1982

by Jian Ghomeshi

  But things really took a difficult turn when my father and mother came to see the show on our third night. After the play ended, I emerged from the backstage area (which was actually an indoor gymnasium near the outdoor gazebo) to find my parents waiting to say hello. My father was wearing a very proper suit and looking quite sheepish.

  “Yes, hello, Jian.” My father always spoke to me quite formally in public, even if no one was listening. “Eet was nice play,” he said. He seemed to want to leave it at that.

  “Good job, honey!” my mother chimed in exuberantly. “You were great!”

  My mother punched the air when she said “good job,” the way you do when you hit a home run or find out your teacher is sick and your class is cancelled. But I wasn’t sure about her enthusiasm. My mother was always polite, just like the way she would say “This is great!” when the Polish people next door gave us Christmas baskets we didn’t need. I knew she was likely embellishing for my sake.

  “Oh … well, thanks, Mom. Anyway, thanks for coming, you guys.”

  I didn’t want to spend too much time talking to my parents. I had spotted Mike Farnell and Tom Howard both looking at me with my family. I wondered if these older actors would think I was less cool if I were speaking with my parents. I prepared to make my escape to the backstage area. Just when I thought I was home free, my father felt the need to speak up.

  “Tell me,” he said, audibly enough so that anyone in the vicinity could hear him, “why you were wearing thees dress in the play?”

  My father could be very blunt sometimes. I don’t think he wanted to hurt me. It was, after all, a pretty good question. I was playing Tom Snout. A man. So why was I wearing a dress? Or rather, a shirt that looked like a dress. But it wasn’t what I needed to hear. Not right after the show. Not with other people around. I lashed out with my reply.

  “It’s not a dress, Dad!” I shouted in my father’s direction. “It’s a costume! You don’t understand Shakespeare. I’m sorry … if … you don’t have Shakespeare in Iran!”

  I turned away from my parents and darted across the gazebo to get my Adidas bag so I could take the bus home with some of the other cast members. I was feeling humiliated. Was being in the theatre scene really worth all this? I had tried to defend myself. But my father was right. It was more of a dress—and not a very pretty dress or an intentional one. Even worse, I had heard Wendy was coming to one of the performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with her brother, Paul. I prayed she wouldn’t make it. I never found out if she did. I surveyed the audience each night and never saw her. But either way, she didn’t mention it now at the Police Picnic. Maybe Wendy had come to the play and decided not to mention the Jesus minidress. Maybe she was being sensitive to my feelings. Again.

  With my higher-pitched voice and the impromptu mauve dress, I had inadvertently assumed a genderless look in our Theatre Troupe production. I had just turned fifteen in early June, and being seen as anything less than an adequate male was not entirely comfortable for me. I was already self-conscious about being skinny and one of the lousier players on my hockey team. Then again, gender ambiguity was all strangely apropos if you were New Wave. It made some sense to appear in drag. Albeit unwittingly in this case. New Wave culture was very much intertwined with androgyny and gender reversal. And this had become my forte. After one of our performances, Mike Farnell’s friend saw me in the communal changing area and bluntly asked me if I was gay. I wasn’t sure if it would be a good thing or not to tell this guy I was gay. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he would like it if I were gay too. I said no. But I wasn’t entirely sure. And nor would I have thought it a bad thing to be gay. Maybe the makeup and the mauve dress I had to wear as Tom Snout were a message sent from above. I certainly liked Bowie. He was a man who sometimes dressed like a woman. And I was smitten with Wendy partly because she was like Bowie. I was obsessing over a girl who reminded me of a man who dressed like a girl. These were confusing times.

  At the Police Picnic I saw that my newest role model, David Byrne, was also genderless in many ways. As Wendy and I watched him on stage, it dawned on me that he was a man who was comfortable in his skinny body and with not being particularly muscular or macho. What you need to know is that the early ’80s was a period when many artists were challenging traditional ideas about masculinity. This was especially true in New Wave culture. If men were expressing themselves as tougher guys in rock bands like Van Halen, New Wave music was about the exploration and celebration of androgyny. Guys were wearing skirts and makeup and streaked hair. At the epicentre of all this was the lead singer of a band called Culture Club. He was an enigma in 1982. We would later find out his name was Boy George.

