Electric Youth!
There are certain markers, certain signposts that you mark your life by. I'm not talking about the obvious ones-birthdays, graduations, ect. I mean the real moments that come out of the blue to forever alter the course of your life. I was 14 years old when one such moment came. I was on the bus on the way home from Paramus Catholic Boys high school. The day thusfar had shown no signs of being a Day of Destiny. To the contrary, it seemed like just another painful day of high school. Just like any other. But then something strange happened. The bus stopped in front of the Garden State Plaza and half the kids on the bus got off. How odd. Everybody knew that the correct procedure was to go home, change out of your school clothes and THEN go back to the mall to do nothing. Everyone was skipping that step. What was up?
Now I'm not exactly a leader. In fact, my general policy in life is to agree with the last person who spoke at all times. I just find it easier. So when half the bus got off at the mall I got off too. I wasn't sure why, but I didn't want to be left out of whatever it was everyone else was doing. Not that I had any real friends that would actually INCLUDE me in any actives of this sort, but at least I would have witnessed things. At 14 my social skills were completely indistinguishable from those of a deaf-mute. A very agreeable, deaf-mute at that.
So I followed 50% of the school bus into the mall. It was about 3PM on a Tuesday afternoon and the area around the carousel was PACKED with other kids who had gotten off other busses. Clearly some homing device had called out to 14-16 year olds around Paramus, New Jersey and instructed them to congregate here. But why? A stage was constructed in front of Sam Goodys (my future place of employment, by the way) with a huge sign reading "Welcome Tiffany!"
Who was Tiffany? Why were we here? Why did we care? My interest was peaked. Clearly Tiffany was someone sent by God to add color to my very gray Paramus Catholic High School existence.
And the color was red.
As soon as I saw her I knew my life would never be the same. She came on to the prerecorded strains of the Beatles "I Saw Her Standing There" and she tore through the song (switching "her" to "him", of course) like John and Paul personally abused her. She was 15, cute as a button, but not too perfect (have you ever seen her nose in profile?), had the most amazing exotic red hair I've ever seen and a voice that sounded like she'd been pounding whisky since she was 9.
I was in love.
I'm not sure how many songs she sang that afternoon. 4 or 5 maybe. This is how the world met Tiffany. Ours was not her only mall adventure, but I didn't care. When she sang "I Think We're Alone Now" I felt her talking just to me, and I was excited and terrified by the implication. She ended with her big balled "Could've Been". And as soon as she waved good-bye I immediately ran into Sam Goody and threw all my money on the counter and screamed at them to give me Tiffany. Like I said, I'm the impressionable type.
My relationship with Tiffany grew in the following weeks and months and in fact became quite serious. I knew every syllable of her record. I studied the cover picture of her face, and the back picture of her in her denim jacket. I was hers for life.
I'm not sure if Debbie Gibson appeared on the public radar before or after Tiffany, but she never did anything for me at all. She was cute, squeaky clean, and looked like the girls in my town. I wasn't interested in that. Tiffany had mystery. She had heartbreak. At 15, Tiffany's voice already sounded like it had more regrets than a 50 year old country singer. Debbie sang of a love that came "Out of The Blue", and of course rhymed "blue" with a "dream come true". Tiffany sang about flowers about to die and her voice cracked when she said, "When I think about what could have been, it makes me want to cry."
Debbie's follow up album was "Electric Youth", and she came on like the overenthusiastic yearbook editor in your school who thought every thing was SUPER and seemed to talk in exclamation points.
Tiffany's second album predicts the end of her 15 minutes of fame ("Oh Jackie say it isn't true/Tell me I'm not just someone you outgrew"), and wishes, in the first single wishes "Sometimes I wish I had no pride, I'd go off and sell my soul"- all at the ripe old age of 17. It's probably the Irish fatalism in me, but at 16 it was she I identified with.
