This essay is a few years old, but with the uptick in subscribers on the back of the recent Cure podcasts, I wanted to share it again.
My first group the Lyd performed at our high school’s battle of the bands in April of 1991. My birthday is in August, so I was fifteen. The rest of the band were a year ahead of me. The first girl I ever asked out was, sweetly, the first to start dancing. Our blonde guitarist-turned-singer was dating her best friend in the black tube top. The four of us and the bassist had been smoking a lot of pot in the town cemetery beforehand. We were rabid child-romantics who spent every cent on weed or Cure bootlegs, and talked rubbish about futures we couldn’t even imagine properly.
Though you’ll struggle to make it out in the VHS dub, my kick drum had black electrical tape around a hole in the batter, in the shape of the letter C. I have to get out of the way that this had nothing to do with the Cure. The batter was solid, for jazz, so I cut a circle in it to stifle those ringing tones, and get me closer to a Tama/Metallica thud. I used a kitchen knife to do this, which left jagged plastic edges that would slice my arms whenever I put a pillow or microphone inside. I ran out of my Dad’s electrical tape trying to cover the opening, and he was so bullshit that I’d used up the entire roll without asking that I never thought to go buy more, and so never got around to completing the circle. This is important, because that C not being a C-for-Cure establishes that we weren’t explicitly a Cure tribute band: we had one original song.
The Lyd started out as the Gothic Hippies, and I wasn’t in the band: they had a different drummer, a skate-rat who years later made waves in the Boston hardcore scene. The Gothic Hippies’ only song, “Sittin’ Here,” was barely two minutes of D and A alternating, and was carried through to this performance. It lacks a chorus, bridge, refrain, more than one melody, and is light years from the structural obligé known as a “middle eight,” yet every wannabe punk in our high school — myself included — was begging for a cassette dub, because there really were no “bands” around.
In the 1980s, if you put up a sticker with a band name on it, you were for all intents and purposes an Actual Band. Kids would write it on their grocery-bag book covers. The ‘80s was a fallow period in the suburbs where most guitar teachers were into classic rock or metal, and suburban kids were taught to play classic rock or metal, and most venues didn’t want that crowd around. Everybody was learning from college kids who listened to R.E.M. and the Violent Femmes. Nobody thought bigger than their parents’ basement or garage.
I’d seen an elder all-black brigade around school, and wanted more than anything to join this clique. The guitarist was something like the goth Tony Hawk of our town, known for owning a different Cure shirt for every day of the month. The bassist was infamous for surviving alcohol poisoning before school, a horrible incident that played out on his front lawn if I remember the second-hand story correctly. I was new to all of this, having just started drinking with a British mate down the street, visible in the video above in a Stone Roses bucket hat and purple button-down. We used to call him Terrence, after Terrence Trent D’Arby, primarily because he liked synth funk and New Jack Swing, but also because he was a bit of a Cry-Baby type, quite a mug. He was actually a dead ringer for Morrissey in those days, and the girls were swooning. I should also point out the kid with the leaning tower of jet black hair wearing a Ritual de lo Habitual t-shirt: he just played Coachella.
Triplets and Rototoms
I couldn’t skate, so I wasn’t going to impress anyone with a boneless off the courtyard stairs. I knew these guys were a band, but the only musical thing I’d done to that point was work out the main lick from the La’s “There She Goes” at Terrence’s house, on his sister’s piece of shit acoustic during a wintry hangover. But after nipping at their heels for a couple of weeks, I asked the guys, “How’s the band going?” in that breathlessly insecure Wonder Years way. The guitarist asked if I played anything, and I said, “Rhythm guitar,” which is what you say when you can’t actually play guitar, or any instrument. He said I should play drums, because their drummer was leaving for another band, and he would be taking back his kit.
Drums…totally.
There were two drummers in my grade, and they always did ostentatious Neil Peart solo runs at school talent shows. One I didn’t know at all, but I’d gone to camp with the other in upstate New York, and he was really close with my best friend. He was also the most hyperactive kid in school with a physical streak care of his older brother. Honestly he terrified me, but I asked if he could teach me the drums, and he was kind of into it, in this weirdly calm, paternal way.
