Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

  What I didn’t comprehend, and wouldn’t for years, is that America was the only country in the world where anybody liked the Fixx or A Flock of Seagulls. Despite the fact that they seemed like certifiable English new-wave groups, they had no fans back home. Not until I went to college, and met people who actually came from England, did I grasp the gap between what English people like and what Anglophile American teen twits like. “I Ran” didn’t even make the Top 40 in the U.K., and the only time they came close to a real hit there was “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You).” But in the United States, they had that exotic appeal of being an English band, and we imagined hordes of foxy British mod girls chasing the Flock down the street. It was painful to realize that this had never happened to A Flock of Seagulls, and therefore was that much more unlikely to happen to any Flock of Seagulls fan.

  Everybody remembers the hair. They were the first famous rock group ever to have started out as hairdressers—and they definitely saved their best work for themselves. Even a big fan of their music, like me, has to concede the point that these days, they are remembered mostly because of the coiffures. That’s only fair, because the hair helped get them noticed, and it’s the main reason they sum up the Bad Hair Era for so many people. If you’re making fun of somebody for having new-wave hair, the words “You! Flock of Seagulls!” are going to come up. John Doe of X accused them of making money with “a haircut and a disco beat.” The hair made them a legend, but it trapped them in an image they could never escape. It became a peroxide prison camp.

  My friends’ band opened for A Flock of Seagulls once in the ’90s, in Richmond, Virginia. But I didn’t go because I suspected it would be depressing, and apparently I was right—whoever was in the Flock at that moment was reportedly dour and hostile to my friends. The Flock had heard so many nasty jokes, they had the wariness you often see in ex-celebrities, where they always suspect there’s somebody in the corner talking shit. That’s a sad thing in itself. Like Scott Baio’s reality show where he revealed that whenever he’s in public, he assumes people are making fun of him, and he goes ballistic if he thinks he hears the word “Chachi.” How sad is that? But you can see how it happens.

  When you see the Flock of Seagulls guys on TV now in any kind of ’80s retrospective show, they’re wearing baseball caps, as if to say, “This is what you have done to us. You took all the fun out of hair for us. We have shaved our domes as penance. Happy?”

  If you watch their videos now, you can see it in their eyes. They sang “Space Age Love Song” because they suspected outer space was the only place they would ever find the right girl. I hope they found her somewhere.

  In the video for “I Ran,” they stand on a tiny soundstage that seems to be draped in Hefty bags. They have a couple of mirrors and some smoke, as well as two ladies wearing their own Hefty-bag ensembles. When I was seventeen, I thought this video was a conceptually bold statement about technology and alienation. But now it looks like a public-access production of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But I still love it. And I still love them—for helping me blend into that crowd and feel, for the first time, like I was meant to be there. You can kill the dream—but you cannot kill the hair.

  CHAKA KHAN

  “I Feel for You”

  1984

  Karaoke and the ’80s are basically the same thing. Nobody knows why exactly, but it’s true.

  You know what else is true? We’re in a basement karaoke bar on Avenue A with a hot microphone, cold vodka and the lights out. I am Chaka Khan. I am Taylor Dayne. I am Sheena Easton. My sugar walls stand higher than yours.

  “He said, Honey, what’s wrooong with you?”

  Ally presses the buzzer on the wall to summon the waiter back with more drinks.

  “Nations go to war over women like you.”

  I always end up doing the Sheena Easton songs, the really slutty ones. If I don’t punch them into the machine myself, Ally will punch them in for me. I can’t help it.

  “Strut! Pout! Put it out!”

  The waiter takes too long with the drinks. But we’re not going anywhere.

  “Come spend the night inside my sugar walls!”

  We always seem to crash at Sing Sing in the East Village with our fellow karaoke-whore friends. Everybody does songs from the ’80s. Ally does LL Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali,” rapping about hitting on chicks on the West Coast. She does Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” a song about picking up a freaky girl who likes to grind.

  Ally always does songs by men, and I always do songs by women. It’s not a rule, just the pattern we fall into. She especially loves to sing the Boy George songs, because she has the same low, throaty voice. I love to see her flicker her switchblade eyelashes when she sings “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.”

