The End of the Eighties, Track 23

“Lips Like Sugar (12” Mix)”
Echo & the Bunnymen
Just Say Yes
1987

Surprisingly, Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar” is the only Bunnymen song on the playlist, but like Xymox’s “Blind Hearts”, it was originally found on both the Thursday’s and Bowling Green mix CDs. This track definitely earned its spot on both collections, though. Echo & the Bunnymen was a staple among my Akron friends Jen and Nancy and me on those Northeast Ohio nights spent driving around, as well as out on the dance floor at Thursday’s.

As for my Bowling Green associations with the song, well, that’s a somewhat longer story…

I’m pretty sure Labor Day weekend was the first time my college friend Jen took me home with her. During that period, my relationship with my parents was still pretty rocky, so instead of trying to find a ride back to Northeast Ohio or asking my parents to come pick me up, I accepted Jen’s offer to come home with her for the long weekend. She had a beat-up Datsun 210 dubbed “Bob” that she kept at school and drove us down to her mom’s house in Columbus in it.

I can still see the interior of her mom’s old house, and I remember Jen walking me through it and how it just sort of spiraled upwards as we made our way from the ground floor up to her attic room. We passed an ironing board in the room at the bottom of the attic stairs (that I’m fairly certain was wood paneled) that had one of those old 12x12, heavy stock record cover art posters used in record store displays. I’m not certain, but I think it was either Prince’s Lovesexy or a Depeche Mode album cover.

On the drive from her mom’s house to the Short North for the monthly gallery hop that end-of-summer Saturday night, we cranked Echo’s “Lips Like Sugar” and sang along at the top of our lungs. That night at the gallery hop, we met up and hung out with many of Jen’s local friends from Columbus’ alternative scene, but here’s where details get hazy… I know we ran into one particular girl Jen had gone to high school with, and, for whatever reason, Jen and I both broke into “Lips Like Sugar” after we parted ways with the friend. I think it was something goofy and (embarrassingly now) maybe slightly derogatory or mean-spirited on our part, but I’m not certain all these years later. I just know that it cracked us up for the rest of the weekend, and carried over with us back to campus when we returned to BG.

This version of “Lips Like Sugar” was originally available on the US 12” release in August of 1987, but I found it on Just Say Yes: Sire’s Winter CD Music Sampler released a few months later. (Sire’s music samplers produced seven volumes between 1987’s Just Say Yes and 1994’s Just Say Roe. By and large, they were treasure-troves of alternative music rarities, where you could find everything from remixes to non-album tracks.)

The song itself comes from the Bunnymen’s self-titled album from the same year. Arguably, their most commercially successful album, it’s a collection of songs that captures the jangly neo-psychedelic, synthpop of the Liverpool post-punk scene that also spawned Big in Japan, The Teardrop Explodes (including extensive cross-pollination and acrimony with Julian Cope), Dalek I Love You, and Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark. Echo & the Bunnymen contains the playful “Bedbugs & Ballyhoo” and the shimmering “All My Life”. The latter – a sort of spiritual successor to The Beatles “In My Life” – was a song I played extensively that year at BG, letting it inspire me and my writing with its beauty.

Taking the notion of the unattainable girl to swirling pop heights, it’s clear why “Lips Like Sugar” was the biggest hit from the album. Ian McCulloch’s vocals are melty, and when combined with Will Sergeant’s luminous guitar work the result is a near-perfect song of unrequited love.

The End of the Eighties, Track 22

“Closedown”
The Cure
Disintegration
1989

Like Siouxsie’s Peepshow album, the Cure’s Disintegration was blasted far too loudly from my dorm room that freshman year at Bowling Green. It sets a mood, to be sure, and that mood was often the morose, brooding, angsty mindset of a gothy punk poet on the verge of young adulthood.

“Closedown” is the album track that really gets the blood churning, and I had this to say about it in 2011:

The liner notes on the original album say “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP,” and the opening tribal drums of “Closedown” are relentless. You feel them thrumming in your chest with urgency at any volume. The immediacy of those four minutes of music – one of the shortest songs on the album – is underscored with a mere 11 lines of lyrics compacted into 40 seconds of song, making every turn of phrase, every word matter. The lyrics are well within lead singer Robert Smith’s doom and gloom wheelhouse, but the music feels uncharacteristically hard. While Cure songs of the era are typically dense, “Closedown” actually seems to apply pressure, actively pushing the air out of the listener’s lungs, suffocating them.

