I ended up at Fubar fairly early last night, just so I wouldn't have to lug my records across the street from the valet parking lot at 7969, and ended up hanging around listening to the choice selection of 80s tunes playing over the soundystem. At one point, I nearly lost it on account of this song.



This was from Anni-Frid "Frida" Lyngstad's (of ABBA) fourth album, Something's Going On, which was released in 1982. It was produced by Phil Collins in the midst of that all-too-brief period when he didn't totally suck in the worst MOR way possible and this track "I Know There's Something Going On" has that same odd echo in the production as "In the Air Tonight." When I heard this last night, I started thinking about what might happen if someone covered it. I think a cover would have to have a minimal techno bent, kind of cold and European sounding, and the singer would have to sound like she (or he) was trying to detach herself(or himself) from some serious pain. I think The Knife could pull it off, but am not sure if anyone else could.

I can't remember what I played last night and left the set list in the booth. Oh well, it happens.

Anyhow, please recall how I've been bitching about this sunburn I acquired at Warped Tour. This is what the burn, which has actually faded a lot, looks like.



Note the significant line between my normally pale, flabby arm and the burned-yet-still-flabby portion. This is what is known as a farmer's tan, except that it's not a tan. I've been wearing long sleeves most of the week but yesterday was so damn hot that I just couldn't do it.

Balthazar Monsoon and Daniel showed up to party in WeHo. Daniel insisted that Balth take his picture while attempting to shimmy up a lightpole or something like that.



Shortly after this photo was taken, Daniel was pick-pocketed. The perp was so stoned, though, that he dropped Daniel's wallet, with all of the contents still carried within, as he started to rush off into the distance.

Finally, we met Norman from Real World 1, which was one of very few seasons that I actually sat down and watched. (I haven't seen anything past Season 4.)





As you can probably tell, I'm not a natural in front of a camera. Also, I have no chin.

So, yeah, we definitely had a good time.

It was oddly hot inside the mainstage area of Spaceland last night. Perhaps not so oddly hot considering this "heat wave" that's lasting far to long to be a wave and seems more likely to be the shit we're stuck with until October. In the smoking area, though, it was relatively cool. My sister and I sat there for a while chatting up Jim, who is one of the best people you can chat up at a show. He has stories and I guess so do we, so the conversation on terrible shows we attended ran on for a good while. Eventually, though, Nine Black Alps hit the stage and we had to venture into the main room.
Also unexpected was the size of the crowd. It wasn't packed. There were definitely people there, but we could still move around pretty freely, which I don't think I've ever done at Spaceland before. Stile, it was hot in that main room and midway through "Cosmopolitan" (odd that the band opened with The Hit as well), Sam Forrest's hair (a might awesome head of hair too, Alex and I decided) was all clumped together with sweat. As the show progressed, the wet charcoal splotches gradually spread across his light gray t-shir. I swear that sweat is as contagious as a yawn because, while watching this, I grew more uncomfortable, eventually taking off the jacket that I was wearing to try and cover up my Warped Tour battle wounds (my arms are peeling, it's pretty nasty). The band looked to be having fun though and the set was excellent, a tight mix of hard rock and guitar pop that reminded me at times of Teenage Fanclub.
Anyhow, since we're on the subject of late night sweatpits, here's your reminder for tonight.

I can't remember the last time I had to leave my house at 3 p.m. to get to a concert scheduled for the evening. Oh, yeah I can. It was the time The Cure played The Forum and there was that statewide power outage that meant that Kar3n, Amy and I had to put on our make up outside in 110 degree weather and then sit on the 405 for, literally, three hours, which was, coincidently the same length of time as The Cure's set that night.
Anyhow, yesterday, I had to leave at 3 yesterday so that I could get on the ol' 405 to head over to Megan's then hop on the 405 again so that we could get to the 710 with enough time to make it to Long Beach Arena and catch The Subways' 6:25 p.m. set. We got through the wait for the photo pass and the usual entrance area patdown roughly ten minutes before the band went onstage. This was my first time seeing The Subways and, man, we they good. Those kids just can't stand still and the crowd loved every minute of it.
Actually, every band on last night's bill (Taking Back Sunday with Angels and Airwaves, Head Automatica and The Subways) was on fire. You'll read more about this later in another venue. Oddly enough, though, Angels and Airwaves blew my mind. The set actually inspired what I think might turn into an essay.
It's just kind of odd how music and writing are so intertwined in my mind, particularly considering that that I can't play an instrument and I haven't written poetry since I was a seventeen-year-old stereotype of a Tori Amos fan. (No fairy wings, just the long skirt, copy of The Bell Jar and tons of issues.) I started writing against a soundtrack when I was in junior high and, at least through college, managed to pile up a stack of short stories based on songs (think late-teen romances set in nightclubs as Duran Duran played, which actually turned out better than it sounds, but still is kind of cheesy in retrospect). Last night was one of those nights where the guitar just sort of hit something in me that had absolutely nothing to do with the review I'm supposed to write and I tried to get it all down in my notebook, but it was too dark and the lights from the stage hit my eyeballs all spastic-like and I ended up with illegible squiggles on paper and a massive headache.

