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

by Rob Sheffield

  People have spent many years trying to figure out what happened to Paul McCartney, but maybe we’re not really asking the right questions. His flaws are actually not that hard to figure out. (“Maybe he used to smoke dope every waking moment” explains a lot of them.) It’s his virtues that seem profoundly fucked up. He was a man deranged by love, driven to madness by a happy love affair, a deeper madness than other rock stars got from their unhappy ones. By the late 1970s, most of his peers were making their divorce albums, but McCartney was knocking out increasingly crazed nondivorce albums, and nobody ever enjoyed being a husband more than this man. “Maybe I’m Amazed” is an infinitely freakier song than “Revolution Number 9.” Linda seemed like nobody’s idea of an obsession-worthy muse, just some random hippie chick Paul liked. It would have been one thing if he’d married Elizabeth Taylor or Jackie Kennedy. But he married a photographer who did the album cover art for Tommy James and the Shondells.

  I’m not claiming to like all the music—far from it. “Let ’Em In” is some kind of high-bongwater mark for how zonked and sedated a grown man can sound when things are going too smoothly. Songs like this terrify me. I mean, Keith Richards has some impressive vices, and I always love hearing gossip about them. But they only disturb me in theory. In real life, I’m not in any danger of turning into Keith Richards, and neither are my friends.

  But turning into Paul McCartney? It could happen to anybody. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

  Two of my friends have met him, neither one affiliated with the music biz or the media in any way, and both used the same word to describe him. I hate admitting that the word was “dumb,” and I hate recalling I was unreasonably aggressive both times in defending him. But I know what they mean. A lot of smart people think Paul McCartney is dumb, and it’s easy to see why. He doesn’t worry about looking cool. He doesn’t have the defensive armor we expect in people who have been visible all their lives. Like a lot of naturally intense people, he seems to have overcompensated with an almost cartoonishly easygoing manner. His moronic public actions get more attention than his smart ones. I mean, there are great songs on his recent albums, but who the hell listens to them? Nobody. Meanwhile, millions of people around the world watched the Super Bowl when Macca showed up and sang an impromptu duet with Terry Bradshaw of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

  Indeed, his flaws are a nonstop source of comic delight. He has no apparent ability to feel shame. If Terry Bradshaw wants to sing, Paul’s game. If he wants to release hit singles so cringingly awful I would rather gnaw off my fingers than type the titles, he goes for it. He sponsored an authorized biography where he detailed how much harder he worked than the other Beatles—he wrote 65 percent of this song, 70 percent of that song. Somebody really should have talked him out of that. Also, during the period he was married to the unspeakable Heather Mills, the Give My Regards to Broad Street of Beatle wives, she was clearly goading him into being more of a bitch than he normally is, telling him she’d never heard of songs like “Get Back.” (You’re married to Paul McCartney! Google the man!) That was when Paul began his deeply embarrassing campaign to change the songwriting credit from Lennon-McCartney to McCartney-Lennon.

  When he divorced this nightmare of a second wife, her lawyers claimed that, among other cruelties, Paul had gotten angry at her for breastfeeding, allegedly telling her, “They are my breasts!” I love that story. Yeah, right—Paul raised his kids on an organic farm with the crunchiest hippie mama who ever lived, so I suspect he was familiar with the concept of nursing. The lawyers should have tried something believable, like “He fell asleep and left the baby on the plane” or “He wrote ‘Say Say Say.’ ”

  Of course, anyone can sympathize with the other Beatles. If you’re George, and you wrote a great song like “Taxman,” you have every reason to be furious that Paul dubbed his guitar solo over yours. But so what? Paul just played it better. Paul didn’t even care about claiming the credit—99 percent of listeners assume George played the “Taxman” solo, and apparently that’s always been fine with Paul. (I had no idea until a few years ago, when the Beatles’ engineer Geoff Emerick revealed it in his book Here, There and Everywhere.) He let George take the credit; all he wanted was to play the damn thing. “Let It Be”? Not really his style.