The End of the Eighties, Track 21

“Burn-Up”
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Peepshow
1988

Freshman year at Bowling Green, I roomed with John. It wasn’t all easy going. We tried each other’s patience and strained the limits of our friendship during that time. But our friendship ultimately survived, despite my handily kicking his ass at a year-long game of Rummy. Down the hall from us, our bear of an RA, appropriately named Mark Justice, kept watch over the floor. Mark is one of those guys who, though physically intimidating, is completely approachable and quick to put you at ease.

Mark was a few years in front of me in the Creative Writing program, encouraged me to be a part of the college’s literary magazine Prairie Margins, and was a member of the infamous BG band The Escaped Fetal Pigs. Mark was the guy who made his way back to the dorm with bags of plastic piggy banks that he found at the Dollar Store, excitedly rambling about how they were going to use them in the band’s stage show. Mark was the guy who, when the ATM across the street from campus ate my card, drove me downtown to the Western Union to collect the money my parents wired me. He was also the guy who would have to come down and police me for blasting my stereo far too loud.

I believe it was the last day before spring break because that is the only time I remember my dad coming to pick me up by himself. Most everyone else on the floor was gone, and I had Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow BLASTING from the stereo. I probably had my dorm room door propped open as well. Because that was enough to bring Mark down the hall to tell me to turn down the music, I have always associated Peepshow – at least, in part – with him.

Among the brilliant kaleidoscopic vision from hell that is Peepshow, the gothic hoedown of “Burn Up” has always shone a little brighter for me. The static fadeout of Nine Inch Nails’ “The Only Time” is both jarring and appropriate next to the bows-on-strings screeching of the “Burn Up” opening. The song builds with an immediacy as the listener comes to realize amid percussionist Budgie’s raging drums and vicious harmonica that “All fire and brimstone, this Jack-O-Lantern / He likes to watch the buildings burn!” Four-and-a-half minutes later, both the song and its protagonist are raging out of control around a blazing musical bonfire of nursery rhyme as Siouxsie Sioux chants about Jack jumping over the candlestick.

The End of the Eighties, Track 20

“The Only Time”
Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine
1989

At the crossroads of sex and religion, there lie Prince and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, and though these artists weren’t the genesis for my thoughts on these themes, they certainly informed my view. In Prince’s world sex is nasty and fun, but it also lives alongside absolute faith. Reznor’s vision is darker, blacker, more violent and questioning, borderline hopeless. Reznor credits Prince for “ideas and sounds” on Pretty Hate Machine, and nowhere is that influence more tangible to me than on this provocative track.

I have written at length about the influence of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, but “The Only Time” has always been my favorite song on the album. This darkly raging exploration of uninhibited lust and the act of losing oneself in another opens with the simple declaration: “I’m drunk.” Reinforcing the emptiness of the moment, this is followed by the admission that “right now I’m so in love with you / And I don’t want to think too much about what we should or shouldn’t do.”

As much as I love the shocking vulgarity of first verse’s “Lay my hands on heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars / While the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car,” it’s the delivery of the next line that seals the deal for me: “Nothing quite like the feel of something new.” The idea of this graphic image being almost disposable gets to the heart of the detachment from reality that was a cornerstone of late ’80s/early ’90s young adulthood.

Looking back on my relationships of the era, I realize just how influenced by this song they were. I took to heart the notion that there needed to be turmoil to make a relationship real, to really feel. Reznor’s notion that “This is the only time I really feel alive” in the chorus echoed all the self-absorption of my late teens and early 20s tortured soul mindset, and resulted in many-a subconsciously sabotaged relationship.

Clever turns of phrase like “My moral standing is lying down” and imagery of “The sweat in your eyes, the blood in your veins are listening to me” work perfectly in front of the music’s clashing industrial synthesizer noise and looped breathing samples. Aggressive animalistic basslines thrust my reeling mind through an off-kilter fun house of emotional damage in the same way they propelled me through crowds at those early live shows.

