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Shedding Tears for A Flock of SeagullsFeb 02 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line In which the author and his 9-year-old self have a heart-to-heart on Super Bowl Sunday.
I'm always making fun of James because, without fail, his Lifetime Movies always reduce him to tears. It's one of the things I love about him. I could sit there, mocking the clunky dialogue, the formulaic plot twists, the over-baked (really, really overbaked) performances, but it doesn't matter. When it gets right down to that dramatic courtroom scene in the climax, where against all odds, our protagonist (Meredith Baxter, Patty Duke, Stephanie Zimbalist, whomever) finally sticks it to her abusers and justice is finally served, I'll turn to see James, his entire face bright red, and little rivulets of tears trickling down his cheeks. What a sucker! I'd think. Still, I'm not wholly insensitive, and I'm not one of those guys who insists he never cries at movies. Though I never cried over the movie "Gone With The Wind", I did cry watching a documentary of the making of that movie, especially during a clip of Hattie McDaniel's Academy Award acceptance speech. I cried all the way through "The Joy Luck Club" when I saw it in the theaters, and the first time I saw "My Dog Skip" on HBO, I sobbed so loudly and pathetically at the end that James was actually worried that I was having some sort of mental breakdown. But my tears totally threw him for a loop yesterday. We were sitting in our den - he was playing on the computer, I was watching TV - he turned to tell me something, and saw I was visibly choked up. "What's wrong?" he asked, genuinely concerned. "Nothing," I choked. "Just this show." As the original members of A Flock of Seagulls, reunited for the first time in twenty years, took the stage of a London night club to play a show for an audience of mostly thirty-and-forty somethings, I was just overcome with this warm, beautiful, joyful feeling, a feeling of wishing I had been there, that I could see more than just the two songs they showed on TV. As they played their rough-around-the-edges-but-still-gorgeous-after-all-of-these-years version of "Space Age Love Song"... I lost it. - - - - - It's been awhile since I've actually watched VH-1. Since we got Digital Cable, I spend more time watching VH-1 Classic, which features lots of obscure video delights from the 80s. But on Friday night, at an office party, my friend Tristan told me about this show where they try to reunite long-forgotten, long-broken-up bands from the 80s, not only to reminisce and maybe mend some fences, but ultimately, to perform a one-night-only reunion concert for their fans. When she told me that one of the bands they reunited was Kajagoogoo, my interest was sufficiently piqued. I made a point of looking up the show over the weekend. So, yesterday, while most Americans were getting together with friends for guac-n-chips and beer and football, I was holed up in our den watching VH-1, and slowly, painfully, coming to the realization that I'm just as much a sucker for this stuff as James is for his based-on-true-story-made-for-TV-men-are-the-enemy melodramas. For too long yesterday afternoon, I was glued to VH-1 watching successive episodes of their new series "Bands Reunited", watching Aamer (what a cutie) crossing the country (and in some cases, the globe) in search of Klymaxx's lead singer, Dramarama's bassist, and Berlin's long-lost original drummer, in the hopes of reuniting them with their bandmates, many of whom separated on less-than-amicable terms, many of whom have long since left the music industry altogether. Mike Score, the lead hairdresser and primary songwriter of A Flock of Seagulls was intercepted by the VH-1 team on his way to set up for a gig with the current "Flock" in Florida. Later they tracked down his brother Ali, looking more like a regular at the local tavern than a former new-wave drummer, working as a quality assurance manager in a plastics factory. The two brothers hadn't spoken in 5 years. Meanwhile, their bandmate Frank Maudsley was in the midst of renovating a sprawling chateau in the south of France and Paul Reynolds, the former "boy genius" guitarist was hanging out in Liverpool, looking like a vivid personification of centuries of rainy British melancholy - a far cry from the delicate, even feminine, young lad with the gawky red-tinted glasses in the videos from twenty years ago. - - - - - I was nine years old when A Flock of Seagulls’ signature song “I Ran” hit the airwaves. I loved the song, its pumping bass-line, its buzzing minimalist synth washes, Paul Reynold’s crisp and brightly reverberating guitar, and Mike Score’s extraterrestrial vocals. I loved the cheesy video, which was like some funky tin foil Patrick Nagel hallucination. Even at the height of new wave and synth pop, the Flock’s sound was truly unlike anything else on the radio, and further singles like “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” and “Space Age Love Song” further proved the point that this band wasn’t just an audio-visual novelty, a punchline in an Adam Sandler movie, but that they were capable of stunning beauty, and more than 20 years on, while we see many of the band’s peers as goofy relics of their time, the music of A Flock of Seagulls still feels real, and sometimes, dare I say it, poignant. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe, as I was watching two brothers separated by personal differences and rivalries, as I saw Paul Reynolds who was very clearly apprehensive about the whole thing, as I watched Frank burst forth in manic joy upon seeing his old mates again, as I watched these four guys reconciling their various pasts with their various presents through a single performance (the Scores’ mother was in the audience too!), it all just seemed overwhelmingly beautiful, For a little while… I was falling in love, Mike sang, and for a little while, I truly believed that these guys could be contenders for the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. But I don’t think it was just about the band getting back together, because I felt personally involved. Every time the camera turned to face the audience, I could see a bunch of thirtysomething 9-year-olds just like me, people who still have their 45’s of “Telecommunication” and “The More You Live, The More You Love”, girls (and boys) who discovered the joys of hair gel through their videos; people like me who consider A Flock of Seagulls to be one of their first “favorite” bands. Sure Mike’s voice sounded a little more earthly (i.e. tuneless) than I remembered, but otherwise the band sounded fantastic – a marvel considering how long it had been since they played together, and how little time they had to rehearse – they were tight and powerful. While I sat there watching these guys connect with each other so unexpectedly, I felt myself connecting to an earlier version of myself, one for which every new band, and every new song on the radio, felt truly, truly new. - - - - - I remember one time watching some kind of old time rock n’ roll reunion on TV with my parents – I was probably twelve or so. And they had Fabian come on to perform “Turn Me Loose”, and my Mom just went into strange fits of ecstasy watching him. And we used to argue all the time – she’d say that music was never going to be as memorable as it was in the 50s and 60s, and I’d always insist the opposite, that there was music, and there were bands from the 80s that people would hold onto in very personal ways. She was always saying that there were no new groups that people would look back on twenty years from now, and love as much as she loved Fabian. I doubt she remembers those arguments, but they were important to me at the time. I’d say, what about Madonna? What about U2? What about R.E.M. and Bon Jovi and Prince and John Cougar Mellencamp? I never figured I’d be shedding the same tears for A Flock of Seagulls (or Berlin, for that matter) that my mom shed for Fabian.  |
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