Show” pilot?

Additionally, the cover art for the “1979” single was riddled with “Seventies” signifiers like shiny outfits and roller skates and neon game room signs. It was proposing a certain then-hip conception of the “Seventies” meant to appeal to kids who in many cases weren’t even born in 1979.

In short, “1979” – a song that I strongly associate with my own made-up version of the “Nineties” – was itself a celebration of some made-up adolescent paradise set in the last days of the Carter administration.

I’m not sure if I’m any closer to having any particular kind of “answer.” I’m pretty damn sure that I’m over doing w/r/t the power of the “Nineties” as a wellspring of pop cultural good. And I know that a lot of what sixteen-year-old me thought was cool was actually a bunch of older folks trying to make peace with their simpler, happier ‘70s childhoods by turning them into myth. Rock and roll is sentimental stuff (at its core) and it allows for this kind of fairy tale creation.

Perhaps the “Nineties” are calling because they’re far away enough to feel different from the drearily grim End Times Tradeshow that threatens to be the calling card of whatever imaginary “Aughts” someone is cruel enough to come up with.

Set the ray to “Jerry,” kids. Watch the horizons.