The End of the Eighties, Track 33

“Every Little Counts”
New Order
Brotherhood
1986

Just like its three previous album covers, New Order’s fourth album featured striking Peter Saville sleeve art. This time, though, he decided to forego color-coding the album title in the cover, and instead it’s a photograph of a sheet of Titaanzink metal. It’s sterile, gray, unyielding… a lot like the perception of synthesizer-based bands in the ’80s (and certainly New Order’s live show reputation). But the last song on the original album’s running order is anything but antiseptic.

John turned me on to this little ditty from Brotherhood. It’s a fun, sarcastic, off-the-cuff song that I think Bernard Sumner might have just made up the words to on the spot. The song opens with the wonderfully mischievous “Every second counts / When I am with you / I think you are a pig / You should be in a zoo” before Sumner looses his straight face and devolves into a fit of giggles. More laughter follows later in the song when he misses a note. In the interim, he sings of the stupidity of the song’s subject, but any sort of mean-spiritedness is disarmed by the orchestral splendor of the accompaniment. 

Much like the Cure’s “A Few Hours After This…”, “Every Little Counts” combines a musically symphonic idea of strings and mixes it with a playful sense of humor in the lyrics and delivery. It’s at once completely incongruous and perfectly matched, right down to the Beatles-esque finale and record scratch ending.

Fine Time

New Order, with Public Image Ltd. and The Sugarcubes
05 July 1989: Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

My senior year of high school we had a foreign exchange student from Germany. I was pretty smitten with her, even asking her out a few times, but she shut me down quickly (and repeatedly). As the school year wore on, I met and fell hard for another girl who would set me on the path that helped shape me into the person I am today, leaving indelible fingerprints all over my creative outlets and musical tastes. Something was in the air our senior year, because my best friend John had also found love, falling harder than I’d ever seen him fall before – for our German exchange student, Julie.

Somewhere between Monsters of Rock and Lollapalooza, in the music festival no-man’s land that was the summer of 1989, New Order toured with Public Image Ltd. and the Sugarcubes. Firmly in my wheelhouse (both then and now, I have to admit), this was the must-attend show of the year. But by that summer before college, my girlfriend had moved on – figuratively and literally – dumping me and heading to San Francisco. So not only did I have to borrow the $15 from John in order to buy my ticket, I was third wheeling it to the show with him and Julie.

I only saw three shows at Blossom before moving to Florida in August of 1990. The New Order/PiL/Sugarcubes show was bookended by the Beach Boys with Roy Orbison and John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band (of Eddie and the Cruisers fame) in the summer of 1988, and Jimmy Buffett in the summer of 1990. Being relatively broke high school and college students during that era, it was exclusively lawn seating for me and my friends. I remember wandering the grounds and getting into all kinds of trouble during the Beach Boys show, and I remember very little about the Jimmy Buffett show (read into that what you will).

For the New Order concert, my memory puts John, Julie, and me right in the center of the lawn with a view straight into the pavilion and stage. I remember being pretty well anchored to our staked out plot of lawn for the duration of the show – even for the Sugarcubes’ set, despite never having been a huge fan of theirs.

The PiL performance was by far the most dynamic of the day. Johnny Lydon is nothing if not an entertainer. They were supporting 9, their most commercial album and one I thoroughly enjoy. The headliners were touring behind Technique, an album I have on vinyl, cassette, and CD. Publicly, New Order played to type by remaining completely impassive behind their instruments. Privately, the band was falling apart. This show took place about a month after Bernard Sumner announced to his bandmates that he no longer wanted to continue as New Order and was forming another band with Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr.

I’ve heard recordings of New Order’s set from this night, and the music itself was fairly solid, but lyrics were mangled or forgotten throughout the set (making one wonder if it was internal band strife or *ahem* recreational activities that resulted in the lyrical casualties). It was a visually sterile show, more impressive for getting to hear this music I love played at incredibly loud decibels than for any sort of stage presence by the performers.

More remarkable than anything else about the night, though, is the fact that virtually everyone from my future close college circle of friends and lovers attended that show, and then some. Some combination (or maybe all) of the people John and I would find our freshman year at Bowling Green just a few months later were there.