  Our friends are our karaoke whores—we know how to find one another. It usually starts with dinner, then over coffee Ally whispers something to Caryn, and Caryn whispers something to Jennie, and Nils and I wonder what the ladies are plotting. It always involves Sing Sing and a private room. You can stand at the bar and sing, but that means waiting your turn. When you get a private room, you and your crew just punch your own songs into the machine. No waiting, just singing. There’s no clock in the room, and no window, so you have no sense of time passing.

  If you’re shy, you can sing sitting down, but none of us are shy when we’re here, in our rented room in the dark. I never sit down—I come here to strut, pout, put it out.

  All our karaoke fiends have their jams. Melissa does the Madonna songbook. Niki goes for Stevie Nicks epics like “Sara.” Nils owns the Lionel Richie tunes, because their voices are in the same range. Nobody else tries Lionel Richie when Nils is around; I used to sing “Easy,” but I had to knock it off. Caryn and I always want to sing the same Ashlee Simpson song, “La La,” so it’s a race to see who grabs the mike first. Kevin does Chaka Khan so well, he stole “I Feel for You” from me. But one of these nights, I’m stealing it back.

  Part of the fun of karaoke is the hangover the next day, flipping through my notebook to see which titles and songbook numbers I jotted down. Oh yeah, “Total Eclipse of the Heart”! That was our jam. Wait, who did “My Prerogative” last night?

  But it’s always songs from the 1980s. Spend any time in a karaoke bar, and you will hear the same two songs over and over: “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Livin’ on a Prayer.” A boy-girl couple might interrupt with “Don’t You Want Me.” But then it circles back to the two biggies.

  There’s just something inherently karaokelike about the ’80s musical style—the overproduced drums, the beer-commercial sax solos, the keytars, the leather-lung vocal melodrama. Eighties songs do not belong to the singer, not the way a James Taylor or Stevie Wonder song does. They don’t sound like a person expressing a feeling—they sound like a gigantic sound machine blowing up this feeling to self-parodic heights. For some people, that’s a reason to dislike ’80s music, but for me, overstatement was part of the fun. Eighties songs sound like they’re karaoke already.

  I never sang karaoke in the ’80s, but I spend my karaoke time rehearsing those years, long after the audition ended. I go to karaoke to live those years out in ways that weren’t possible at the time, technologically or emotionally. Now I can step into the stilettos of Sheena or Chaka. These are songs I used to sing alone in my room—now I have a microphone and a crowd.

  Sometimes karaoke lets you go back to the memories attached to the song. When Ally sings with her friend Marisa, they are the only two people in the room. They were BFFs in high school because they both had U2 stickers on their lockers. They used to sing each other the Nirvana song “Drain You” and pretend they were the two babies in the song. They have been through countless adventures together that they’ll never tell their husbands about, except via karaoke.

  Whenever they sing George Michael, they giggle. There’s definitely a story there I’m not in on.

  The mike has lots of echo and delay, so even if you can’t hit
any actual notes (like me) you can fake it. There’s something ’80s about that too. Karaoke is the show—if you impersonate INXS for a few minutes and it doesn’t feel right, you don’t have to take them home with you.

  One night, going through all the Boy George songs in the book, Ally sang “The Crying Game.” It’s a song I can’t endure because it makes me sad—everybody has those. Sad songs are like the bartenders in the old black-and-white detective movies. They provide a sympathetic ear. But they spend enough time listening to people cry and complain. Sometimes you have to put the song away for a while, just to give it a break. Like in the movie where Richard Widmark is the tough guy at the bar, drinking bourbon and grousing about the ladies. He doesn’t believe in settling down. “Get married, become a statistic.”

  “Yeah,” the bartender replies. “Stay single, and you wind up talking to bartenders.”

  “The Crying Game” is a bartender I’ve spent too much time talking to, so I had to put the song away forever and figured I’d never be able to hear it again. I gave up trying to listen to it years ago—but she brings it back to life for me. Sometimes karaoke also lets you escape the memories and hear the song fresh. If a song is too painful, to play at home, you use the karaoke room as a safe place to try it on again.