I brought over a tape of Cure hits I thought I could learn quickly, which unfortunately meant I learned to play the drums by imitating Lol Tolhurst, who was more a band-mate than a drummer per se. When my instructor — who was all Rush, all the time — heard I wanted to play Cure songs, he cautioned, “That guy’s really good, he’s in Modern Drummer.” I played him “Fire in Cairo” and he said, “This is the Cure? What is this shit, this guy sucks!” Transitively, this meant I learned to suck.
After a few weeks, I started rehearsing with my heroes, which felt like rehearsing with the Cure, because girls would come over to watch us practice. Sadly, they were after our guitarist and singer, but as options went, being in the same room as six silly, giggling high school girls kicked the shit out of RBI Baseball on Terrence’s couch.
At Night
The Lyd had a dedicated lead singer who couldn’t sing, which was forgivable, since none of us could really play our instruments. Unforgivably, he lost his nerve the night of this show. Nobody had cellphones in 1991, so we had no idea where he was, or what to do. Ten minutes before we were supposed to go on, our guitarist summoned a courage I still can’t reconcile twenty years later, and decided to take the microphone, having never sung a note in his life, so that we could do our Cure covers. A mutual friend — the redhead with the Vuarnet bangs — knew “Sittin’ Here” from jamming with us, and agreed to go up cold. The guitarist gave him the Top-era Cure shirt off his back, so he’d fit in better. Nobody noticed, since he was wearing a 9XL black sweater over it.
When you consider the inexperience, panic and intoxication we were all dealing with — the band preceding us was a combo of popular seniors doing “Who Can it Be Now?” and “What I Like About You” — and add in that one of our friends was busted by the police for dealing acid before the show — I maintain our version of “A Strange Day” is positively heroic.
A Reflection
I’ve written before about the social ordering advantages of pop music, particularly in the days before our likes and dislikes were easily catalogued in online profiles and metadata. In the suburbs, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, scenes like punk and hardcore were inaccessible without a driver’s license and extremely lax parents. This is predominantly why younger suburban kids were only exposed to acts whose record labels had national distribution.
Dischord, Matador and Merge were the most obscure indies you could expect to find at a mall, and then only in stores run by hip managers. Our best bet was Musicsmith, a chain that was on its way out, and so left the staff to its own devices. I wish I knew who their buyer was, because in simply ordering good records, he or she was responsible for my hearing Codeine, Superchunk, Medicine, the Vulgar Boatmen…and Drunken Boat.
I made the above playlist in 2011 for some younger friends who were starting a band rooted in 1980s suburban punk and college rock. They really caught the whiff of those days without having lived through them, but I liken it to the way I looked up to the Gothic Hippies. I may have been too young to date anybody, or have a driver’s license, but they’d loan me the music that soundtracked their relative abandon, which was really only a year or two out from becoming my reality, though it felt like a different era. The faux 90-minute mix I made for Mr. Dream, with a punk side and a dreamy side, puts a fine point on what was floating down to us in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, up until Nirvana broke.
The difference in those days was that inscrutable taste was a roundly antisocial mark. Hardcore record geeks, like the Lyres’ Monoman Conolly, were really tough to be around, and if you listened to say Northern Soul, punk, hip-hop and Krautrock, you didn’t broadcast a decipherable identity. You weren’t advertising, you weren’t inviting.
In your teens, you desperately want to meet people who understand you, and next to team sports, clothing sense is about the only flag you can fly. Regional punk rock scenes were the quickest route to a new identity, but they tended to be lorded over by intense twenty-somethings, and at that time, East Coast punks were prone to gang-like activity, and brawling. At fifteen, I was not ready for that in any sense. Most people aren’t, so the burbs end up with safer, goofier thrash and skate punk (D.R.I., 7 Seconds, Angry Samoans), and whatever filters through from the fashion-heavy, faraway British canon, for which you have no context (The Exploited, 999 and the Damned).
After proving my commitment by taking lessons from the psychotic Rush fan, my father bought me a pitiful set of matte grey CB700s for my fifteenth birthday, from a friend whose son had given up on drumming. A few years later, Juliana Hatfield’s then-bassist Dean Fisher (later Tanya Donelly’s husband) paid a visit to my then-guitarist’s older sister, and recognized it as his starter kit. It had fallen through two other kids to me. Such are the big moments in a small town.
