The End of the Eighties, Track 29

“**** (Jungle Law)”
Love and Rockets
Love and Rockets
1989

Appropriating the Signifyin’ Monkey found in African folklore, Love and Rockets apply the trickster persona to a writer “spreading ugly lies like it’s some horrible disease” in “**** (Jungle Law)”. Assuming bad blood between the band and the press adds an extra layer of subtext as the song’s protagonist confronts the “signifying hack,” knocking him around a bit before letting him “go back to the trees” and to his typewriter. But when “the mother” eventually falls to his death, he notes that “there’s a new one in the obituary, and it shows four stars where the name oughta be!”

Musically, Love and Rockets is a 180-degree departure from the folk leanings of their previous album, Earth * Sun * Moon. Peppered with driving, feedback-laden tracks, the album feels considerably harder than anything they produced earlier in the decade.

The album was released just before graduation. It’s one of those CDs that I can tell you exactly where and when I bought it: Magnolia Thunderpussy. Pam and I drove the two hours south to Columbus after prom. We wandered around the Continent and actually ran into John and Julie at the Columbus Museum of Art. (I still have the little card with a black and white image of John Singer Sargent’s Carmela Bertagna on the front and information about the painting on the back that I picked up at the museum that day filed away somewhere with my senior prom mementos.) We also hit the record stores around the Ohio State University campus, and I bought Love and Rockets that afternoon at Magnolia Thunderpussy. I’m certain it was from Thunderpussy and not Singing Dog because for the longest time I actually had the receipt tucked into the CD booklet. In fact, it was probably still in there when I replaced it a decade ago with the two-disc expanded edition. (Replaced again with the new 5 Albums UK set just released earlier this year.)

“Bad Monkey”, a radical reworking of “**** (Jungle Law)” saw the light of day first on the “Glittering Darkness” EP in 1996, and later as a part of the Swing! project finally released on disc two of the Love and Rockets reissue. It’s fairly unremarkable, meandering even, interesting only as an artifact of just how pissed off the trio really was over whoever they were feuding with in the press.

Back in the day, oversized subway posters of alternative bands were all the rage. I had a Love and Rockets one for the song “Motorcycle” off this album mounted on the ceiling of my bedroom at my parents’ house, but I am not sure if it made it to the dorm room at Bowling Green. The weird thing is that I honestly can’t remember where I got the poster. I might have had to special order it from the CD store I worked at, but I can’t be certain. I also had a smaller Love and Rockets poster of the band that might have been Pam’s. That one did make it up to BG and hung over my dorm room desk freshman year.

The End of the Eighties, Track 03

“Saudade”
Love and Rockets
Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven
1985
In the wake of Bauhaus’ dissolution in the early ’80s, band members went their separate ways with various solo and one-off projects. As the story goes, in 1985 when Peter Murphy failed to show up for a proposed Bauhaus reunion rehearsal, three-fourths of the band decided to jam anyway and Love and Rockets was born.

Amid the psychedelia-glam mash-up of Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, the debut closes out with a gorgeous 13-minute pairing of “Haunted When the Minutes Drag” and “Saudade”. The former is somewhat well-known for being featured in John Hughes’ She’s Having a Baby (an edited version of the song appears on the soundtrack). The latter is a five-minute instrumental I have always associated with my college roommate John.

For the last 20 years, I have operated under the assumption that “Saudade” is John’s favorite Love and Rockets tune. And knowing John, and how thoughtfully he walks through this life, there couldn’t be a more fitting choice because “saudade” is a Portuguese word analogous to nostalgia. Regardless, “Saudade” is one of my favorite Love and Rockets tunes and reason enough for inclusion on the playlist.

The synthesizer-guitar mix winds and flows around and between all the little reflective places in my head, easily conjuring memories of friends and girlfriends. It encapsulates those quieter moments I remember from Bowling Green… furiously trying to capture the thoughts in my head as my Sharpie (my writing utensil of choice at the time) flew across a page, watching Wonder Years in our dorm, hanging out with Kari (my girlfriend early that Fall semester).

Avoiding the Goth prototype they pioneered, Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins explored psychedelia and glam (Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven and Express), psychedelia and folk (Earth * Sun * Moon), and alternative rock and glam (Love and Rockets), before finally devolving into techno and house (everything after until I stopped following them altogether). But those first four albums contain some of my favorite songs of the era.

And given the backward-looking nature of this playlist, I can’t think of a more appropriate song selection than “Saudade”.

Related, irreconcilable memory: Not sure why it’s lodged in my head or if it’s even accurate, but I’m pretty sure Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven was the first compact disc I ever bought. What I do know for sure is that I started buying CDs before I ever had a player.