  You know all about Boy George. First of all, you know that’s his name. George. Boy George. You know he was a guy who wore makeup and played with themes of gender stereotypes in the early ’80s. You know him as a gay man now. But we didn’t know who he was in 1982. More importantly, we didn’t know what he was.

  The debut Culture Club album, Kissing to Be Clever, was released in 1982. It featured the hit song “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” which was the third single released by the band in England but the first to come out in North America. Culture Club had an appealing pop sound that was a mixture of New Romantic synthesizers and old-school R&B and soul. They were a very good group that would be unfairly judged more for their image than their sound—although that image was very much cultivated by the band. And as you also likely know, they would go on to have several international hits in the 1980s, and Boy George would become a widely recognized star before fading away. But we didn’t know him in the beginning.

  For many in my circle of kids, our first exposure to Boy George was the video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” The singer was unlike anything we’d seen before. This person was in a white, genderless outfit, with long hair, heavy, feminine makeup, and a cute hat. The singer had luscious lips and a girlish pout and danced around through the video in a slow and seductive way. The whole subtext of this music video was that the singer was on trial for looking and being different.

  I have made a list of characters’ reactions to the androgynous lead singer of Culture Club in the video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”:

  judge shakes his head

  old man loses his monocle

  horrified young couple stops kissing

  shocked woman removes sunglasses

  arm wrestlers lose incentive to win

  woman falls off diving board into pool

  These were all reactions to the gender-ambiguous lead singer of Culture Club in the video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” It was a powerful and effective statement. The video was sending up our own reactions to this curious person. Especially given that we didn’t know who it really was. I had a few debates with Toke about the lead singer of Culture Club in late summer of ’82.

  “Dat is totally a chick. It’s an ugly chick.”

  Toke could be quite direct sometimes. Just like my father. He was convinced the lead singer of Culture Club was a woman.

  “I think it’s a guy, Toke. His voice is more like a guy’s, too.” I was not really sure myself. But it was important to maintain a debate.

  “No. It’s a girl. Dat’s a girl’s voice. A chick!”

  The debate went on for a couple of weeks. Remember, this was before Google or Wikipedia. Arguments couldn’t get settled by asking your iPhone for help. Now, you might just say to your smartphone, “Is that a chick?” and you’d get an informed response instantaneously. But we didn’t have that in 1982. We had unanswered questions that could linger for days and wouldn’t be resolved by Encyclopaedia Britannica. And in this case, even a lot of the New Wave kids at school didn’t know the answer. It wasn’t until one afternoon at Toke’s house, when his older brother, Mitch, heard us discussing Culture Club, that he told us the lead singer’s name was Boy George and that he was a man. Toke remained suspicious. But Mitch was usually an authority on these things.
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  The example of Boy George very much represents the way the world was changing for me with music and theatre in 1982. Questioning sexuality—including my own—was part of my routine, along with wanting to be Bowie. And I was not alone. Lots of the students in 213 were gay. Some of them were gay sometimes and not other times. One of the New Wave girls at Thornlea, who was a year older than me and dressed like John Taylor from Duran Duran, had told me she wished she was gay. It was odd for her to be disappointed that she was straight. Wider society’s intolerance for homosexuality ran deep at the time. But in the New Romantic milieu, being gay or bisexual was almost coveted. I had a good sense that I was ultimately oriented towards a sexual attraction to women. And I certainly only fantasized about girls. But there was something liberating about sexual orientation not being a big deal. That was what New Wave music and 213 were teaching me. And in Wendy I got to be attracted to a beautiful female and still be devoted to Bowie.

