The two weeks before I moved to Minneapolis, I wrapped up on my roofing and siding job.
I had a boom box to help while away the lonely hours of hammering and sawing. To save battery power (four D batteries ain’t cheap), I usually tuned it to KFYR in Bismark – the only non-country music station in range.
This being the eighties, program directors were casting some very broad nets to try to figure out what’d latch on.
And this song peered out onto the radio a few times during those few weeks. It’s by Jane Wiedlin, erstwhile rhythm guitarist for the Go Gos.
There is no rational reason why this song, of all the hours of music I listened to on that job site that month, this one stuck with me. You never hear it on the radio – ever. I doubt most of you ever have heard it, or retained it if you did.
And yet this song, for me, feels like a hot day, smelling the hay coming in, watching the sun edging down toward the hjorizon.
I didn’t say all of these songs made sense.
I remember this one — hadn’t heard it in a long time. Jane did some good solo stuff, but Belinda Carlisle had the better career.
Never heard it. But, again, proves your thesis about association, especially if repeated often enough. We haven’t evolved much from Pavlov’s d0gs, have we?
So, MBerg, you had a BA, and you were working as a roofer?
Hey, it was the 80’s. I know a guy who graduated from a name university with a degree in English Lit. Not a marketable skill. He found a job driving a Kenworth in the oil fields of North Dakota when oil was booming – made more than his classmates working at B. Dalton or grinding away in grad school – and still had time to read the books he loved. I always envied that guy.
Not in my memory bank either but the GoGos influence is strong.
I didn’t live here then so I don’t have real life experiences to bind to this song, Blue Kiss. I think Ms Wiedlin is also the (co-)writer of Our Lips Are Sealed, which, in my ears, is reminiscent of Blue Kiss.
The Go-Gos are an interesting band because when they started they were punk-ish and dressed themselves down until some point in time when they started dressing up, especially Ms Carlisle. Always liked women’s clothes styles from the 80s.
So, MBerg, you had a BA, and you were working as a roofer?
I believe this was established quite some time ago.
A BA in English + 3.5 years of not really thinking that hard about what to do with it = roofing for a bit.