That was a long time ago, though. My life was simple then. I instinctively knew, however, that it would get more complicated. So I sought out art that would give me a clue as to what adulthood was like. Springsteen, Scorsese, Tom Waits, Humphry Bogart and James Cagney-all artists who painted in shadows and shades of gray. And as teen pop princesses go, Tiffany's white trash background, legal troubles (she sued her parents for emancipation at 17) and the undercurrents of melancholy she somehow infused into teen pop made her positively Kafkaesque.
I know what you're thinking, by the way, that I've lost my mind. I'm seriously arguing for Tiffany as a serious artist. I think I MAY have lost my mind. All I know is that at the time I felt that Tiffany represented all the dark secrets I wanted to know.
But as I grew up, and I had my heart broken a few times and I found out about some of those dark secrets, I found myself increasingly attracted to simple songs. Pop fluff. Teen candy. As my life became more complicated my life music got simpler.
I built a shrine to Britney. I listened to Christina in her "Genie In A Bottle" phase. Of course I loved Jessica (pre Nick). And I went back and bought "Out of The Blue" like it was The Odessey-the fountainhead of all airbrushed teen pop. It wasn't, of course, it was another candy teen record in a long line of them. But it represented a time in my life when things were simpler, even if I didn't appreciate it at the time.
So Debbie came to town recently. She played Culture Club, the local nostalgia club on downtown. She was billed as going "Back to Debbie"(as opposed to Deborah-her nom de Broadway). The posters promised "All The Old Hits". I had to be there.
I got there around 2 hours before the show. It was packed shoulder to shoulder. We watched a videotape of the "Out of The Blue" tour on monitors as we waited endlessly for our former Teen Queen. The crowd was mostly my age, although the guy standing behind my friend Lindsey was at least 50-too old to have been into Debbie the first time around, and REALLY too old now. I imagined myself as the Creepy Old Guy in 10 or 15 years when Britney Spears-Cruise played there. Honestly, I liked what I saw.
Debbie finally came out at around midnight to the prerecorded strains of "Shake Your Love" and the crowd went bananas. She entered through the crowd and took to the stage jumping up and down to the beat. It was good to know that some things never changed-Debbie still couldn't dance.
There are certain markers, certain signposts that you mark your life by. I'm not talking about the obvious ones-birthdays, graduations, ect. I mean the real moments that come out of the blue to forever alter the course of your life. I was 14 years old when one such moment came. I was on the bus on the way home from Paramus Catholic Boys high school. The day thusfar had shown no signs of being a Day of Destiny. To the contrary, it seemed like just another painful day of high school. Just like any other. But then something strange happened. The bus stopped in front of the Garden State Plaza and half the kids on the bus got off. How odd. Everybody knew that the correct procedure was to go home, change out of your school clothes and THEN go back to the mall to do nothing. Everyone was skipping that step. What was up?
Now I'm not exactly a leader. In fact, my general policy in life is to agree with the last person who spoke at all times. I just find it easier. So when half the bus got off at the mall I got off too. I wasn't sure why, but I didn't want to be left out of whatever it was everyone else was doing. Not that I had any real friends that would actually INCLUDE me in any actives of this sort, but at least I would have witnessed things. At 14 my social skills were completely indistinguishable from those of a deaf-mute. A very agreeable, deaf-mute at that.
So I followed 50% of the school bus into the mall. It was about 3PM on a Tuesday afternoon and the area around the carousel was PACKED with other kids who had gotten off other busses. Clearly some homing device had called out to 14-16 year olds around Paramus, New Jersey and instructed them to congregate here. But why? A stage was constructed in front of Sam Goodys (my future place of employment, by the way) with a huge sign reading "Welcome Tiffany!"
Who was Tiffany? Why were we here? Why did we care? My interest was peaked. Clearly Tiffany was someone sent by God to add color to my very gray Paramus Catholic High School existence.
And the color was red.
As soon as I saw her I knew my life would never be the same. She came on to the prerecorded strains of the Beatles "I Saw Her Standing There" and she tore through the song (switching "her" to "him", of course) like John and Paul personally abused her. She was 15, cute as a button, but not too perfect (have you ever seen her nose in profile?), had the most amazing exotic red hair I've ever seen and a voice that sounded like she'd been pounding whisky since she was 9.
