“I am tired with grief and despair and a consuming rage for humanity…the shame is ours. A shame so fierce it should burn us like the sun burns the desert.” Bob Geldof, Live Aid programme, July 1985.
Born in the 1970s, I was made in the 1980s. A lot of my pop culture references are exactly the same, for better or worse, as Seth MacFarlane’s (born five and a half months apart). So if MacFarlane makes a pop culture reference on Family Guy, chances are I’m right there with him. MacFarlane, myself, and a bunch of us who happened to be in that sweet spot (spending the 1980s from age seven to 17, or eight to 18, or nine to 19) are the children of the people who came of age during the 1960s. Stay with me, because I have a point.
For most of our childhoods during the 1980s, the inundation of 1960s nostalgia was deafening. Speaking for myself, I’ve started to have Vietnam flashbacks due to the proliferation of it in the culture when growing up. Hell, I remember the time that three of my friends and I went to see a dead body lying on the tracks in 1960. Er… was that Wil Wheaton? Anyway, I grew up in a household where my father had both been to Vietnam and also to Woodstock. There was no escaping the two major 1960s events. If my dad had been on the grassy knoll in 1963, he would’ve scored a great trifecta!
Anyway, so it was basically reliving the 1960s during the entire time I was young. All the stories I heard about how my father would go to coffeehouses at Wayne State University in suburban Detroit and hear Bob Dylan before he was famous, and how he spent three days in the mud (leaving before Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix came out) at Woodstock. How they’d get high on weed (and I knew where my parents’ stash box was, so it wasn’t like they’d stopped) and groove along on the reel-to-reel in their VW Bug. It would be as if I told a 12-year-old today about how much fun it was when we attached our 1200 baud modem to our 386 IBM.
In the early 1980s, my (and my contemporaries’) world was rocked by being able to watch the radio on my television set. Yes, for five glorious years, MTV was a channel where you would watch video set to music and I was on that cutting edge. Well, the cable system in my area finally got MTV in 1982, and I remember the first time I heard about it. A neighbor kid named Jimmy Brayl had mentioned the J. Geils Band song, “Centerfold,” and asked if I’d seen the video. I hadn’t. I didn’t know there was such a channel. Being, oh, nine years old, I didn’t surf the 36 channels of my cable system much. I turned it on, and since the video was in heavy rotation in December 1982, there it was. I was transfixed.
There was this effeminate black guy named Prince, whose song “Little Red Corvette” I couldn’t stand. (Tastes change, but that’s another story.) These weird British people whose hair spiked high and whose collars spiked as well seemed to dominate the channel. I was introduced to music I’d never heard on top 40 radio, which was filled with REO Speedwagon, Toto, and Styx. To say MTV changed my world outlook is to say that pavement changed the way I walk.
While I’d like to say this makes me the vanguard of my generation, realizing the trends and spotting them before they happened, I can’t. I followed the trends of my cousin Mike. Mike was six years older than me and was in high school when MTV hit. I always looked up to him; our parents would go camping in Northern Michigan together and we’d hang out. I tasted my first (and only) bit of chewing tobacco because of Mike. He built my first dirt bike and charged me $40. (In 1983!) He loved horror movies, and had special fondness for the slasher genre of the early 1980s.
We’d have family get-togethers at my uncle’s house. Mike would take me into the basement, flip on the cable, and we’d watch MTV for a couple of hours. Sometimes in silence, sometimes he’d explain to me who the bands were. Mike was the first person on his block to have a Flock of Seagulls haircut. Mike was the first person I knew to have a CD player. I think he had one in 1985, right around the time of Live Aid. Imagine being twelve years old and having your cousin explain to you how lasers read data imprinted on a silver disc. It felt like I was talking to Buck Rogers with a mullet. So Mike carved into me the importance of music, especially in that great year of 1985. It was our generation’s time to make a statement.
Back then, we believed (thanks to the 1960s delusions of our parents) music could make a difference. Only in 1983 could a band 20 years past its prime (The Beach Boys) be considered controversial to play at a Fourth of July concert at the Capitol by the Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. When John Lennon was murdered in 1980 (an event that is branded in my own memory), the last social activist musician was gone. Pop music backed away from political change post-Vietnam, more interested in getting down tonight than giving peace a chance. But the army of Dylan Youth kept blowing into the wind with their harmonicas and beating into our young heads those wonderful days of protest marching and tear-gassing (I once marched against the Klan in 1996 and got tear-gassed. I have no misplaced nostalgia), so we understood music equals politics.
Enter Bob Geldof. See, I knew I’d get to Live Aid!
