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I am currently reading Alex Van Halen's memoir Brothers , so I have VAN HALEN on the brain right now. And guess who released an album in the year of our lord 1984? And not only released an album that year, but actually named it 1984 ? Yep, that would be Van Halen. How do I approach writing about an album that sold over ten million copies, peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts, and produced a massive #1 single in "Jump"? I'll just start off with a personal approach. It's impossible to over estimate what a big deal Van Halen was in the early and mid 1980s, especially if one attended a small town Midwestern high school like I did. VH was voted favorite band by my 1986 senior class. (I voted for U2). If all or most of the kids in my school liked something, I was naturally skeptical, and Van Halen seemed a bit dim and dumb. A lot of flash with no substance. I mean, U2 was an "important" and "serious" band. They'd played at Live Aid an...

Former Replacements guitarist Bob "Slim" Dunlap died on December 18 after many years of ill health. Though Slim didn't join the Replacements (aka the 'Mats) until 1987, this seems the perfect time to write about the band's 1984 album Let It Be , and thus continue with this little series on 1984 long players. Let's rewind to that magical year of 1986, the year I have rhapsodized about so often in this blog. I don't remember exactly how this happened, but sometime in autumn '86, Ron P.--an older guy who lived on my dorm floor--let me borrow his vinyl copy of Let It Be . I assume this has to do with the R.E.M. factor. Ron may have thought that Let It Be was similar enough to R.E.M. that I'd like it, and maybe it also had to do with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck being guest guitarist on the opening track, "I Will Dare." (All roads lead back to R.E.M.). Allow me to digress for a moment and say a retrospective "thank you" to all the peop...

From San Pedro, California, we now travel across the continental United States, fly over the Atlantic Ocean, and make a stop in Basildon, England. The next album in my yearlong looks at '84 releases is from the pride of Basildon: Depeche Mode, and their 1984 LP, Some Great Reward . Depeche Mode were among a crop of "synthesizer bands" that emerged, mainly from the UK, in the early '80s. This includes Human League, Tears For Fears, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), Talk Talk, and Yazoo (to name a few). I'm sure scholarly works have been wriiten discussing this phenomenon, so I won't delve into that here, and in any case, I'm not educated enough in the subject to take a stab at it. Of all the so-called "synth bands" of the '80s, Depeche Mode is the one that has evolved, thrived, and soldiered on to the present day. They have released consistently good-to-great material every other year or so since 1981, and have not taken decade-long bre...

"We don't write songs, we write rivers"--Mike Watt Minutemen bassist Watt nails it with this quote, and who--outside of his bandmate/soulmate D. Boon--would know better. This band from San Pedro, California never wrote conventional songs. Their songs are like brief journal entries put to music. Sometimes they are more like disjointed thoughts put to music. And sometimes, the instrumental interplay between Mike Watt's active and bouncing bass, D. Boon's jagged guitar stabs and beat poet-like vocals, and George Hurley's jazzy, syncopated drumming are enough to make the lyrics inconsequential. As Watt said in the above quote, the Minutemen's songs are best described as rivers: they start from a little trickle, twist and turn in unexpected directions before spilling out into a larger body of water. Then they start all over again, only to take a completely different direction. The Minutemen created their own little world with their own private language, and the...

"Oy, Wanker, Bloke, Telly"  This is a descriptive term, for a certain strand of Britpop, that I recently heard podcaster Yasi Salek use on the most recent episode of Bandsplain (about the band Blur--who, coincidentally, I love). It made me laugh out loud, because this is just the sort of British pop music I tend to gravitate towards. It's the sort of music that wears its Britishness proudly on its Union Jacked sleeve. While the subject of this post, The Smiths, aren't of the 1990s Britpop movement, the music they made in the 1980s certainly helped pave the way. Now, let's take the time machine back to that magical year of 1986 that I have discussed so much in this blog: Sometime during the first week of college freshman year, a particularly outgoing floormate--I can't remember exactly who this was--knocked on my door and introduced himself. (The irony of me forgetting who this kid was is not lost on me. I think it might have been Bob D., but I'm just guess...