  My adoration of Bowie was related to the fact that I felt like an outsider. Bowie was the champion of the outcasts. At the end of Grade 9, I attended the commencement ceremonies for the graduating class at Thornlea. It took place in our school gym. I was there because Theatre Troupe members had a small role in a theatrical number to honour the graduating students, and I was also singing in the Thornlea Vocal Group.

  The highlight of the event was a touching duet by Mike Ford and Dani Elwell. Mike had been dating my sister and was the coolest person I actually knew. He was five years older than me but still hanging out at high school. He was in theatre and also in music. He carried around an acoustic guitar and played in the hallways. He had a beard and Coke-bottle glasses. He was widely revered for his creative talents and encyclopedic knowledge of essential trivia. He would go on to play in Moxy Früvous with me.

  Dani was one of the prettiest girls at Thornlea. But she was also super New Wave and punk. She was like a gorgeous version of Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees. Dani wore a black leather jacket and big black scarves and crimped her hair. I was in awe of her, and she could sing, too. She had played bass in a Toronto punk band called the Babyslitters when she was only fifteen.

  Mike and Dani ended the commencement ceremony with an acoustic guitar medley that concluded with David Bowie’s “Changes.” In “Changes,” Bowie had written lyrics about children being spat on as they tried to change their reality. The words in the song suggested that young people were selfaware and “immune” to the influence of the mainstream adult world.

  Hearing Mike and Dani sing “Changes” was one of the most beautiful experiences I’d ever had. It was probably partly because I was in awe of them both. But Bowie’s lyrics also moved me. I always took “Changes” as a message from Bowie to all those who saw themselves as outcasts or outsiders. He understood us. He had written that song—albeit a decade earlier—for us. Bowie was more than a rock idol. He was a role model for those who felt they were different. Whether that meant differences of sexuality, gender, artistic choices, attitude, or race, I felt like Bowie understood me.

  BACK AT THE POLICE PICNIC, Talking Heads had now launched into a frenetic song called “Life During Wartime.” Wendy and I were bopping up and down along with what seemed like everyone else at the CNE Grandstand as well as the band onstage. My connection with this creative band was becoming more profound with each passing minute. I marvelled at how it was even possible that a rock group so infused with my own interests could not have occupied my stereo and my life before now. At the point in the song when David Byrne sang about changing his hairstyle so many times he didn’t know what he looked like, I turned to Wendy and smiled. She smiled back. The fact that I was experiencing all of this with Wendy beside me was taking it from memorable to dreamlike.

  By the time Talking Heads launched into their final song, a cover version of Al Green’s classic “Take Me to the River,” I was overwhelmed. It’s a strange sensation, the moment when you discover your new favourite band. It’s like the feeling of love at first sight with your fantasy partner. Or it’s like being told you’ve won your school’s public-speaking contest for your epic speech about the Montreal Canadiens’ Guy Lafleur and you’re only in Grade 5 and you’ve beaten all the kids in Grade 6, too. Yes. It’s like either one of those two things. There is a sense that you will remember the moment forever. There is also the awareness that it will never get this good again. It may never again taste quite as good as it does the first time. But I can tell you, my devotion to Talking Heads began that day in August of 1982 and never abated.

  The summer after the Police Picnic, I would go to see Talking Heads perform outside again, but this time headlining at the Kingswood Music Theatre for their “Stop Making Sense” tour. The tour featured an outstanding theatrical stage show with three giant screens displaying iconoclastic messages. The concert began with David Byrne in a tight white jacket that would grow throughout the set until by the end he was in a giant oversized suit. The oversized suit performance is now the stuff of legend. That tour was shot and made into a movie by Jonathan Demme. It’s still one of the best concert films of all time.