My sister Alex and I are less than two years apart in age and, due to my parents superb planning skills, one grade apart in school. We also shared a bedroom until I was a senior in high school and shared a car until my senior year of college (by orders of my mother, though, we were not allowed to live in the same dorm). We had just enough common interest to ensure that we would end up hanging out in the same crowd and were just different enough to make catfights inevitable. To make matters more complicated, no one in our family could get us straight, even though we look nothing alike, so if one of us got into trouble, my parents would scream "Liz-Lex!" or, if my mom and dad hit the apex of pissed-off confusion, "Lez!"
Needless to say, my sister and I didn't always get along. This baffled my mother, who grew up surrounded my brothers, and most of our friends, save for the few who also have sisters thisclose in age. However, what the sisterless don't understand is that our bonding moments equal (maybe surpass since we stopped sharing a room years ago) the numerous occasions on which we screamed "You bitch!" and reached for the other's hair. (For the record, I'm the hair-puller. I'm really no good in a fight. You don't want me to have your back.)
When we were young, a lot of our sisterly bonding happened while we were on our beds doing homework and listening to KROQ. We always listened to KROQ because there was always the chance that we would both hear something we liked, despite my sister's aversion towards Morrissey and the feeling of nausea I would get whenever I heard Pearl Jam. So, this one night, we're listening to KROQ and Doug the Slug was introducing the Furious Five at Nine, which was our favorite programming segment particularly when it had a theme. This night, the theme was Top 5 Modern English Songs. Alex and I just stared at each other.
"There's more than one Modern English song?" she asked.
"I don't know, maybe they're big in England or something."
Number 5 on the countdown was "I Melt with You," which we always reference by singing the hook, "I'll stop the world and melt with you." So was number 4 and number 3 and so on and so forth.
My sister and I will contend that this was by far the best Furious Five at Nine ever. Better than the one when my best friend and I ended up as the second most annoying listeners. Better than the sex song countdown that made me physically unable to ever hear "Doot Doot" by Freur ever again. In fact, a few weeks ago, out of nowhere, my sister said to me, "Hey, Liz. Do you remember that Top 5 Modern English song countdown? That was one of the funniest things I ever heard."
In fact, I had no idea that there was more to Modern English that "I Melt with You" until I was in college and heard this.

This Mortal Coil "Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust"

Combining two fine Modern English tracks, 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil created an epic with this 12". Of course, I didn't hear it until way after the fact and, at that point in time, it was incredibly difficult to find it. One of my friends found a copy of the 12" and gave it to me. From what I recall, it ended up on that big This Mortal Coil boxed set, but even that might be hard to score now. Anyhow, this is the original of "Gathering Dust."

Modern English "Gathering Dust"

You can find it on Life in the Gladhouse as well as on the album Mesh and Lace. Both are available at Amazon.com, but it looks like supplies are very limited.

While I was looking for Modern English goodies, I became annoyed with the amount of bands that have covered "I Melt with You." First of all, you don't mess with a classic, a song that by its simple inclusion in Valley Girl helped it define an era. (Shit, someone call the hyperbole police.) Seriously, though, that song is so tightly wound into the whole '80s pop culture thing that covering it is just plain old lame. I suggest covering this Modern English track, from the album Ricochet Days.

Modern English "Ricochet Days"

You can find that on Amazon too.