  I never knew karaoke existed until the early ’90s, when Charlottesville got a bar called Mingles. Like every Southern karaoke joint, it had an Elvis Guy who sat by himself at the bar, waiting for his turn. He always does “The American Trilogy,” ending with his fist in the air as he cries, “His truth is marching on!” Then he sits down by himself. Other people do Elvis songs, but nobody tops the Elvis Guy. Some things are meant to be.

  It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties when I was at a bleak point in my life, a depressed widower who found ordinary social interactions painful, that I first sang karaoke. It was so much easier to sing than to talk. When I found out that I had other friends who liked to sing, it became an obsession. Suddenly, this was social interaction. I met my friend Laura one night because I was doing “Young Americans” and she decided to grab the mike and be the backup chorus. Needless to say, we’ve been friends ever since.

  Laura bemoans the fact that karaoke is not more like real life. She asks, “Why do I have all the confidence in karaoke that’s completely missing from any other area of my existence?” I wonder the same thing.

  I first experienced the private room in early 2001, one night when we got tired of waiting around some East Village dump for our songs to get called. Nils and Jennie whisked me off to Korea-town. We spent the night in a shiny room where every flat surface was covered with mirrors. It was like a Robert Downey Jr. movie, with the same soundtrack but only one drug: karaoke. They gave me an overnight crash course in commanding the microphone and surrendering to the song. We subjected one another to selections ranging from the undeniable (“Lovergirl”) to the unsingable (“Word Up”) to the physical (“Physical”). When we straggled out to the sidewalk at ten the next morning, already late for work, we joked about how sordid we must have looked, rubbing our eyes at the sun like teen runaways in an Aerosmith video. But I felt like a new man, even if the new man felt like Cyndi Lauper wobbling home in the morning light. Karaoke, like money, changes everything.

  Ally is bouncing on the couch now, doing “Going Back to Cali.” Asif and Jennie missed it when she sang it before, because they were out having a smoke, so they demanded it again. Nobody minds going back. “To Cali, Cali, Cali!” Ally chants. “Yo, I don’t think so!” I missed it before when she sang the Cure’s “Fascination Street,” but I won’t make her sing it again. You can always go back later. There are more songs that need to be heard right now.

  At Sing Sing, they kick us out at four. There’s always some melancholy when it comes time to punch in the final songs of the night. Everybody picks their last song, and then, inevitably, someone notices something else in the songbook that didn’t catch their eye before. Okay, one more.

  A group sing? No, not “We Are the World.” It seems like a good idea but it’s always a mistake. No Michael Jackson—too sad, too soon. It looks like Chaka Khan is getting a little more action tonight. When it’s a toss-up between Chaka Khan and Sheena Easton, Chaka wins three times out of five. This time Ally’s doing the rap, Caryn is doing the Chaka part, and the rest of us are just going to feel it.

  PRINCE

  “Purple Rain”

  1984

  I was the ice cream man the summer after high school. It was the perfect job—driving eighteen hours a day, just me, the streets of Boston, my tunes and my truck, hustling a freezer full of toxic chocolate sludge. Every morning, I stocked up in Charlestown and hit the road, pimping my Nutty Buddies, Hoodsies, Bomb Pops and Gobstoppers block to block. This was the best job ever. I had visions of lissome brunettes pulling crisply folded twenties out of their bikini tops with the command, “Cool me off, sugar boy.”

  Instead, these visions gave way to a reality of sitting in Southeast Expressway traffic all day, munching ice cream sandwiches, slurping Mountain Dew, singing along to the radio, all to bring the Chipwiches and Chocolate Whirls to the sweaty little children of my town. There hadn’t been an ice cream man in town for years—the previous guy had blown his license by selling weed out of his truck. So I was bringing ice cream to blocks that were starved for it.

  I pushed all kinds of weight: popsicles, Fudgsicles, dreamsicles, Creamsicles. Take a ride on the white line highway, my white lines go a long way. Pay the toll, sell your soul, my Nutty Buddy’s nice and cold. Since I was paying wholesale for a truckload of them, and I was my own boss, I could eat into the profits all I wanted. With all due respect to Tony Montana in Scarface, my policy was to get high on my own supply.

