Glory Days
(Performed at Salon Saloon's Summer Fun USA show on May 31, 2011)
At a certain point in early summer, for the first fifteen years of my life, my family would pile into our car—first a 1973 Dodge Dart with no air conditioning, then a 1984 Dodge Aires station wagon, then a 1991 Dodge Caravan with a tape deck—and begin a 970-mile drive east to my maternal grandmother’s home in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Pulling out of our driveway in Grinnell, Iowa, my parents never stopped finding it hilarious to sing “On the Road Again,” Willie Nelson’s timeless paean to the itinerant lifestyle. Even after we got the minivan and I occasionally wore them down to the point where they’d let me play early Genesis albums for the whole family’s edification, they mostly stuck to National Public Radio, scanning the lower end of the band for another affiliate every time the signal grew weak. My mother packed grocery bags full of juice boxes, cereal, and animal crackers that she’d occasionally, awkwardly proffer by thrusting them back between the seats at my younger brother and me whenever we seemed about to explode with ferocious giddiness, sending my father’s temper gauge into the red and suddenly making his threats to pull this goddamn car over seem very real indeed.
The trip, broken into three eight-hour days, combined pretty much everything a young boy found irresistible about life: cars, travel, music, hotel swimming pools, McDonald’s, and snack food. The summer of 1985, our station wagon was still very new and boasted air conditioning, an FM stereo, and grey plush interior that the Dart had lacked. But I was still relying on a very quaint form of audio technology to listen to the two tapes I owned at the time: Thriller, and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I loaded them into a boxy monophonic tape recorder my father had borrowed from his department at the college and soon enough bequeathed to me. I listened to my tapes through its built-in low-fi speaker or through one of those little white earphones that resembled a suppository and sounded about as good. But at age nine I didn’t know any better, and I didn’t care.
With my tiny music collection and primitive equipment to listen to it, I should have had an equally limited exposure to music as a child. But instead, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of almost every pop single released during the 1980s. I attribute this to three little letters that implanted themselves in our cultural consciousness on August 1, 1981 and proceeded to educate everyone in my generation about the beautiful, ephemeral, superficial musical subgenre that is 1980s pop music.
The Buggles. Phil Collins. Bananarama. Heart. Air Supply. Joe Jackson. Duran Duran. Night Ranger. Van Halen. Big Country. Level 42. The Thompson Twins. Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Men Without Hats. Eddie Grant. The Police. Cyndi Lauper. Men At Work. Peter Gabriel. Howard Jones. Devo. INXS. Madonna. U2. Wang Chung. Robert Palmer. Eddie Money. Glass Tiger. Journey. Naked Eyes. Toto. Bonnie Tyler. Def Leppard. The Jets. Hall & Oates. Prince. Janet Jackson. Weird Al Yankovic. ABC. A-Ha. Paul Carrack. Bryan Adams. Davie Bowie. Billy Idol. Paul Young. Tears For Fears.
The Transformers. The Cosby Show. Go-Bots. Corey Feldman. Corey Hart. Corey Haim. Bloom County. Laser Tag. You Can’t Do that on Television. Care Bears. Atari. The Challenger. He-Man. “We Are The World.” Voltron. Michael Jackson. Revenge of the Nerds. The Cola Wars. Michael Jackson’s hair on fire. Doonesbury. Alf. Family Ties. Cheers. Cabbage Patch Kids. Iran-Contra. My Little Pony. Live Aid. Farm Aid. AIDS. Wham! Ollie North. Nintendo. VHS. Beta. Police Academy. The Rubik’s Cube. Max Headroom. Garfield. Thundercats. Len Bias. Teddy Ruxpin. Double Dare. The Karate Kid. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Pete Rose. Mary Lou Retton. Mitch Gaylord. Ghostbusters. Chernobyl. Reaganomics.
