The year was 1986. Having typed that, I immediately envision
myself wearing an Abraham Lincoln
get up and holding a book in the crutch of my arm tightly to my chest. Some details are hazy, but at the time, I was
really getting into music, but still mostly relying on Commercial Hit Radio for
my music discoveries. I was beginning to
seek more into the nooks and crannies that year, yet some hit songs poked
through. Some of my friends and I all
liked the moderate hit song “The Honeythief” by Scottish group Hipsway. I liked the groovy guitar and it was fun to
sing along with, despite the creepy Lolita-esque
lyrics. I wound up purchasing the 12”
single, while my friend Matt bought the full album on cassette. He liked it and loaned it to me, espousing
the song “Long White Car.” I agreed it
was a good song and that the album was alright.
I honestly only remember “The Honeythief” at this point, which was
they’re only hit US single.
The Portland hit radio station Z100 began advertising a concert for
Hipsway in town, where their sponsorship provided really cheap tickets. A bunch of us secured tickets and all piled
into Matt’s father’s van (none of us kids could drive yet) and he drove us from
the Oregon coast to Portland for a day of downtown hijinks and a late evening
concert. In retrospect, I do not know
how our parents put up with this crap:
trucking us morons around for these long distance trips to concerts, yet
I am thankful they did. The concert was
at The Starry Night club off of NW
Burnside. It is now The Roseland Theatre and remains essentially the same, except now
there’s a different entrance full of insane security measures. Then, one only needed to show a ticket (pre-barcode)
to get in the door and walk up those stairs to the second floor into the smoky
venue. An old square venue where the all
ages dancefloor fronted the stage, while above was a balcony for the 21+ crowd. All being fairly new to the live music
experience most of us bolted to the front of the stage eager to see the bands
perform. Bill split off to bum smokes.
The tenuous reason why I am relaying
this story is why this strange top 40 sanctioned show still stands out against
the hundreds of incredible bands I’ve seen over the years since. The crowd was so incredibly diverse and The
Starry Night was packed. Despite being a
Z100 event, the crowd was full of punks and goths – more in one place than I’ve
ever seen since, and I’ve seen a lot of punk and goth shows, which have both
been favorite sub-genres of mine. Of
course there were other teenage white generic nerds like us as well as poofed
hair teen girls in their finest shiny blouses buttoned all the way up with big
oval brooches. There were older looking
guys there who looked mean, like all record store employees at the time. The sheer amount of smoke in the venue was
astonishing. The sweet smell of cloves
was exotic and alluring.
My friend Ryan and I were at the front of center stage as the opening act, Hypertension, eased into position and the house lights turned off. Hypertension at that time were an 80s cover band with some similarly styled originals, who seemed to be the house band for Z100 events (where was the Z100 mascot: The Jammin’ Salmon?). I don’t remember much, except for the repeated in unison kicks the band would employ to emphasize the songs and their party vibe. Each time the kicks would happen, I would lean back to avoid a kick to the face, and blinding lights above would like up the audience. As I fell back from the kicks, I would look to my right and Ryan was also leaning back and looking back at me with his hands still clutching the edge of stage. He had a wide grin on his face that was more of a mystified confusion than actual joy. Ryan remembers the singer wearing uncomfortably tight acid wash jeans, and that seems right.
Unlike the highly scheduled and precise timing of so many concerts in these modern times, in the 80s and 90s concerts ran on their own schedule. An endless gap between bands back then were absolutely exhausting. At the stage, we could clearly see that everything was set up, yet the waiting would go on for what seemed like forever. Even by the time I became more jaded and would seek out alcohol at the bar between sets, the gap was almost too much to endure.
Again, my memories are fuzzy regarding the actual show. Hipsway played their set, surprisingly sans the 80s staple of a pair of soulful backing singers. The quartet were dressed in suits and played their smooth pop and of course, “The Honeythief” drew a huge positive response from the crowd. What I do remember is that the vocalist danced around in a fashion that had me mesmerized: like a marionette puppet whose puppeteer was having a seizure. No that’s unfair, because his dance was smooth and it fit his olive green suit wearing chic. More like an expertly wielded Jig Doll? That’s seriously all that I remember of the performances. I know that I enjoyed them and had a great time. It’s amazing how my memories are more snapshots than actual reels of action.