  To this day, when I hear “Purple Rain,” I can taste the La Dip—a revolting concoction consisting of two deep-fried chocolate chip cookies, the kind you’d get out of a hospital vending machine, with a block of vanilla ice cream in between, and then the whole shebang given an inch-thick coat of fudge and then apparently battered in some strange kind of sucrose tempura. It was like a hockey puck, except harder to digest. Every time I chomped away on one, I wondered, what kind of God permits such a thing to exist? A fucking righteous God.

  I vowed on my first day that girls who flirted with the ice cream man would get free La Dips. This didn’t turn out to be the profit drain I anticipated.

  I leased the truck from the Universal Ice Cream Company in Boston, and bought the ice cream, candy, bubble gum, soda, etc., wholesale from them. I did not mess around with soft serve, which is a whole other genre of ice cream man. Every morning, I drove into the warehouse and took a few minutes to fill out the order form. Let’s see. Nobody wants Toffee Krunch Bars, delicious though they might be. Screwball Orange? Too complex for the masses. Malt Cup? Too subtle. Chunka Choklit? Now we’re talking. Freeze Pops? On the money! Astro Pops? On lots and lots of money!

  The guys at the Universal Ice Cream Company were a mysterious bunch. I liked to imagine they were shady underworld characters, but they were probably just badly dressed. Randy, the owner and boss, was a great guy, walking around the warehouse with a clipboard that had nothing attached to it. He wore a Members Only jacket (it was cold inside that place) and shades, hairy as a panda. For some reason, the boss would always greet me with a Greek joke. Did he think I was Greek? I don’t recall how it came up, but without fail, every morning, he would grab my hand and say something like, “What’s virgin wool in Argos?” or “What’s the motto of the Spartan army?”

  “Hey duuude, how you doing?” I would reply. The word “dude” was brand-new on the East Coast that summer, and if it’s now hard to imagine life without it, that’s mainly because it functions so efficiently as a way of acknowledging someone’s physical presence while discreetly backing away. The word could be stretched into one long vowel while you inched closer to the door, and it was easier than laughing at Randy’s jokes.

  Randy was a big Springsteen fan�
�who wasn’t that summer? As a result, whenever you handed in your order for Dubble Bubble, he would sing, “This gum’s for hiii-yaaah!”

  The first time I drove in to beg for the job, he sat me down and told me about the last guy. “Goddamn hippie,” he said. “Sold the drugs right out of the truck. You’re not on the drugs, are you?”

  “No way, dude,” I said. “What this world is coming to.”

  “You’re gonna have to go in and interview for the license, and the first thing they’re going to do is look in your eyes. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because they can see the drugs in your eyes.”

  “Awesome.”

  “You look like a nice kid,” he said, touching his shades yet not budging them a bit, just hinting at the existence of shades-removal as a conversational gambit. “But if I ever hear about you selling anything, I will break your goddamn ankles.”

  “Got it.”

  “Ever drive a truck before?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Hey, how did Socrates separate the men from the boys?”

  I got the license. I did not sell the drugs. I had my route all mapped out—Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, Hyde Park and Milton, miles and miles of hungry kids. If I started early in the morning, I could make the whole route in eighteen hours, get back to Charlestown, and plug in the truck so the freezer could recharge overnight. The next morning, I’d be right back on the road. Ice cream sleeps for no man.

  My truck had a big green dragon painted on the door, to show the customers where you stick the trash. The dragon’s mouth cleverly surrounded the hole in the door where the garbage bag went. If I punched the button on the dashboard, I could turn on the revolving lights up front, to let all passersby know that ice cream was rolling through. There was also a button to ring the bell. And no, it was not one of those newfangled ice cream trucks that plays a stupid jingle all the time. No, no, no. I hear those all the time in my neighborhood now and I shake my head. These trucks offend my professional code. You know what that means? It means he doesn’t respect the ice cream. A real ice cream man doesn’t play a little jingle—just a bell that rings and says “never fear, the ice cream man is here, let’s see those dimes and quarters appear” without hassling people with a jingle.