  Paul was the Beatle who was never embarrassed about having been a Beatle. He spent his Hall of Fame induction speech urging them to induct George and Ringo. When he was knighted, he said, “It’s strange being here without the other three.” He’s bewilderingly generous to the idea of the group, and one could say it’s because he tended to get his way in that group, but considering the decades of success he had without them, his deference to the others is a bit baffling.

  Nothing, however, can explain how he convinced a capitalist record label to release Give My Regards to Broad Street, which gave the world “No More Lonely Nights.” I only know this record because I bought it as a Christmas present for Ann in 1984. We listened in awe. This album is mostly composed of orchestral remakes of Beatles songs, fluffed up by Paul in the nadir of his tragic Hawaiian shirt phase. It has “No More Lonely Nights,” which is a surprisingly gorgeous tune, and deserves to be remembered as an ’80s pop trifle on par with the best of Phil Collins or Steve Perry. Yet it’s completely forgotten because it was buried on the soundtrack of this infamously ass movie. Not even Ann, a confirmed Paulmaniac, could find anything nice to say about this album.

  Paul really only makes sense to me as an Irish big sister. His loyalty to the group is second only to that of my sister Ann, who would take a bullet or even two for any of her siblings, yet would not think of letting us board a plane without drawing up a diagram of how we should pack our suitcases. She works harder than we do.

  Ann is a take-charge gal. Ann is the only one of us who can drive a stick, the one you’d call from a Turkish prison to explain you’d be late for dinner. When one of our basements gets flooded, Ann is the one who drives over with the sump pump before being asked. Ann taught our ninety-year-old grandfather to use the microwave, knowing full well he’d never touch it. She organized my mom’s closets and wanted to throw everything away; my mom insisted on keeping our first-communion blankets. They argued over this for days. Ann finally said, “Fine. When you’re gone, they’re gone.”

  My mom likes to say that Caroline is her daughter, Tracey is her sister, and Ann is her mother. I am old enough to remember my mom and her mom having the same arguments that Mom and Ann have now, usually involving one telling the other what to do.

  Ann is the girl my grandmother warned me about, because she is the girl my grandmother was. My grandfather used to call her “the girl from Glenbeigh,” because she looks just like her. Nana knew this was coming. Back in County Kerry, she was Bridget Courtney, and she continued to terrify her brothers even after she had crossed the ocean and settled in the new world. Nana was “fussy,” as she herself put it. She was fond of giving orders on behalf of her grandson, mostly the matter of who was going to feed him in the immediate future, so I had no complaints. But the point is, you want this woman on your side. If somebody is invading your country or the river is flooding your farm, the Alsatian is who you want on your team. Or, if you’re one of the Beatles, you want Paul in your band.

  When my grandfather tried explaining the Alsatian to me, he said it was the Courtney temper versus the Twomey temper. My grandfather, my sisters and my mom got the Courtney temper, where you blow your top and then it’s over. He and I got the Twomey temper, where you stew about it for hours and hope it goes away. He told me it was better for everyone to have the Courtney version, and apologized for passing on the wrong kind to me. I didn’t mind that—I was grateful to be surrounded by all these women. All I wanted to know was how to live with them in peace.

  I’m sure he would have told me, if he had any idea.

  MADONNA

  “Crazy for You”

  1985

  In general, people do not remember 1985. It’s
the decade’s forgotten year, even when people have made their peace with the rest of the ’80s on so many levels. At this point, everybody admits that the early ’80s new-wave stars were the bomb, and late ’80s hip-hop and disco stars were tubular. But 1985? It was the year of the great awesomeness drought.

  The reason, obviously, can be summed up in one word: Rambo. If you were alive at the time, this name probably brings back a Proustian rush of memory, but if you’re too young to remember, Rambo was a hit movie in 1985, a year so starved for laughs that Rambo became the big summer blockbuster. And it gives us traumatic post-disorder stress trauma or whatever it was Rambo suffered after ’Nam. There was nothing else to do but go see Rambo every weekend, and it hurts too much to remember.

  It’s a Sylvester Stallone movie about a guy named Rambo who goes back to Vietnam to fight the war all over again. He did not pack a shirt, but he did bring bows and arrows and a nice little Richard Simmons headband, in order to play upon the enemy’s fears by invoking the ancient Vietnamese legend of the Great Gay Warrior who comes across the sea to unleash his mighty power of seduction. He kills everybody in the whole country, and finds true love with a local girl who says, “You not expendable, Rambo.”