When I was in junior high, my mom coerced me to join the Armenian youth group and I did so willingly on account of the fact that I had been going to school with the same 20 kids since first grade and was hoping to meet some new people, particularly cute boys. The first blow was the realization that the only teenage Armenian boys taller than me were my cousins. The second blow was the realization that most of the kids I met were total jerks, the sort who insisted upon speaking in Armenian even when they knew full well (and perhaps because) that I couldn't understand them and then made snide comments in their mother tongue, which, of course, consisted of the only words I could understand. For some reason, probably boredom, I persisted with the whole youth group thing and ended up on the volleyball team. I'm not quite sure how that happened because height cannot make up for a lack of coordination. Anyhow, I ended up on the team with my sister, who actually is athletic, and we headed up to Fresno for the annual sports tournament.
On our first night there, I was hanging around the pool in my Depeche Mode t-shirt and black jeans when my friend, we'll call her Laura, spotted a guy in a bad-ass Cure t-shirt listening to his Walkman. We started whispering. Well, whispering for Armenians, which is to say that we were probably speaking in a hoarse yet audible tone that would be considered normal by the standards of most.
"Oh my God, he's totally cute."
"Dude, he's so tall."
"And he's blonde."
"I bet he's not Armenian."
"You should go talk to him."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah."
I did what fourteen-year-old Catholic school girls do best. I put on some red lipstick, walked towards him and tossed my hair. I probably would have hiked my skirt too, if I were wearing one. Hey, I was two weeks shy of junior high graduation and everything I knew about dating came from Sweet Valley High and my best friend's mom's romance books.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi," he replied.
"I'm Liz."
"Dean."
"What are you listening to?"
"The Beautiful South."
"Who's that?"
"Here, you should listen."
He handed me his headphones and this song played.

The Beautiful South "Song for Whoever"

"Wow, this is amazing."
That wasn't even a pathetic attempt at flirtation on my part. The song did, in fact, blow my mind.
We started chatting. He was from the Valley, not Armenian, just up here with a friend of his who was on the basketball team. He worked at a record store and was an art major in college.
He asked me where I went to school. I gave him the name of the high school I was set to attend that fall. I also told him that I was a junior and that I was seventeen.
I hated the fact that I was lying because the more we talked, the more I genuinely liked this guy. But, really, I had to lie. There was no way around it. Here I was stuck in a sea of short, immature dorks and I found this guy who is tall, good looking, gentlemanly and a Cure fan. Was I supposed to pass that up just because he was 20 and I could get him 20? Well, even at my fake age of 17 I was jailbait, but, y'know, 17 is the preferred age of rock stars the world over, so why not, right?
I kept up the lie for the whole night. We roamed around the parking lot for hours talking about books and art and that Morrissey concert the following weekend that everyone and their grandma was going to see. In the meantime, Laura and this bitchy sometimes-friend of ours who I will refer to as Ani, ran into my parents hanging out with all of the other parents. When they asked where I was, the girls replied, "Oh, she went off with this guy, Dean. He's in college."
I was sold out.
By 2:00 a.m., my dad was walking around the hotel looking for me and I was standing right outside this guy's door. He asks me if I want to go in and I said no and he leaned over like he was going to kiss me goodnight when I felt a hand tugging on the sleeve of my jacket.
Oh shit, I thought. I'm dead and I didn't even get to kiss the guy.
My dad yelled at me as I followed him throughout the hallway across the hotel back to the suite. Despite my slouched posture and mounds of hair covering my face, I saw my friends, with my cousins and seemingly 500 other people, laughing in the corner.
According to my cousins, the story remained something of a legend at the old Armenian youth group. I wouldn't know. I stopped going shortly after I ran into Dean at a dance the following year and my dad actually walked inside to get Laura and I, since we missed curfew, probably forever ruining the illusion that I could have been anything more than a high school freshman.
I never saw Dean again, but The Beautiful South have maintained status in my music collection. "Song for Whoever" is off Welcome to the Beautiful South as well as Carry on Up the Charts: The Best of the Beautiful South. Both albums are in print, so I suggest buying one, the other or both.

Two years ago, The Beautiful South released a covers album that I believe is only available as an import. It's called Gold Diggas Head Nodders & Pholk Songs and contains these two gems.

The Beautiful South "Don't Fear the Reaper"

The Beautiful South "Ciao!"

For the record, I humbly submit that "Don't Fear the Reaper" is one of the best songs ever written. Now that I think about it, "Ciao!" is pretty high up on the list as well. The original is from Lush and features Jarvis Cocker on vocals.