1982

by Jian Ghomeshi

  On the second-last day of Rush’s practice time at New Media Studios, the unthinkable happened. At the end of another shift of sitting in the sun by the fence with our Adidas bags, we saw two men come out of the back of the studios and head towards us. It was Geddy Lee and a taller-looking blond guy. It didn’t take us long to realize it was guitarist Alex Lifeson. Toke started whispering under his breath. “Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!” We stood at the wire fence, the top of which came to our chests. We were both frozen as the Rush members approached.

  Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson walked right up to us. Geddy spoke first.

  “See? These are the guys who’ve been sitting out here each day,” Geddy said to Alex. Then he turned to us. “Right, guys?”

  “Um … yeah,” I replied. I had become very shy. No matter how long we’d been sitting outside the fence, we still hadn’t adequately prepared for this moment. Nor was it really possible to.

  “Rush!” said Toke. No one understood why he said that. He seemed a little bit in shock.

  Now Alex Lifeson spoke.

  “Well, that’s really cool, guys. Thanks for hanging around. You want us to sign those?”

  Toke and I had almost forgotten that we were holding copies of our Rush albums, Moving Pictures and 2112.

  “That would be really cool.”

  Before we knew it, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson had each signed their name on our Rush albums. Then they both got into Geddy’s car and drove away. As they were leaving, Alex waved at us. We waved back.

  After almost three weeks of a musical pilgrimage only ten minutes from our homes, Toke and I had met a couple of our musical heroes. Rush were better than just a big rock band. They were nice guys. My faith in music and my idols was never stronger. I wondered what kind of car Bowie would have driven into that parking lot. I wondered if he would have signed all of my Bowie records. I imagined he would.

  “Dat guy … Alex Lifeson,” Toke said. “Ee’s great.”

  8

  “ONCE IN A LIFE TIME” – TALHING HEADS

  Rock concerts can change your life. You have to trust me on this. They really can. They can also be boring. Just like REO Speedwagon albums released in the 1980s. Boring. So it is with concerts. There are concerts that are mundane, or predictable, or a waste of money. But sometimes rock concerts can change your life. And when they do, it’s magic.

  Wendy and I were still jammed in the middle of a sweaty crowd as afternoon turned to evening at the Police Picnic in August of 1982. Amidst the pushing and excitement, we’d somehow managed to maintain our real estate on the floor only about twenty rows away from the main stage. In a gathering of forty-five thousand fans at the CNE Grandstand, our positioning was actually pretty stellar. Not bad for an aspiring New Wave kid and a diminutive blond girl with a Bowie-like glow. I wondered if Wendy was impressed with how close we were to the action. I wondered if she credited me for our positioning. And I wondered if she was thinking of us as a team the way I was.

  The MC guy had now returned to the stage.

  “Okay, everyone, please be patient! Please, you guys. We’ll be back in just a few more minutes with … Talking Heads!”

  There was a roar of approval from the massive stadium of punters at the mention of Talking Heads. This must have come as some relief to the shell-shocked MC guy. He looked a little desperate. His job was to calm the restless crowd after the near mutiny that had just taken place, and simultaneously to get us revved up for the next act to hit the stage. Mind you, everyone knew the next band would go over better than Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. It couldn’t get much worse in terms of audience reaction. The promoters were probably crossing their fingers, hoping the show would get back on track.

  It had been almost forty minutes since the premature end of the Joan Jett set and the debacle that had cost me my red-and-blue Adidas bag. I was no longer in possession of my jean jacket or my new Walkman or my hair gel or my mix tapes featuring the Police and the Beat and Heaven 17. All of those items were gone forever. But Wendy had been really sweet. She kept giving me affirming looks. That is, she kept giving me affirming looks from underneath that longer bit of straight blond hair that flopped in front of her face and sometimes covered one eye. As I might have mentioned, she had a short haircut with a longer bit in front like Bowie. And she had sparkling eyes. And I now realized she had kind eyes. And I noticed she was smiling at me a lot, too. Maybe it was to inspire me to smile as well. This was nice. But it was also a bit of a surprise. Smiling was not always very cool. Not in 1982. It was very controversial to smile in 1982. Siouxsie, from Siouxsie and the Banshees, would never be caught smiling.