  No matter what your politics were, this was a spleenpunchingly funny movie and everybody went to see it six times. If you weren’t born at the time, you have never heard of this movie, even though every other Vietnam franchise is in constant weekend TV rotation, from Delta Force to Missing in Action, as is every other Stallone movie from Rocky to Demolition Man. Rambo’s been written out of history. But in 1985, it was a brilliant movie to watch in the theater, especially if everybody in the crowd was high as a kite. The third time I went, as they rolled the credits, the guy behind me told his buddies, “I got a fuckin’ woody already!”

  However, it sucked and nobody remembered it a year later, because nobody liked to think we were all so desperate. So 1985 is the memory gap no one wants to recall, much like the way Willis and Arnold on Diff’rent Strokes blocked out their traumatic memories of 1975 (inspiring the shocking “Willis throws book at annoying tutor who won’t shut up about 1975” episode).

  The only other thing we did for fun in 1985 is talk shit about Madonna and how much we hated her and how we couldn’t wait for her to go away. Except she didn’t.

  Madonna entered my life with the “Burning Up” video, which was so sexy it just made me mad. She turned my private Catholic angst into a spectacle, a one-woman Vatican 3. “What’s a-matter?” she asked in the “Open Your Heart” twelve-inch remix. “You scared a-me or something?” Well, yes.

  I couldn’t believe anybody could be as brazen as she was. What the movie said about Rambo was truer about Madonna: “What you call hell, she calls home.” I was a shy boy who craved a not-shy girl to be Madonna for me. She dared me to open my heart, and now I had to figure out how, listening to her for clues. I was lost in Madonnadolatry. And I was pissed off about it.

  Of all the complex females in my life, Madonna was the one who taught me how to be completely exasperated by a woman, and how to like it. She was the first woman who ever told me I can dance (I can’t) and the first who told me I came when she wished for me (I’ll have to take her word on that one). I literally never go the movies without thinking about the scene in the “Into the Groove” video where she puts her head on the guy’s shoulder and lets him feed her popcorn. She screwed me up good. Oh, Madonna—you put this in me, so now what? So now what?

  By now she’s saturated popular music longer than anyone else from that time. For me, it’s “Angel,” “Who’s That Girl,” “Keep It Together,” “Bad Girl.” For you, it might be “Papa Don’t Preach” or “Deeper and Deeper” or “Frozen” (none of which ever did it for me, but you never know).

  Some of her songs are so beautiful it hurts to feel them pierce my body, making me too sad to listen to them (“What It Feels Like for a Girl,” “Promise to Try”). Some make me happy every time, like “Dress You Up”—that thwamp-thwamp-thwamp synth-snare intro, exactly one second long, and exactly as perfect as any number of equally joyous seconds in that song. Some become my go-to karaoke jams (“Crazy for You” on a vodka night, “Justify My Love” for bourbon), some evoke deep historical paradoxes (“Angel” is the same song as both Lou Reed’s “Crazy Feeling” and the Stylistics’ “Betcha By Golly, Wow”—how the hell did that happen?), sometimes she sounds silly enunciating the consonants (“Drowned World/Substitute for Love”), sometimes she gasps for breath between low notes she can’t hit (“Angel”). Sometimes she says “Whee!” and sometimes she says “Hey!” As a cruel Italian goddess, she does stupid things like Evita or the “Secret” video, but that’s just her painful way of teaching us not to trust her.

  One of the reasons I keep listening to her, whether I want to or not, is that she keeps teaching me about how difficult women are, how needy and pushy they are, how silly it is to think you can control them or make them what you want them to be. I guess I should have learned this lesson years ago, but I never do, so I keep getting burned by Madonna. I guess that’s one of the reasons I keep her around.

  In 1985, it was still possible to believe Madonna was just a flash in the pan. She was this year’s girl. I was a librarian that summer, shelving books to the radio. Every time a Madonna song came on, my coworkers, groovy lesbians with new-wave haircuts, raved about how Madonna was the shit. This made me feel a little stupid. And so did the yearning in Madonna’s voice when she hits those growly low notes in “Crazy for You.”

