The Honeythief

 

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 70^th 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. 

 

Hipsway "The Honeythief"

Overkill

 

Apparently, I’m a very nostalgic person.  I was thinking about how during the fall of 1988, my senior year of high school, I made a melancholy mix tape made up of songs from my earliest purchased records, so we’re talking stuff from like 81-83.  I remember being a huge Men at Work fan in 5^th & 6^th grade and digging their goofy schtick.  By 1988, I was fully immersed in the darkness of a lot of postpunk, gothic rock and industrial, so I was pleased to choose songs like the hyper reflective and nostalgic “I Can See it Your Eyes” and the underrated “Overkill” as choices for my mix.  It was fun rediscovering these things from my then distant past.  It seems silly now, because that was only five or so years prior, but it was almost a third of my life at the time.  Now that I am officially old, five years is a blink of an eye in an ever-unchanging lifestyle.

 

Men At Work "I Can See it in Your Eyes"

I realize that it is quite meta to be reminiscing about a time that I was reminiscing about songs about reminiscing, but that’s how I seem to be built.  Besides, if one listens to these two songs closely, they will tell my story here much better and more eloquently than I can.

 

Men At Work "Overkill"

As summer turned into fall in 2004, I was sick.  I was really sick.  I’ve written about it before, so I won’t dive too far into it here, but I had been on kidney dialysis for almost three years, I was going through treatments to kill my immune system, and my skeleton was withering away.  I was dying.  I hadn’t given up, but unconsciously, I think I knew my time was coming.  I had stopped sleeping, so every night I would weed through all of my stuff and box most of it up to get rid of.  I began perusing through old stuff like all of my comic books from the early 80s and all of those old mixtapes I used to make for car rides.  Before getting rid of these things, I read the comic books and listened to the tapes.  Both would transport me not only into the world’s within, but to the times that I originally encountered them.  It was pretty powerful.  It was a slow-cooked version of having much of my isolated life pass before my eyes.  There was a particular mix tape from 1987 that blossomed a very powerful flashback to a very particular day.  It included the song by the Cure, “Why Can’t I Be You?”  I think the fact that the tape had been put together when that song was brand new, took me back to that time.  When I say “took me back,” the memory became so vivid and real that it became a powerful beacon that I began to strive for. 

 

The Cure "Why Can't I Be You?"

The flashback was from a day in 1987, likely June, just after school had ended (sophomore year).  It was a rare bright sunny and warm Saturday on the Oregon coast and I was blasting music in my bedroom, and I remember feeling antsy and likely bored.  My dad told me he was driving to Salem to drop off some commercial art he had done for a client.  I asked him if I could ride along as long as he dropped me off at a record store.  He did and I purchased the Cure’s wild new double album Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Concrete Blonde’s debut.  When we got home, I put on the Cure’s new album, and my headphones and was completely drawn in.  The album was epic and more than I could’ve ever hoped for.  It was everything!  Not long afterwards, I got a ride to the south end of town for a dance at our city’s Masonic Temple.  It was there that I hit the dance floor for the first time in my life (to “Why Can’t I Be You?” and Depeche Mode’s “Strangelove”) and later sort of tried my first clove cigarette (so 80s).  It was a good day!   As a memory, in 2004, it was so real – so tangible, I began to feel like I was living that day again.  I’m not sure of the significance of that day, but I wanted those feelings again.  I loved that Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me felt like it was brand new again, that I had not yet heard “Just Like Heaven” 40,000 times and had developed a dislike of the final LP single “Hot Hot Hot!!!”  Not long after this recurring flashback began to dominate all of my thoughts, I got a call for my life saving kidney transplant. 

Like a lot of people, my memories are generally tied to the music I remember from those times.  It’s an old cliché, but it is truly a soundtrack to our life stories.  Personally, I am fascinated by stories.  A lot of the old stories I’ve shared on this page, are moments in time with some deep significance for the narrator/character.  This is why I’ve been so thankful and excited about the handful of Song Stories people have sent in.  It’s these personal attachments to important songs that can sadly get lost when we go. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to some Northern Picture Library and Field Mice songs in my car, as I was stuck in traffic.  I became overwhelmed by the emotion behind some of those songs.  Old wounds from heartbreak bubbled up to the surface, as did an intense longing.  I began to think about how important, not only those songs are to me, but those feelings that they still bring to the surface, which are tied to moments from my life that are only meaningful to me, and hopefully to the other players from those moments.  Then I began to think about how fleeting those moments are and how easily they disappear.  When I finally do pass, all those important moments that make up what and who I am will be gone. 