  That wasn’t very New Wave. Or punk.

  To be clear, the non-smiling disposition was not limited to Siouxsie and her band, either. It was much more of a widespread epidemic. New Wave artists were considered to have more credibility if they were brooding. At least, that’s what I’d concluded by the end of Grade 9. Smiling would undermine the idea that a New Wave artist’s life was hard, and dark, and goth, and serious. Hardship was an important part of what it meant to be New Wave. It was essential to communicate pessimism at every turn. When you heard Phil Oakey from the Human League sing in 1982, did he sound like he was smiling? No. Of course he didn’t. And neither did he smile in his videos. Smiling was superficial and preppy. Being preppy meant being well off and content and wearing bright clothes and having dodgy mainstream artistic interests. Preppies might regularly smile. Cool people did the opposite. The theatre students in 213 who were considered the real deal and only wore black didn’t smile much. Well, they might smile if they had to play a role from another time period. That is, if they had to act a role from an era when people smiled. Like in the old days, when life was less serious and people didn’t have thick eyeliner and synthesizers. But otherwise real theatre types didn’t smile in 1982. Just like New Wave bands.

  I have made a short list of New Wave acts from the early 1980s that featured members who would never be seen smiling:

  Siouxsie and the Banshees

  the Cure

  New Order

  Depeche Mode

  Duran Duran

  Ultravox

  As you can see, there were many cool New Wave bands that refused to smile in 1982. None of these groups had members who were allowed to smile. Not at that time. They would look very strange and out of place if they smiled, because no one else did. Sure, there were a few exceptions. The English Beat were allowed to smile sometimes, because they were partly ska. Playing ska music meant they were happy. So that was an exception. They jumped up and down because they were so happy. And then there were some bands, like Spandau Ballet, that were originally cool when they didn’t smile but then started to lose their credibility when they decided to begin smiling. As Spandau Ballet began to smile, they also became preppy and tanned and sang the saccharine and emotional saxophone ballad “True.” By then they were no longer cool. Obviously.

  But Wendy could smile. She made it okay. Wendy could smile without being uncool. It was actually very nice. And I knew that Bowie would smile on occasion as well. I had seen a vintage photo of Bowie smiling when he was onstage at Boston Garden in 1978 during his “Berlin” period. This was when he was making some very serious music about his drug addiction and beating his drug addiction. You’d think that Bowie would only be brooding at that time. He would have had good reason to brood. But even then, Bowie would smile sometimes. I assumed Bowie was above a lot of these conventions.

  On the floor at the Grandstand, I was quite sure Wendy was smiling because she wanted to put me in a good mood after the Adidas bag situation. I could tell Wendy was attempting to be compassionate about my loss. But she was also pushing me to move onward and forget about it all for the sake of the rest of our night.

  “It’s just a bag, right?” she’d said in the aftermath of Forbes the punk launching my prized possession at Joan Jett. “It’s not a big deal. Just stuff, right?”

  I knew what she mea
nt. And she was not wrong. It was probably more mature not to care about “stuff.” But Wendy really had no idea how important my Adidas bag had been. It was a shock when Forbes had raised my bag above his mohawk head and thrown it at the stage. And now Forbes was no longer anywhere near us. He’d graduated to terrorizing other members of the audience. Forbes had enough punk cred to avoid repeatedly picking on the same kid.

  Odd things can happen as a result of unforeseen events. Now that my Adidas bag was gradually becoming a memory, I was filled with a strange new sensation. I began to feel okay about no longer having it in my possession. It was not fun to lose my goods, but I wasn’t as devastated as I thought I’d be. The Joan Jett incident had actually rendered me less freaked out about the whole day. You might think that was strange, too. You might think it’s the opposite of what would happen. But in a way, I felt free.