  In 1983, I formed a band named Tall New Buildings with Murray and John Ruttle and some other musician friends I’d met. Unlike the Wingnuts and Urban Transit, this group was our first to play outside of school and get some real exposure, even though we were all in our mid-teens. We had a minor New Wave hit on the alternative music station CFNY and some other radio channels for a song I wrote called “Fashion in Your Eye.” And our videos got played a bunch on MuchMusic in the following few years. I would often get asked where the name Tall New Buildings came from. I would tell interviewers how I liked the name because it suggested modernity and was futuristic and it was somehow related to Toronto’s growing skyline. But the truth was that I liked the name Tall New Buildings because I knew our records would come immediately after Talking Heads in the sales bins at record stores. If you were rifling through Talking Heads albums at Sam the Record Man, at some point you would hit Tall New Buildings. That was the theory. And it worked. Any type of proximity like this was something to jump at.

  In the mid-90s, I would discover a new band that would achieve favourite status in my life and remain there to this day. They’re called Radiohead and they’re from the UK. I don’t think there has been a better band in the world than Radiohead over the last two decades. Interestingly enough, Radiohead got their name from a song called “Radio Head.” That song is from a 1986 album entitled True Stories. That album is by a band called Talking Heads.

  When Talking Heads exited the stage at the CNE Grandstand on August 13, 1982, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Wendy and I were both drenched in sweat. It wasn’t until after they’d gone that I realized I’d been laughing out loud for much of the Talking Heads set. I was giddy. I was giddy like a schoolgirl or a young man in a mauve minidress. I would have been concerned about my less than manly disposition except that Wendy seemed to be high on the same energy. Besides, things couldn’t really have gotten much better. Losing my Adidas bag felt like a lifetime away.

  When the Police hit the stage mid-evening for their set, there was little question that they owned the headliner billing. The lighting and the sound and the staging were more ostentatious and glamorous than they had been for all the other bands combined. The Police were the superstars. And there was no doubt they sounded good. Sting was in fine form, playing coy and teasing the audience between songs. He had blond, straight hair with a long bit like Wendy’s. He jumped up and down and hit all those high notes that I’d not been able to reach when I’d sung “Roxanne.” Andy Summers bounced around the stage like a Muppet on guitar. And of course, I was transfixed by Stewart Copeland’s stellar drumming.

  Mind you, for all that they were trendsetters, the Police certainly had a lot of hits. Despite their New Wave synth sounds, there was something uncomfortably commercial about the Police. They had increasingly become mainstream pop stars. I wondered why they were allowed to have massive s
uccesses with their songs but Joan Jett was not. I wondered if it had been fair that the entire crowd had turned on Joan Jett as a sellout. Forbes the punk had thrown my Adidas bag at Joan Jett because she was such a sellout. Yet the Police were now staples of pop radio as well. In fact, they were much bigger than Joan Jett. It didn’t entirely make sense. But the Police were still cool. They were still considered New Wave. Their art was still suspected to be real. The audience roared with delight.

  Watching the Police was not a letdown. That would be an overstatement. But there was nothing that any band could have done to follow the magic of Talking Heads on this day. Wendy and I maintained our position near the front of the stage and we sang along to all the familiar songs and highfived with the stubble-faced guys, who were still next to us. The Police were good. We stayed until the encores were done. During one break in the set, Wendy leaned in to me and whispered, “This has really been a great day.” She smiled, and her eyes squinted like Bowie’s eyes would.

  On the subway ride home, Wendy and I didn’t say much to each other. We agreed that Talking Heads had been the best band on the bill, and we joked about the Forbes incident. After Eglinton station, the crowded subway car emptied enough for us to share seats next to each other facing the direction of home. Wendy and I were both looking straight ahead. I was tired. I wanted to rest my head on Wendy’s shoulder. I wanted to curl up into her or have her rest her head on me. But I couldn’t. I became very self-conscious.

  I thought about how long it had been that I’d wanted to spend time with Wendy. I thought about how I’d spent most of the year hoping she would notice me in the Thornlea hallways. I suddenly became very intimidated by the thought of doing anything that Wendy might consider uncool. I wondered if I’d see her much during the new school year. I wondered if we’d continue to become close friends.