It brings up all of those old questions everyone asks themselves: “what is all of this for?”  Believe me, I’m not just now asking these things, but for some reason, it has been on my mind a lot lately.  Perhaps it’s because I’m older, wildly unhealthy, and feeling a lot lost.  There is a strong sense of purposelessness happening in my life right now.  I do not feel like I’m contributing, but instead just taking up room and valuable resources.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t feel like I used to.  I’ve reached a point in my life where I am too numb – too calloused from past physical and emotional distress.  Most news is bad news, so when I get positive news, I don’t trust it!  That life soundtrack is getting old and outdated.  New memories are rare and rarely as affecting as they used to be.  I kind of miss feeling dramatic and alive!  Am I alone on this? 

This is a long-winded call for more Song Stories!  Please share them here (tangledrec@hotmail.com).  Every story is important and I’m personally interested in why it’s important.  It can be any song and it can be anonymous.  Let’s explore these hidden moments together.

Thank you Alexandra Smith for sending me the "Overkill" video.

Memories Fade

 

In the Spring of 1985, I was in the 8^th grade.  I have a vivid memory of getting dressed up for my class’ 8^th grade graduation ceremony.  I put on my best dress pants, wore the only non-basketball shoes I had, I put on my prized new sport coat, which was black and filled with colorful speckles, which buttoned over by my left arm at the waist – like a jacket from the 80s should.  I was in my bedroom listening to the Portland Top 40 station Z100 as I did much of the time in those days.  They were playing Tears for Fears’ “Shout,” which I was pretty enamored with.  This coincided with the time, like many people, that I was developing my own real tastes in music and was soon to have income.  Later that summer, I obtained my first real job and began buying records.  It was mostly top 40 stuff – dance remixes and albums.  Of course, I purchased TFF’s second LP Songs from the Big Chair and all of its related singles.  Even though that album was a massive hit and a huge part of the mainstream’s consciousness, it still managed to feel a little different than everything else around it.  I mean it was a hit record that was inspired by the disturbing movie Sybil, about a woman suffering from a psychological breakdown (during my senior year of high school, one of our teachers showed us that movie starring Sally Field in class.  I still marvel at how I think it took two weeks of class time to muddle through.)!  Tears for Fears was my major gateway band. 

Around this time, I noticed that most of the songs I heard and liked on Top 40 radio were the ones that would disappear from playlists quickly or barely crack the Top 40 and I was fascinated by b-sides.  I especially loved the experimental and strange b-sides on the back of TFF’s hit singles.  This is when I became obsessed and began buying all the music I could.  I purchased TFF’s debut album The Hurting, and all of its related singles.  I began having crazy dreams about finding non-existent limited-edition vinyl singles at the local grocery store with exclusive b-sides.  When I look back on it, I realize that this was very unhealthy.  The Hurting was a giant album for me.  It is so isolating and it was strangely identifiable for me (I was generally a happy go lucky kid).  I loved and still love its unbelievably aggressive darkness.  It is so sad.  So tragic.  It can be difficult to listen to.  It’s a cry for help, not a pop album!  But wow, did I lose myself in it.  Next up, I learned about the usual suspects from the time: Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division/New Order, etc. and it went from there in a hurry.  By the time I was graduating high school, I had gone through a goth phase, a punk phase (first UK, then different regions of the US), an industrial phase, a NO WAVE phase.  When I was dressing for graduation, I was likely listening to “God Damn the Sun” by Swans or a My Bloody Valentine or a The House of Love EP from Creation Records.  Like many people, I feel a great nostalgia for the music of those formative years, but I’m mostly nostalgic for the sense of discovery and wonder this journey provided me.  I still love the thrill of learning about new music and artists, but it will never come as fast and as extensively as then.

This is on my mind, because I recently ran across a live set of Tears for Fears from the German TV show Rockpalast recorded in 1983 that was a revelation.  Not only is it a high-quality documentation, but it is an excellent performance.  I never really considered this music “live”-ready.  The performance loosens up the extreme stiffness of the LP, but remains tight and measured.  It hit me with a lot of emotions, including nostalgia, and reminded me how horribly claustrophobic and depressing those early songs are.  It also sends me down black holes of thought.  Like how when I listen to younger and current artists like COLD BEAT or CASTLEBEAT, or many others that tap into an 80s sound, no one has made it like TFF did then – not even them!   I thank them for sending me on this continuing musical journey!

Tears for Fears "Memories Fade"