It was all because of a girl I met... That's how I became a U2 fan. To be clear, that's how I learned about the very existence of U2. In the summer of 1985, almost a full year after The Unforgettable Fire 's release, I attended a summer camp at Olivet College. This camp was patterned after Boys or Girls State, but was sort of a low-rent version of that. We were supposed to learn about how the legislative and executive branches of government ran by participating in mock campaigns and elections--or at least I think. I really don't remember much of anything we did at this camp, but I do remember this particular girl. She liked me, I liked her (probably because she liked me) and the most memorable parts of this summer camp were the evening dances in the Olivet cafeteria, hanging out with this girl (I'll call her "Janine"--not her real name), and her telling me about this band called U2 that her college-age brother hipped her to. When the camp ended--which had ...

This is an album I'm sure my handful of readers out there weren't expecting, and in fairness, it wasn't even on my radar until very recently. To go a step further, I have a list of 30 albums from 1984 from which I'm working, and Out of the Cellar isn't on that list. So, why, you may be asking, am I writing about Out of the Cellar ? The reasons are as follows:  Several years ago, after dropping my older son off at his fencing class, I had the radio on and Ratt's big hit "Round and Round" came on. I was surprised that not only did I know all (or most) of the lyrics, but I was actually enjoying the song. "Round and Round" came up in a conversation I had and I was happy to learn the person I was talking to also a champion of "Round and Round." Underneath the glam metal dressing, the song is simply a killer pop tune with a catchy chorus. If you hear this song on the radio, it's an immediate earworm. The third reason I decided to...

I initially thought that I would listen to Prince & the Revolution's Purple Rain , jot down my observations, and then write about the album (like a real record review). However, I have heard this album so many times and have such a deep connection to it, that I decided this probably wasn't necessary. For this post, I will simply write about my personal experience with the album. And really, who needs yet another review of Purple Rain , anyway? In late spring of 1984--I can't remember the month, but it must have been either late May or early June because I swear I was still in school--I turned on the tiny black & white television in my room to an afternoon music video show. I don't remember what this show was called or what channel it was on, but it was about a half-hour long. It was on this show that I first saw the video for Purple Rain 's leadoff single, "When Doves Cry." All these years later, it's hard to remember exactly what I felt upon h...

In my latest sporadically published posts about 1984 albums, I tackle R.E.M.'s second album, Reckoning . This is yet another album I discovered after the fact. It was that hallowed autumn of 1986 that I have mentioned at least a few times in this blog. I had already heard "Fall on Me" that summer and quickly went out and bought a cassette of Lifes Rich Pageant at the Camelot Music in Saginaw's Fashion Square Mall. A month or so later, I arrived at Michigan State and quickly learned that, compared to several other kids, I was an R.E.M. newbie. I was "tripled" in my dorm room at MSU, which means I had two  other roommates. (We were assured by the university that as we settled into the school year, the "triple" would revert to a "double." Of course, I couldn't help but worry who would be the odd man out). Anyway, one of my roommates was a guy named Tim F. Tim was cool. Tim was the first to arrive and already had posters of the movie Era...

I have debated back-and-forth with myself trying to decide which 1984 album to go with next. I have finally decided on Husker Du's Zen Arcade. The Replacements and Husker Du were two big punk/"college rock" rock bands to emerge from Minneapolis in the '80s. I "discovered" both of them in that fateful autumn of 1986 that I have mentioned more than a few times in this blog. "Discovery" is giving myself too much credit. In both cases, it was another kid in the dorm who floated an album my way. With Husker Du, it was a cassette copy of their 1986 major label debut, Candy Apple Grey . Until about 2000, Candy Apple Grey was the only Husker Du album I owned and was completely familiar with, since up to that point I was a much bigger fan of The Replacements. For reason I can't remember now, I made the deep dive into the Husker Du discography. At the time, I worked at Borders corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor and attending graduate school ...

Just for fun, I've decided to take a look back at some favorite or notable albums that were released forty years ago. 1984 was, in retrospect, a significant year for pop/alternative/metal/rock music. I have already made a long list of my favorites, and I will at least try to explore them here in this blog. These entries might be a little freewheeling, so beware. I mean, it IS a blog, right? I reserve the right to be a little sloppy. Leading off is Echo & the Bunnymen's Ocean Rain . The album was the band's fourth album and was released on May 4 of '84. (May the Forth be with Echo and the Bunnymen--sorry, I couldn't resist).  In full disclosure, and as should be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog, I had absolutely no awareness of this album's existence in 1984. The first I ever heard of Echo & the Bunnymen was accidentally seeing their name on the marquee of Detroit's Fox Theater in about 1985(ish).  After arriving at college in autumn 1986, I ...