  Experiencing a loss can make you forget about putting on airs. Maybe that’s what happened after I lost my Adidas bag. Or maybe it was a genetic predisposition to react calmly to catastrophe. My father had a knack for bringing calm to a storm. He could react with impressive composure when truly horrible things went down. When I smashed his Buick outside of Unionville High School a few years later, he had every right to scream at me, but he didn’t. He had every right to be really angry, but he wasn’t. Immediately after the collision, I was worried about what my father’s reaction would be. I had totalled his Buick. And my father’s Buick was big, and very long, even longer than a Cadillac. My father loved his big Buick. And bigger was better in the 1980s. But when I got him on the phone from the school office to explain that I’d been in an accident and that it was my fault and that his big Buick was now wrecked, he reacted with surprising serenity.

  “You are okay?” my father asked softly after taking a breath.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. But, Dad, the car …”

  “If you are okay, this ees most important theeng,” my father said, calmly cutting me off. Then he added in a reassuring tone, “Don’t worry about thees car. We can fix thees.”

  My father could be calm when we needed him to be. Maybe that had rubbed off on me.

  It certainly was odd for me to be at peace without my long-time material companion—my Adidas bag. But this was exactly what transpired. Up until the late afternoon at the Police Picnic and the Joan Jett thing, I’d been self-conscious about the way I was looking and acting with Wendy. I’d been very focused on trying to be cool and anxiously hoping she’d like me. But losing the Adidas bag had somehow made me forget much of that—at least for a few hours. It was strangely liberating. It was like the way those Buddhist guys figure themselves out and learn what’s important in life when they give up everything they own. The Buddhist guys have a revelation when disposing of their possessions. The Buddhists are really impressive when they do that. Or maybe it’s the Hindu guys. Well, I can’t remember which, but the point is, I was just a boy who had recently turned fifteen named Jian, standing at a concert and waiting with an older girl named Wendy for the next band to play. That’s it—nothing more dramatic or less. And no more fake-leather baggage. Just like Buddhists. It was an inspiring realization. Not that I didn’t still want to be Bowie. I did. Maybe I just wanted to be Bowie mixed with more of me now. Before the end of this day, I would have another revelation, too. I would discover something very magical. It was all about to happen. And I could not have anticipated what I was going to find.

  During the prolonged break between Joan Jett and Talking Heads, I asked Wendy if she would like a drink. She told me she would like that very much, and I headed off through the crowd in pursuit of refreshments. I should explain that by “a drink,” I mean a Coca-Cola. Actually, I mean two Cokes and some pretzels—the large kind. I know that “a drink” sounds like alcohol. That’s why I said it. That would be cool. But this wasn’t alcohol. And whether it was alcohol or not, I liked the idea of taking care of Wendy and showing her I could assume control. Besides, they didn’t sell fancy foods and drinks at concerts in 1982. They only offered basic items like Coke and pretzels. Today, they might include sushi. Today, they might sell various packages of sushi rolls and sashimi at inflated prices at concerts. But we didn’t know what sashimi was in the ’80s. Most of the fish you bought in a Toronto restaurant was cooked or fried back then. And you probably wouldn’t buy fish at a concert. It would be odd to be carrying around fish at a concert in 1982. They just had pretzels at the Grandstand. And Cokes.

  I still had some cash. Fortunately, I’d put money in the front pocket of my black jeans earlier in the day rather than inside the dearly departed Adidas bag. I’d done some calculations and was satisfied that I had enough to buy Wendy and me some non-fancy refreshments and pay for us both to get home on the subway. I was feeling more at ease now. I found the concession stands and got in line to buy the Cokes and pretzels.

  I was standing just behind two goth guys with heavy eye makeup and black cloaks. It seemed strange to see goth guys buying pretzels. I’m not sure why. But you probably know what I mean. I think you do. You wouldn’t really expect goth guys to eat. Or at least, you wouldn’t expect them to eat concert pretzels. I don’t really know what the alternative would be, but that was the image I had of goth guys in the summer of ’82. Non-eaters. Maybe I thought real goths would have some rule confining them to consume only cool and gross things, like human blood or imitation human blood. I wondered about this as I stood in line at the concession stands at the Police Picnic. Maybe these guys were fake goths or young recruits on a goth apprenticeship program. Maybe that’s why they ate pretzels. One of the goth guys had a Bauhaus T-shirt on, and he didn’t look very happy—just like his heroes. Bauhaus was another band full of members that weren’t allowed to smile.