Speaking of memories, I do not remember what happened to the rest of our gang. I knew that Bill was running amok bumming smokes and trying to “scam chicks,” yet I do not remember if Ken and Matt were up front with us, or not. I always suspected that Ken was in some side room with old fashioned 30s movie style mobsters sniffing blow off of a hooker’s bare stomach, but this cannot be confirmed. Plus in the days and weeks after he could expertly mimic the Hipsway singer’s dance. And Matt? Who knows? Probably ordering chili cheese fries from a kitchen that no one knew existed. They were probably right there with Ryan and I, but not nearly as confounded by Hypertension as we were.
Once the show was over and the house lights sprang back to life, I remember standing in the middle of the dancefloor surrounded by all of the people filing their way to the exit stairwell. We were keeping an eye out for Bill, who popped out of the crowd excitedly shouting at us about all the cool people he had met and the babes who gave him smokes. This was when I really began to notice the diversity of the audience. Being Portland, yes, the audience was mostly white, but not exclusively. It was also gender diverse. Not until the early 2000s did I see I see so many women at concerts. The “alternative” 90s shows had become testosterone fueled hell pits.
It didn’t fully dawn on me until much later, but this Hipsway concert was one of the last times that I attended a concert that drew such a wide swath of people of all kinds of backgrounds happily co-existing. I’ve always wondered why that was. I’m still not sure, but I think it may be because of the changes in media options, or just an unusual anomaly. We went from a society made up of broadcasting options. That meant limited options. So many of us had very few choices, if say we wanted to hear some new music. We listened to one of the few radio stations that played new music, so we would put up with hearing numerous songs that we didn’t really care for in order to hear that one song that felt thrilling. Today, obviously, we all choose our own playlists. We don’t have to listen to stuff we don’t like just to get to the stuff we do. We can listen to only our good stuff. I’m not judging this. I do this too. It’s remarkable. That fifteen year old kid would’ve never had a notion that one day he could listen to a streaming radio station (DKFM) for an hour and only hear one song that was just okay, while the rest are stunning! Who wouldn’t choose that over listening to an hour full of commercials, boring ballads, and “Careless Whisper” by Wham! for the 70th time in a day?
What this has done though is it has limited our exposure to very specific people and things. Not that all crowd diversity is gone, but over the past two decades, I can predict the make-up of the audience before attending a show. One might experience more of that Hipsway diversity at these giant stadium concerts, but I am so far down my own rabbit hole that I didn’t consciously know a Taylor Swift song until 2023, plus I can no longer afford concerts. Perhaps that alone is part of that Hipsway audience back in 1986, it was cheap entertainment. It was a night out with something that we could all do. Most of us likely learned about it from the same source.
I’m no expert in this kind of thing,
but as my old age nostalgia has ramped up lately and I ponder about times like
this random show from the 80s and marvel at seeing a group of Japanese coeds
excitedly leave that show together directly behind a few skate punks wearing DRI and Circle Jerks T-Shirts
and a 30-something married couple holding hands (please forgive the
assumptions). Since about 1998, I’ve
been almost guaranteed to see some guy at a concert who could be me. It’s kind of creepy and never fails to make
me question my life choices.
Please don't mistake this as a "back in my day things were better" tirade. Again I'm not judging. Personally, some things then felt better, and many things are better now. Things are definitely different. That cannot be denied. Sometimes I wonder if our individualized isolationism is why we still struggle so much with understanding each other. I think as humans we crave shared experiences, but not as much as we crave satisfying our own interests. Over recent years I’ve witnessed a lot of excited conversations about certain TV shows on certain streaming services. People who otherwise don’t interact. I do not pay for streaming and I can tell that people are disappointed, but get excited to tell me about the show that is lighting up their days and nights. Often times they offer me their login so I can watch said show and be available for a rundown. The craving for that shared experience is palpable and yet we’re finding more and more ways to let it go. I’ve done zero research and fully realize that I’m talking out of my ass, yet my experiences especially since social media became such a thing is that I will likely not attend a live concert ever again that will come anywhere close to the broad spectrum of people that I used to witness regularly years ago. It’s nice to know now that when I see an artist perform that most of the people there are, as a whole, much more likely to be people I have a lot in common with. However, it’s more forgettable. Nearly forty years later I still remember Hypertension’s kicks and the smell of cloves and seeing a couple of black kids dancing uninhibited to a mostly unknown white band from far away.