I was in love.
I'm not sure how many songs she sang that afternoon. 4 or 5 maybe. This is how the world met Tiffany. Ours was not her only mall adventure, but I didn't care. When she sang "I Think We're Alone Now" I felt her talking just to me, and I was excited and terrified by the implication. She ended with her big balled "Could've Been". And as soon as she waved good-bye I immediately ran into Sam Goody and threw all my money on the counter and screamed at them to give me Tiffany. Like I said, I'm the impressionable type.
My relationship with Tiffany grew in the following weeks and months and in fact became quite serious. I knew every syllable of her record. I studied the cover picture of her face, and the back picture of her in her denim jacket. I was hers for life.
I'm not sure if Debbie Gibson appeared on the public radar before or after Tiffany, but she never did anything for me at all. She was cute, squeaky clean, and looked like the girls in my town. I wasn't interested in that. Tiffany had mystery. She had heartbreak. At 15, Tiffany's voice already sounded like it had more regrets than a 50 year old country singer. Debbie sang of a love that came "Out of The Blue", and of course rhymed "blue" with a "dream come true". Tiffany sang about flowers about to die and her voice cracked when she said, "When I think about what could have been, it makes me want to cry."
Debbie's follow up album was "Electric Youth", and she came on like the overenthusiastic yearbook editor in your school who thought every thing was SUPER and seemed to talk in exclamation points.
Tiffany's second album predicts the end of her 15 minutes of fame ("Oh Jackie say it isn't true/Tell me I'm not just someone you outgrew"), and wishes, in the first single wishes "Sometimes I wish I had no pride, I'd go off and sell my soul"- all at the ripe old age of 17. It's probably the Irish fatalism in me, but at 16 it was she I identified with.
That was a long time ago, though. My life was simple then. I instinctively knew, however, that it would get more complicated. So I sought out art that would give me a clue as to what adulthood was like. Springsteen, Scorsese, Tom Waits, Humphry Bogart and James Cagney-all artists who painted in shadows and shades of gray. And as teen pop princesses go, Tiffany's white trash background, legal troubles (she sued her parents for emancipation at 17) and the undercurrents of melancholy she somehow infused into teen pop made her positively Kafkaesque.
I know what you're thinking, by the way, that I've lost my mind. I'm seriously arguing for Tiffany as a serious artist. I think I MAY have lost my mind. All I know is that at the time I felt that Tiffany represented all the dark secrets I wanted to know.
But as I grew up, and I had my heart broken a few times and I found out about some of those dark secrets, I found myself increasingly attracted to simple songs. Pop fluff. Teen candy. As my life became more complicated my life music got simpler.
I built a shrine to Britney. I listened to Christina in her "Genie In A Bottle" phase. Of course I loved Jessica (pre Nick). And I went back and bought "Out of The Blue" like it was The Odessey-the fountainhead of all airbrushed teen pop. It wasn't, of course, it was another candy teen record in a long line of them. But it represented a time in my life when things were simpler, even if I didn't appreciate it at the time.
So Debbie came to town recently. She played Culture Club, the local nostalgia club on downtown. She was billed as going "Back to Debbie"(as opposed to Deborah-her nom de Broadway). The posters promised "All The Old Hits". I had to be there.
I got there around 2 hours before the show. It was packed shoulder to shoulder. We watched a videotape of the "Out of The Blue" tour on monitors as we waited endlessly for our former Teen Queen. The crowd was mostly my age, although the guy standing behind my friend Lindsey was at least 50-too old to have been into Debbie the first time around, and REALLY too old now. I imagined myself as the Creepy Old Guy in 10 or 15 years when Britney Spears-Cruise played there. Honestly, I liked what I saw.
Debbie finally came out at around midnight to the prerecorded strains of "Shake Your Love" and the crowd went bananas. She entered through the crowd and took to the stage jumping up and down to the beat. It was good to know that some things never changed-Debbie still couldn't dance.