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Thanksgiving Weekend: ’80s Redux

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving!

Did you have a good weekend?

I awoke today, realizing that I had spent my entire holiday weekend in the suburbs: Thanksgiving Day out in no-man’s-land (um, Huntley) with some family, including new baby cousins; Friday night to check out my Little Cannoli’s Toy Drive (friend and former WJMK co-worker, Dick Biondi), this year at Stratford Square mall in Bloomingdale; and a two-fer on Saturday, with a going-away party for a friend’s daughter in Palatine, then down the street to see ’80s tribute band, 16 Candles, at Durty Nellie’s.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But for this city girl, who grew up in a suburb and years ago escaped down here as soon as it was humanly possible, it turned out to be more of a flashback than I expected. And I’d heretofore never even been to Durty Nellie’s.

So, yeah, most of the flashback-iness of the weekend occurred there.

I had heard of these 16 Candles guys, as they play street fests in the city all summer long. Yet, somehow I only seem to have heard them while passing by, on the way to get a drink or see some other band, or something. It’s the first time I had ever spent more than 5 minutes in a room (or really, on a street) with them.

My friend Alison, her friend Mike, and I, missed the first set, I think. By the time we got all settled with our drinks and down to the main floor, they opened their second set by ripping into “Relax,” the one-hit wonder from 1984 by Liverpool natives, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Well. Somehow that wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was good enough for us! Let the flashbacks begin, indeed. The drums and bass kicked up the familiar pulsing new-wave opening bass line, and we were fist-pumping and dancing around like kids.

The funny part: while we were gleefully transported back to our youth, the actual kids (20-something bar rookies) in the crowd just…stood there.

Don’t they know what great music this is?!?, Alison’s and my eyes said to each other in silent scorn, as we bopped around, blissfully defiant to the youth of today. Some frowny-faced jerkoff kids behind us didn’t even look like they knew what they were doing there, and resigned themselves to making fun of us. Too bad for them that they missed the point.

Don’t get me wrong; it was an ’80s band, so obviously there were other 30-something people there, enjoying the music, but in our little quadrant, we seemed to be the only ones having any actual fun. Observing this, I thought it similar to what our parents must have felt, hearing us dance in our rooms to this “vile” stuff the first time around, back in the day, rolling their eyes, but blissing-out when they, say, finally got control of the car radio to listen to their precious Beach Boys and Leslie Gore when they got the chance.

(OK, so I grew up to be an Oldies jock for a significant part of my career, so all of that Oldies stuff certainly wasn’t wasted on me, but that’s neither here nor there, for the pop-culture purposes of this story.)

Back to the bar. Hah, what do they know? They acted all too-cool-for-the-room, as youth will do, regretfully ill-informed to the coolness of a song with an easy hook and which once seemed shockingly…dirty. Taboo, what with the suggestive lyrics and “Frankie” punctuating every other beat with all that moaning. So shockingly “dirty” that somehow, someone gave me a fluorescent pink over-sized sweatshirt that said “Frankie Says: Relax” on it for Chanukkah that year. So, if a relative gave me that when I was 12, it couldn’t have been that bad, right? Totally mainstream. I wore it with my skin-tight black leggings, of course, back in junior high.

Maybe the kids weren’t acting “too-cool-for-the-room.” Maybe they’re just de-sensitized, in these sexually-charged times of Usher and Lady Gaga and many other pop stars; maybe it wasn’t dirty enough for them! Or maybe they just didn’t like it. (How could they not like it? Ultimately, they paid to go out and see it.)

A few Depeche Mode songs, Tony Basil’s “Mickey” and Madonna’s “Material Girl” mixed in to some little medley the band strung together, Duran Duran, Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl”—thankfully, the kids did seem to know that one, since it still gets plenty of radio play—and more. Good times.

The most ironic part of all of this hit me when I took a trip to the ladies room: I saw legwarmers. More than one pair. Really? Legwarmers? Again? (Even back in the ’80s, I never saw the point of anyone but dancers wearing legwarmers. I was given a pair of those, too, but they never matched any of my clothes, and ultimately, as no one really wore them in summer, in winter they just made your ankles even more wet when your pants grazed the slush and snow outside. Blech.)

I saw those ruffled mini-skirts, the likes of which we all wore at the party after my Bat Mitzvah in 1986. The big tops and big belts and leggings—in the form of the newly-named “skinny jeans,”—too, are coming back, folks. I realize that rumbles of this returning trend have been quietly building for about the past year or so. To be fair, I was warned. But to see them all at once, in the bathroom of a surburban concert hall while live ’80s music was playing?

I think I may have even seen some big hair, but I have to give that trend the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s because we were in the suburbs. Even with the fashion trends, you don’t see that hair in pop culture these days unless you’re watching “Jersey Shore” on MTV.

Even my friend Samantha recently proclaimed, “I’m getting on the skinny jeans bandwagon!” But a) she already has naturally yet tastefully big, curly long hair and b) she’s naturally skinny and waify and hot and beautiful, and is about the only human with whom I’m personally acquainted who could pull this retread look off. So she gets a pass.

But to the rest of you young ladies…it’s bad enough you don’t know good “oldies”(haha) bar music when you hear it, but this is a fashion trend we don’t need again:

Gag me with a spoon.

All in all, it was a lovely weekend, and a fun blast from the past.

The only complaint, musically-speaking, I had was: they didn’t play “Wham Rap,” that little-played, cult-ish, awesome nearly-hit wonder by Wham. THAT would have been a true treat, in my book! The guys in the band seemed charmingly wry and hip enough to do it, though. I will have to check out 16 Candles some other time to see if they deliver.

Now, here I sit, cozily winding down on a holiday weekend, never before dreaming up that I’d be inspired to write a blog by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, of all freakish things. I kinda wish I had my old sweatshirt, but I probably grew out of it and wisely gave it away, years ago.

However, I will not be buying an updated pair of legwarmers.

Musical selections for today: “Relax,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood; “Wham Rap,” Wham; “My Generation,” The Who