  At nineteen, I had never had a girlfriend, and I knew for a fact that this was somebody’s fault, though not mine. So I decided it was Madonna’s. I had pretty strict ideas about how I thought the world should be, and my plan for getting a girlf riend was to make the world rearrange itself to conform to my conditions. I thought that was a fair set of demands. Madonna kept reminding me, over and over, how full of shit I was. So I resented her bitterly and prayed for her to not be famous anymore. I was sure she was going to have a short run anyway.

  In August, my parents took me and my sisters on a road trip through Europe. Four of us were packed in the backseat cruising through Spain, Italy and France. So it was a summer spent in the car with my sisters, like so many summers and so many family road trips. We sat in the backseat and sang every song we knew, from “American Pie” to the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack. Ann and Caroline sang every song on Ronnie Milsap’s greatest hits, just to annoy me and Tracey.

  The book I brought with me was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , a gift from a girl I liked, except I read her inscription even more obsessively than the novel. “For you,” she wrote inside the front cover. “Read this and think of me. This pen is horrible.” The ink ran dry halfway through “horrible,” leaving me with questions. “For you”? What did that mean? Why didn’t she pick a new pen to write the rest of the inscription, so she could sign her name and maybe add some hearts or “XOXO”s? It was a mystery. I loved the novel but I had to admit, my concentration kept wandering back to that girl’s handwriting.

  We had a radio in the car, but we rarely turned it on because the songs were all Madonna, as they were back in the States.

  We all had destinations we were keen to see—Ann was looking forward to Rome, Tracey to Milan, Caroline to the ruins of Pompeii. But I was waiting for Lourdes, the sacred Catholic shrine in the French countryside. I was nineteen and extremely devout, struggling with all my screwed-up obsessions about Catholicism—and, as was inevitable, they were all tangled up in my screwed-up obsessions about Madonna.

  Religion was something I’d been somewhat cuckoo about all through my teen years, and I found it excruciating to discuss with anybody, even though I was raised in the faith and had plenty of well-meaning adults to talk about it with. I’d grown up religious enough, but I got a little intense about it as I got older. I could pinpoint distinctions between mortal sin and venial sin on episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter (Horshack didn’t
know the vitamins were drugs) or What’s Happening!! (oh, Rerun, you knew bootlegging that Doobie Brothers show would break Michael McDonald’s heart).

  I was an altar boy until I was sixteen, which is pretty late to stop, but I didn’t fit into the cassock and surplice anymore. I still went to CCD classes after confirmation, which hardly anyone does. Of course, I was the only boy in the CCD class. Once my teacher had asked the girls in the class, “Who’s he going with?” Regina Kelley (who of course reported this entire discussion to my sisters immediately afterward) said, “Well, he’s kind of shy.” The teacher said, “Awww, that’s the best kind!” I was mortified when my sisters told me about this—once your CCD teacher is trying to find you a date, your social life is probably a matter for St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless cases.

  For me, religion was an escape from the world, not a connection to it. I gleaned all my religious ideas from books and kept it all fiercely private. I went to confession at four on Saturday afternoons, the only time of the week they had confessions, because nobody went except the same five or six old ladies, who were more weirded out than gratified by my presence. I kept confession note cards in my pocket so I wouldn’t forget any of my sins, even though I never really had any juicy dirt to share. I never even rode my bike, for fear somebody I knew would pass by St. Mary’s on Saturday afternoon and see my bike in the bicycle rack. The priests of the parish, who were all extremely kind and friendly guys, would usually try to cheer me up. They seemed puzzled but glad to see me, and we’d chat about the Red Sox, who were testing our faith something fierce.

  One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people’s religions, since ours is nuttier than yours. I believed lots of nutty things, so many that I’m never surprised at the dumb shit other people believe. I always looked forward to the annual Mass where we’d renew our baptismal vows. (“Do you renounce the glamour of eeeeviiiiil?” Who wrote this script, Ozzy?) Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion— lots of ritual, lots of ceremony, lots of private oblations as we genuflect before our sacred spaces. We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something splendid of our most secret desires and agonies.