Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Sledge sisterhood.
    Rick Springfield from General Hospital had started making hard rock records, and although they were theoretically guitar rock records for boys, they were the girliest thing ever, and I was vaguely threatened by how much I loved them. I felt so dirty when Rick Springfield sang cute, but as Rick would say, the point is probably moot. “Jessie’s Girl” turned out to be one of the ’80’s most enduring hits. Hell, in the Rite Aid in my neighborhood, teen girls can still buy Jesse’s Girl Baked Powder Eye Shadow, which is stocked on the shelf right next to the Love’s Baby Soft and Hannah Montana Glamour Guitar Lollipops.
    I thrilled to the glories of rock-and-roll radio, especially the Doors. Was any band ever so perfectly designed for teenage boys? My friends and I were typical eighth grade dorks at the time, in that our sex education mostly took the form of Jim Morrison. We studied No One Here Gets Out Alive as if it were holy writ, and memorized the entire soliloquy in “The End,” right down to the chilling “he walked on down the hall” conclusion. They seemed more like an ’80s new-wave combo than a classic rock legend, in part because they clearly had no idea what they were doing and didn’t even bother faking it. They prepared me for all the nightmarishly pretentious and incompetent new wave that would become my adolescent raison d’etre. The Doors revival was in full swing, with the immortal Rolling Stone cover that showed Jim Morrison with the words “He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead.” (I was 0 for 3 in that department.)
    Can you blame us? When you’re an eighth grade boy, everything sucks in your life except Jim Morrison. We felt Jim was a god—or at least a lord—who had faked his death and escaped to Africa. When he returned, he would reward our faith, telling us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servants.” Eventually, we started to get the sinking feeling that even if Morrison did fake his death, he probably died later anyway, and we never heard about it. But that’s too depressing to think about. Morrison lives! What was it Jim Morrison said? “People are strange, when you’re a stranger”? More like “People impose, when you’re a poseur.”
    I assumed my sisters would scoff at the Doors, but Tracey ended up doing a book report on No One Here Gets Out Alive . We were always checking out each other’s music, books, magazines, everything, looking to surprise each other with new kinds of fun. One day I put on the cassette of Jesus Christ Superstar only to find that Tracey had taped something new over it: the Go-Go’s album Beauty and the Beat . I grieved for a few minutes before I realized I was now off the hook and never had to listen to that annoying, bogus show-tune church shit ever again . Praise Jesus!
    And praise the Go-Go’s. Man, we listened to that tape over and over again. Every song sounded like it was the chronicle of a world that was much cooler than the ’70s burnout rock we heard all around us. It was a report from California, where sassy girls got dressed up and messed up and went out to cool places to do evil. “This town is our town,” they sang. “It is so glamorous! Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us!”
    I used to dream about being the only boy in the Go-Go’s. I had to feel like that was the ultimate rock-star gig. I had the scenario all planned out, that I would learn to play bass and replace Kathy Valentine. (Sorry, Kathy!) I would be Jane Wiedlin’s true love, and she would take me to wherever she got her hair did and fix me up a little, because I wasn’t really presentable enough to hit cool places with her. Our lips would be sealed. I would get to borrow her stripey pants and sing backup on my favorite Go-Go’s song, “How Much More,” which was basically just the two words “girl” and “tonight” repeated over and over. Since those are the two new-waviest words in the English language, it was