  I made my way back to Wendy with the drinks, pushing through punks and sweaty New Wave fans. I was experiencing a new excitement. I debated whether I should try to put my arm around Wendy during the next band’s performance. It would be a big move. Maybe we were ready for that step. I wasn’t sure how people made such decisions. But things seemed to be going well.

  Coming back, I was reminded that our position on the floor was remarkably near the stage. As I approached the place where I’d left Wendy, I spotted the older stubble-faced guys in the cut-off English Beat T-shirts who’d been standing next to us earlier. Then I saw Wendy amongst them too. The stubble-faced guys were talking with her again. They were sharing a smoke. Wendy looked cool when she smoked. She looked intelligent and introspective. The main stubble-faced guy— who was very tall—was speaking with his face quite close to Wendy’s. I figured he’d probably offered to light her cigarette. He’d also said something that made her laugh. Wendy’s eyes squinted a lot when she laughed. It was like Bowie. The main tall, stubble-faced guy had his legs planted squarely on the ground and held his cigarette in one hand while he hooked the thumb on the other hand in his jeans like a gunslinger. He looked like a real man.

  Our prime minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau, had also been known to stand like a gunslinger. He knew karate. I wondered what I would look like if I attempted to stand like our prime minister. I didn’t think I’d be very believable as a gunslinger. I tried to imagine the way Bowie would stand if he were there. I adjusted my body and my expressions to appear more Bowie-like. I had actually started doing this over the previous year anyway. I carried myself based on images of Bowie I’d seen. New Wave was about the music and the culture and even the aesthetics, but it was also important to consider the way you held your body. At least it seemed so. I knew Bowie moved in an impressive way, but I had no idea he had practised this. I had no idea he had begun studying back in 1967 under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp, an abstract mime who was also a dance instructor. I didn’t know he had then learned how to move onstage and how to help reveal a song’s meanings through movement and lighting. I knew nothing of any of this. I would learn it all later. I just knew that Bowie carried himself in a cool way. And whether that was New Wave or not, I’d taken to t
rying to physically copy what Bowie did.

  There were many ways to look like Bowie by the early 1980s. Sometimes, I would lift my shoulders up and slightly bend my left leg like on the cover of the album David Live, recorded in Philadelphia in 1974. That was a more passive position, so I would do that if I was standing and waiting for someone. Or other times, I would scrunch up my face like I was about to sneeze, the way Bowie did in the video for “Fashion.” I’d seen the video for “Fashion” on The NewMusic on Citytv. It was a song from his Scary Monsters LP, which had been released in 1980. I don’t know why Bowie made that scrunched-up face in the video. He probably didn’t have to sneeze. But the fact that he’d made that face meant it was cool. So I tried to do that, too. That’s the thing about being a trendsetter. You can do anything odd and it will be cool. It will become something that others want to do. Maybe Bowie was aware of this. Maybe he had a laugh with his mates about the fact that there would be a fourteen-year-old boy copying that scrunched-up face a couple of years later just to look like him. Maybe. But when Bowie did these things, they really did look cool.

  I truly had no resemblance to David Bowie, but I sometimes imagined I did. I imagined this even though his skin was very pale and mine was olive brown, and being pastywhite was part of being New Wave. But it helped that I was skinny. I was really skinny. Just like Bowie. Mind you, I still had more of a circular Middle Eastern face. I got that from my father. Bowie had chiselled features. Wendy also had chiselled features. Just like Bowie. I always wanted chiselled features, but that physical trait would never be in my repertoire. I couldn’t get much skinnier than I was, and I still had a round-looking face. You see, along with being an olive-brown colour, the cherubic face was another cruel trick God played on Middle Eastern guys so we’d be destined to be less New Wave. But at least my body was very thin. That was one way I could be like Bowie.