That summer of 1985—the decade’s exact midpoint—marked what was arguably our country’s cultural and political late-twentieth century nadir, but of course no nine-year-old would perceive it that way. In the same way that our parents might wax nostalgic about the sixties, the fifties, or even the forties, my brain has automatically and meticulously ablated all but my very sweetest, simplest, most childishly hedonistic memories of the 1980s. My cultural maturation, my family’s proficiency road-tripping, MTV’s ascendancy—all of it coincided in the summer months of 1985 to create the perfect cocktail of laughter and forgetting, the best carefree summer a kid could ask for, mediated through pop music, big-screen escapism, and trips to the East Coast, to the National Air and Space Museum, to the beach, to baseball games, to tennis lessons and fishing trips, to the little shag-carpeted living room at my grandma’s house where luxuries I’d been denied back in Grinnell—like cable television, air-conditioning, and Trix cereal—were suddenly in rich abundance for four to six blessed weeks.
“Four to six weeks?” you’re asking now. Isn’t that a long time to just … hang out with Grandma in Maryland? It does seem a bit unusual now, though by dint of sheer repetition it comprised a normal summer for my brother and me for the first decade of our lives. While my peers’ families might mix it up a little—the Grand Canyon one summer, Disneyworld the next—our summer travel plans were reliably unchanging: an extended sojourn in Greenbelt Maryland, a planned community born out of the New Deal where my grandparents raised five boys and five girls in a tiny postwar row house, and where life for my brother and me was pretty much one long non-stop party of television and trips to the pool and fresh Maryland crabs and too many cousins to count.
Now that I’m an adult whose girlfriend’s various family members live in other parts of the country, and who sees these ostensible in-laws fairly regularly and loves them very much, but in whose company he might nevertheless demur at the notion of spending six weeks out of the summer (as would they), I have to wonder, as you probably are—what about my dad? How did he pass the time in his mother-in-law’s home, surrounded not just by her but by eight siblings-in-law living in relatively close proximity, sprinkled around the Beltway? How did he cope?
From what I remember, he coped by sitting in an easy chair in the master bedroom on the second floor, listening to the radio and smoking and reading War & Peace in the original Russian. On weekdays he’d hitch a ride into DC with my mother’s youngest sister, who worked at the Pentagon, and do research at the Library of Congress. He’d go to a lot of Orioles games, and took me along to some of them. He’d join my mother’s brothers at the bar at night and bird-watching or fishing in the morning. At some point in the summer, we’d drive up to the Pennsylvania coal-mining town where he grew up, then over to Allentown to visit his sister for five whole days, sometimes even a week—after all, marriage is full of compromises. My brother and I loved these trips just as much. We loved just about anything, as long as it involved cable television and cousins roughly our own age.
It was that cable television and those cousins who helped me catch up on the cultural phenomena I’d missed during my cloistered school year back in Grinnell: the pop music, the irreverent shows on Nickelodeon, the Hollywood blockbusters like Ghostbusters and Back to the Future. I remember my parents paying perfunctory lip-service to the corrosive influence of these entertainments, but they must have understood the futility of banning them outright, and the destiny of uncool freakishness to which I’d be doomed if I wasn’t allowed to consume them.
This photo was taken the summer of 1985, in my Grandma’s backyard. I am the slightly larger boy wearing a polo shirt and extremely short shorts. In the spirit of full disclosure, I also had a Care Bear. My other most prized possession that summer. is probably just out of frame, residing semi-permanently in that old mono tape player: a cassette of Songs From the Big Chair, Tears For Fears’ second album. It was dominating the charts at the time, its four hit singles saturating the radio and MTV. Tears For Fears’ songwriting genius and maximalist production values doubled down on the aesthetics of pop music I’d known up to that point, catapulting that album into my desert-island top-ten list long after the decade ended and I grew up and developed a supposedly more refined musical palette. Maybe you wrote them off as just another eighties flash in the pan, but Songs From the Big Chair holds up, and it’s still an effective litmus test for every band I’ve formed or joined: as with Sgt Pepper’s or Thriller or The Soft Bulletin, if my bandmates like that album, then we’re going to make great music together.