The alternative music culture of the late ’80s was an amplified version of the feeling I had of gaining entré into an exclusive club after wearing my first concert t-shirt (David Lee Roth) to school the day after the show. Musical tastes were visible in the costumes we wore day-in and day-out: dyed black hair, black eyeliner, thrift store chic. We might have found each other anyway, but because she was wearing a black PiL concert t-shirt I was prompted to strike up a conversation with Erin at college orientation a month or so after the show. I’m pretty sure Jeff was at that concert, and maybe Jen was, too.

Just as extraordinary, and like so many other shows in our shared history (David Bowie at the Richfield Coliseum springs immediately to mind), Tracy was in the house this same night. Although I wouldn’t meet her for another six-and-a-half years, while I was on the lawn, my future wife was in the mosh pit down front getting gobbed on by Johnny Lydon himself.

PiL is rumored to release a vinyl EP and full length album of new material this year, and a partial reunion of New Order has been teasing live shows overseas since late last year. The frenzy around the latter should only increase with their scheduled performance at the closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics. I’m not sure if I’d go to see New Order or PiL, though, if they ended up touring the U.S. (I didn’t go out of my way to see a reconstituted PiL a couple of years ago when the closest they came to Northeast Ohio was a 2010 show in Pittsburgh.) I just have too much history mixed up in these groups, and it’s probably best if I just leave those memories unaltered.

The End of the Eighties, Track 13

“Bizarre Love Triangle”
New Order
Brotherhood
1986

If there was ever a more aptly named song for the complicated, incestuous romances and crushes among college friends, I can’t think of one. Although appropriate for probably the bulk of that freshman year at Bowling Green, there is one particular night that I associate most with New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”.

Despite that seemingly juicy insinuation, this is going to be a terribly disappointing entry. Much like the New Year’s Eve that would follow that same year, there are too many fuzzy memories tied up in the night associated with this song, and attempting to recount specific details would be doing a disservice to the friendships involved. So instead I’m going to do my best to dance around as much of the incriminating evidence as I possibly can.

It was early in that fall semester, but the close bonds between John, Jen, Erin, Jeff, and me were already being forged. I was dating Kari. Jeff was living in a frat house on campus because of a freshman housing shortage, earning him the nickname “Fratman” (remember, Tim Burton’s Batman had just hit earlier that summer).

On this particular night we were all going to meet up in Jeff’s room at the frat house. Everyone else went ahead to Jeff’s while Kari and I stayed back in my dorm room where – using nothing more than ice and the kind of starter earrings Claire’s Boutique uses – she pierced my ear up in cartilage. (It was my sixth piercing, but, for the record, it hurt like hell. And, according to urban legend, it’s kinda dangerous because I guess you can actually shatter the cartilage if not done correctly and then the top of your ear just flops over. Ew.)

After we were done mutilating my ears, I headed over to Jeff’s room. I can’t remember if Kari came with me there or not, but I don’t have any strong memories of her being there. There was alcohol involved, but I don’t know where it came from. We were all very drunk and there were admissions and confessions of unrequited love. There was a bunch of drunken laughter, probably some undeserved tears, and for some reason I can clearly see a combination of all of us in the community bathroom in the house. No idea why, though.

I don’t know what else I could possibly say about the night that wouldn’t either embarrass someone or be horribly inaccurate. (My relationship with Kari didn’t implode until later in the semester. Completely my fault, by the way, but not related directly to any of the events of the Bizarre Love Triangle.)

So if only by virtue of its title, New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” would deserve a place on The End of the Eighties, but it runs deeper than that. Lyrically, it’s one of the band’s least cryptic tunes, and was their first US hit, landing them on numerous late ’80s soundtracks.

Hailing from the “synth” side B of the album Brotherhood (side A being the “rock” side), it’s a remarkably bright song for the band. Most New Order compositions have a decidedly dark undertone, perhaps a lingering residue from the band’s previous incarnation. “Bizarre Love Triangle” is downright bouncy, carrying the listener along on a wave of keyboards and percussion, pushing any concerns over romantic entanglements blissfully out of mind.