I listen to this song nearly 25 years later, and I am immediately transported back to New Year’s Eve 1989, I’m in the music store I worked at through late high school and college, I’m at all those early shows at the Phantasy and Empire, I’m fucking up relationships that deserved better, and words are pouring from the tip of my Sharpie on to unruled paper at a furious pace. The sway this song and this album have over me is staggering, a catalyst to lay bare everything that was swirling inside me.

The End of the Eighties, Track 19

“Somebody”
Depeche Mode
Some Great Reward
1984

Like most of America, it was the hit-you-over-the-head obvious, egalitarian “People Are People” where Depeche Mode first came onto my radar. Released in March of 1984, almost a half-year in advance of Some Great Reward, the single’s popularity would prompt the release of a US-only compilation of the same name nearly two months before Some Great Reward was available. The album of new material boasts two of Depeche Mode’s most provocative songs: the psycho-sexual “Master and Servant”, and the religious-questioning “Blasphemous Rumours”. But it’s the double A-side of that latter song that has always caught my ear. After Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode in 1981, Martin Gore stepped up and took over primary songwriting duties for the band. “Somebody” was Gore’s first ballad and only the fourth time he sang lead on a Depeche Mode song. 

Coming from a place of damaged love, there is a need for comfort. The hopeless romantic as the addict, and “Somebody” is the junkie’s lie – to himself, to her. There are pledges of support and requests for understanding. Challenging and disagreeing are a part of the healthy give-and-take façade that crumbles under harsher light. Things unravel when the singer admits, “I don’t want to be tied to anyone’s strings / I’m carefully trying to steer clear of those things.” Ultimately, the bait has been switched, and “Though things like this / Make me sick / In a case like this / I’ll get away with it.”

Playing off the duplicitous lyrical twist, there is a sinister undertone, courtesy of the heartbeat time being kept throughout, and the almost-intelligible voices that provide background… is it children on a playground, idle cocktail party-goers’ chatter, something else entirely?

Thematically, I love the bridge between The Cure’s “Untitled” and Depeche Mode’s “Somebody” on the playlist. Where the previous track wallows in its self-pity, this one looks for new hope (or at least a new bed to share). Also, of note, the original single version of “Somebody” found on the Catching Up With Depeche Mode/The Singles 81>85 compilations shaves a few seconds off the album version, but somehow feels more rich and textured.

The End of the Eighties, Track 18

“Untitled”
The Cure
Disintegration
1989

When it comes to The Cure, and Disintegration in particular, I’ve said so much already, but I hope that doesn’t mean the subject is unworthy of being revisited and refreshed…

I started dating Pam in January of 1989. It was the most intense relationship I’d ever been a part of at that point in my life. Inspiration and passion were the order of the day, every day. She encouraged me and challenged me. It was here that I found my voice. Here that I found my creative outlet. Here that Random Thoughts Escaping truly began. The title of the blog is taken from my first collection of poetry dated January 1989 through August 1989, which I pretentiously – and completely unironically in the way only an 18-year-old can – subtitled “Ideas of Life, Death, Love, Loss, Beginnings, and Endings.” I wrote constantly, scribbling furiously every chance I had. I filled page after page of angsty, sometimes-overwrought, sometimes-pretty good poetry. Ultimately, I found my voice and found a direction.

This relationship with Pam, however, wasn’t going to last. She opened me up to worlds I had never experienced, but I didn’t recognize what was always hanging in the air. She gave me as much fair warning as she did play with my heart. Ultimately, she broke it and moved to San Francisco to live with her ex-boyfriend. I spiraled.

Music was a huge part of that period in my life and that relationship in particular. And this album, released just a couple of months before Pam literally moved out of my life, was epic in scale. Disintegration became the soundtrack to my loss, and “Untitled” the voice of my heart. Sitting in my parents family room in the early morning summer hours after coming home from the bars, the stereo playing this album, this song, as my Sharpie raced across the page, trying to capture all the emotion of Life After Pam.