Songs From the Big Chair became the most durable bridge between my adult present and my childhood past, between the honest now and the idealized then. And boy, was it ever idealized. For people my age—and if you’re not my age, just bear with me, because I’m almost done—for us, the 1980s were the decade when our ages were still in the single digits, when it seemed we had all the best music, all the best toys. We had no perspective on history and we didn’t have to plan for the future. We had only the here and now. We didn’t worry about anything, not only because we were kids but because no one else of any age, including our president, seemed very worried about anything, even while so very much was going wrong. Looking back now, from the other side of 9/11 and two Bush presidencies and all the attendant anxieties and heartbreaks of being in our twenties and thirties—it seemed like, by comparison, no one had to take responsibility for much of anything in the Me Decade. Maybe that’s why the Republicans never wanted the eighties to end.
In some perverse way, we have our terrible leadership to thank for our memories and perception of eighties culture. Without Reagan, there’d be no Born in The USA; without Thatcher, there’d be no Songs From the Big Chair. The historical amnesia, deficit spending, and not-my-problem politics embraced by those in power spurred musicians and filmmakers to created these artifacts as an antidote to the rampant and scary politics of the time, and to inject them with such total saturation into the culture using delivery mechanisms like MTV and Top 40 radio.
But everything is best in moderations, and my parents’ tolerance for the schlock that sustained me had its limits. My mother still pressed books by Beverly Cleary and Isaac Asimov into my hands to somehow counteract the massive amounts of sugar, both literal and figurative, that I was ingesting every day. And there was one day, just like any other day, when I was glued to my grandmother’s TV set waiting for the video for “Shout” to air again, when I was instead treated to the brand new video for “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen’s hokey bar-band anthem to drinking one’s life away while reminiscing about better times. Back then, however, I thought it was just a song about baseball.
That was the afternoon when, for whatever reason, my father came thundering into the living room, raging at me about God forbid his sons should go outside, or God forbid they should read a book once all summer, instead of goddamn it watching this goddamn crap all day.
Maybe he was just cranky from being cooped up in his mother-in-law’s house. Maybe he was trying to quit smoking again. Maybe he just didn’t like the song. But it was fitting that it was the song playing when he erupted, because when I hear it now, at a quarter-century’s remove, I can appreciate just how fucking sad it is. “Glory Days” isn’t really about baseball. It’s about being a grown-up and knowing all your best moments are in the past, and being too lazy or drunk or broke to create new, great moments in the present. There was a time when I’d consigned myself to that point of view as well, despite how little I might have in common with Springsteen’s working-class protagonists. But I’ve gotten over it, and now recognize nostalgia for the devious succubus it is. The past wasn’t all great, and I don’t have it that bad in the present. And I no longer use that or any other eighties song as an opportunity to wallow. Most of the time.
But I can still appreciate Bruce’s sentiment.
Because see, I spent a great deal of my adult life working in the service and retail industries. And if you’ve spent any degree of time in those industries, as a worker or a consumer, then you know that they are now staffed and managed primarily by people roughly my own age, and as such their outposts are usually piped full of background music drawn mostly from the 1980s and earlier. You may never be able to enter a grocery store or chain restaurant without hearing “Glory Days” or “Take on Me” or “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” Which, even if you like those songs, as I do, that fact is pretty damn depressing. Because when I worked those jobs I'd be standing in those places attempting to earn a living—passing another eight-hour shift in grudging acquiescence to an adulthood full of difficult choices, some of them wiser than others, and trying to remain grateful that I’ve even been afforded the ability to have the freedom to make those choices—I’d be standing there when one of those songs would begin playing on and I would attempt to reconcile, for the umpteenth time that day, the surreal juxtaposition of my present surroundings with my memories of the first time I heard those songs decades ago, in very different circumstances, alongside younger cousins and aunts and uncles and a father who was still alive, with my little tape recorder at my side and my Care Bear clutched to my chest.
But what am I going to do? Live in that bittersweet limbo forever? Fuck that noise. I’ve got shit to do. And that little internal scuffle I have with myself, dozens of times per day, is simultaneously the best and worst thing about nostalgia, as I’m sure you realize. So I simply acknowledge the moment, make my peace with Bruce and the rest of them, and move on.