In those days my bedroom was locally legendary, a disintegrating twist on Ferris Bueller’s, or Watts’ from Some Kind of Wonderful: year-round Christmas lights, a half-dozen subway-sized Cure posters, magazine clippings to fill any gaps, and unwound cassette tape as frillery over the lot. My drum set stood in a weird alcove of leftover space you could only understand if your house was built by an architect whose wife cheated on him while he was in Saudi Arabia, bringing work on his questionably-designed, hideously geometric addition to a grinding halt.
The Final Sound
At some point in the Lyd’s performance, someone shouts, “Play ‘Just Like Heaven!!’,” to which our singer indignantly replies, “No.”
When you want to find people and try new things, massive “alternative” acts like the Cure offer the full kit: t-shirts and tours for the casual fan, then the records and bootlegs for obsessives to pore over, and finally drugs, if you’re so inclined. The first two Cure bootlegs I bought were Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a BBC/Peel session collection) and Outer Walls. We bought anything we could get our hands on: Hot Hot Hot, Arabian Dreams (one of the first-ever CD bootlegs), and the two-LP set Lorelei, which, despite the hilarious cover, offered a particularly strong version of “Plainsong,” and was pressed on clear and green vinyl.
When you’ve listened to dozens of different versions of a song literally hundreds of times, you come up with very specific in-jokes. In “A Strange Day,” for example, there’s normally a guitar solo toward the end, but on most of the bootlegs from 1982, the Cure would play through. Much like the early “all kick drum” version of “In Your House” from Concert (which we tried and failed to learn), not cutting to the solo at the end of “A Strange Day” was a way of broadcasting our astute grasp of the band’s discography. Guaranteed, we were the only people on Earth who appreciated the aesthetic value of our decision that night, and perhaps to this day.
During the second verse of “A Forest,” the bassist booms out “I hear her voice!” and the guitarist gives him a look, and laughs. We used to have some stoned joke about how percussive and dopey that line was, and he would sing it in an affected, exaggerated way every time. The guitarist gives another look, to the keyboardist, right after that, because he leaves the script.
As a classically-trained near-virtuoso pianist and certified Dream Theater fanatic, our keyboardist often got bored and threw scales at the Cure’s four-bar drones, which irritated us to no end. But you can’t really pull off a Cure cover band without a keyboardist. Today you probably could, but there were only about five guitar pedals in 1991. Maybe three kids in the whole school would have a decent keyboard, and two of them would just play “Jump” over and fucking over. Nobody who was ever in a high school cover band before Nirvana can hear that song clean again.
Our guy ignored our musical differences, donned one of the bassist’s PiL shirts, and was flatly just really great about the entire situation. I always hope it’s a favored memory of his, because without him, we would have sounded so much worse. I mean, it is possible to sound worse than we did, and, full disclosure: the bassist is so stoned, he’s playing the wrong four notes for most of “A Forest.”
The Exploding Boy
Just after we begin “A Strange Day,” a lion-maned, very fit young man in white denim overalls walks towards me. He is the lead singer of the band who follows us, a funk-metal act called Bone Dry System. I was engaged in a losing tug-of-war with him over my aforementioned girlfriend. We had thought he was going to kick my ass at some point during the night, but the sort of head-lurch fake-out he brings here was all she wrote.
Actually, that’s not true. Later in the set, during our monumentally ill-advised cover of “The Same Deep Water as You,” this guy, and his guitarist, stood in front of the video camera filming us to try to block the shot, and made derisive faces at us. I’m not saying we didn’t deserve derision, especially from other, actually-talented musicians; going on musicianship, his was probably the most talented teenage band in Massachusetts at that time, without exaggeration. Going on taste, however, they were the absolute worst thing you could have dreamed up in a world before Nirvana.
Take a bunch of humorless, insecure jocks who completely missed the tongue-in-cheek aspects of Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, guys who are just starting to realize in 1991 that Extreme isn’t actually cool, and make them all amazing at their instruments. We’re talking slap-bass vomit, fucking…Living Colour minus everything. The worst shit I’ve heard in the decades since — the fucking Postal Service, Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco — you could lock me in a room and Zaireeka all of those records at me simultaneously if the alternative was hearing Bone Dry System again.
A Few Hours After This
This night cemented and continues to color my love of pop music. Though the Lyd broke up soon after, and our friendships faded, the guitarist and I are now back in the same small town, preparing our kids for the 2022 battle of the bands. We catch up at science fairs over bad coffee, and apologize to our parents for making them worry.