“Untitled” is six-and-a-half minutes of sorrow and resignation. Where “Closedown” is musically hard-charging, “Untitled” is languid, wallowing in tears and defeat. Thematically, it’s right in line with what’s considered typical Cure of the era, but the lyrical imagery is some of Robert Smith’s very best:

Hopelessly fighting the devil futility

Feeling the monster climb deeper inside of me

Feeling him gnawing my heart away hungrily

I’ll never lose this pain, never dream of you again.

And it spoke to me like no other in that dark summer as I struggled to redefine my new self, alone.

As a young writer, I loved the notion of this song being untitled. It fit perfectly with my own writing style of the time, which lacked punctuation and capitalization, eschewing rhyme and titles (the bulk of my poetry from the era took their titles from the first line of the poem). Today, I recognize “Untitled” as a cheeky bit of fun on Smith’s part, unable to even find the right words to provide a title for a song that laments “Never quite said what I wanted to say to you / Never quite managed the words to explain to you.”

If you’ve followed this blog over the years (thank you!), then you probably already knew there was simply no way “Untitled” wouldn’t appear on the End of the Eighties playlist. For an expanded look at the entire album this song is taken from and the importance of Disintegration, I hope you’ll take a few moments to revisit my thoughts on it from 2011 with fresh eyes, and enjoy!

The End of the Eighties, Track 17

“Jump in the River”
Sinéad O’Connor
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
1990

It was difficult not to pick the obvious Sinéad O’Connor song here (like I did with the Cowboy Junkies’ selection earlier on the playlist). “Nothing Compares 2 U” is epic in every way and deserving of its recognition. The strings and verge-of-tears vocals over Prince’s heart wrenching lyrics are a perfect storm of emotion. I remember the video coming on MTV while home from college and calling my mom into the room to watch it, and gushing about how beautiful O’Connor was and those amazing green eyes and trying to put into words the way the song touched me. (The significance of this occasion may be lost over the years, but this was actually an olive branch of sorts – an attempt at connecting with my mom and letting her into my world – given the tempestuous state of my relationship with my parents during my punk phase.) The album that followed shortly after that first proper single was wrapped in stark passion and right in the crosshairs of my musical awareness.

But “Jump in the River” is the one that holds specific Bowling Green memories. Located right on Main Street in downtown BG, Uptown/Downtown was already a ten-year-old fixture in the small college town by the time we arrived on campus. I had no interest in Downtown’s sports bar, but Uptown’s dance club was a perfectly acceptable option.

The ritual of getting ready to go out now seems almost as important as the night out itself was – eyeliner and black lipstick, black tights under ripped jeans, these crazy black boots I had bought the year before, and the black leather motorcycle jacket I bought on consignment in BG (and plastered with NIN and Ministry stickers) all played a role. Throw in a pack of cigarettes and the Zippo lighter John’s dad gave me years before, and the costume was accessorized.

I remember very little about the inside of Uptown other than ubiquitous crowds and sweat and thumping music. I’m pretty sure “college alternative” nights were on Wednesdays back in the day, but I say that without any sense of certainty. I do know we danced at Uptown to “Jump in the River”. The gunshot ricochet opening and driving percussion make it one of the hardest tracks on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Co-written by O’Connor and Marco Pirroni, he of the seminal punk pedigree, I still love the song’s imagery… 

Real world kisses (“I thought I tasted of too many cigarettes, but you tasted like wine.”) give way to the fascination of a relationship never meant to last (“It’s all been a gorgeous mistake / A sick one, a clean one, the best one God ever made”). Over Pirroni’s screeching feedback guitar, O’Connor describes all the turmoil of young love and lust in a single couplet: “There’s been days like this before, you know, and I liked it all / Like the times we did it so hard there was blood on the wall.” This was music that spoke to me in the same way The The’s Mind Bomb expanded my world.

Originally found alongside the likes of New Order, Debbie Harry, Ziggy Marley, Tom Tom Club, and Brian Eno, the song was the lead off of Jonathan Demme’s stellar (and underrated) Married to the Mob soundtrack, meaning “Jump in the River” was actually released a year before O’Connor’s album.

Among the selections on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, there are certainly songs I prefer to “Jump in the River” – the slow build from a cappella to the stirring drum and acoustic guitar finale of “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” springs immediately to mind – but this song makes the most sense based on its ties to nights out at Bowling Green and flow within the playlist.