Friday, December 11, 2009

I had forgotten

It was the mid-80's. I was 16.

I'd just moved to a new town and away from everyone I knew.

I was...hmmm...angry? Disenfranchised? Contemptuous?

All of the above and more.

The only friend I had in this new place was the daughter of a longtime family friend...a girl who had just come back to Wyoming from the wilds of the L.A. punk scene...strung out on smack1.

There were a lot of bands and albums that shaped that time period for me...

X - Los Angeles
Concrete Blonde - Concrete Blonde
Jane's Addiction - Nothing's Shocking

Among others.

But there was one album in particular this girl handed over to me one day that would forever define the autumn of 1988.

The Cult - Love

I wouldn't appreciate their later albums nearly so much but this one...this one touched me, got under my skin, posessed me for months.

I had not heard it for nearly 20 years.

And then in the gray sunlight of early morning on Sunday, as I began to contentedly drift off to sleep, I heard the first few phrases of this song begin to play:



And I found myself tumbling down the rabbithole and smiling.

A beloved favorite song and a new delicious memory to go with it.



1: Eventually, we added friends to our circle...friends who would worship her for being older, for being beautiful, for having BEEN there in LA during the first wave of the punk frenzy...also for being an addict. Some of them became addicts themselves. She went back to smack 3 times more. I didn't worship her - I watched her detox. Instead, I worried about her, loved her, tried to just be a rock for her.

2 comments:

kk said...

OMG, I just listened to this album last weekend for the first time in about 15 years. Super freaky! Get out of my head!! :)

zero hour said...

that one always got me too.
We all have our stories to go with that time period, that song, events....thanks for sharing