I’m sad. I missed four classes, I’m so sad. Usually only miss the two.

Cold Cave, Cherish the Light Years.

That whole overblown Interpol/Arcade Fire thing that’s all the orchestrated rage these days is tough to pull off. Cold Cave avoids sounding derivative by actually sounding like they mean what they’re saying, and rushing that whole storm-in-a-studio ambiance a few steps faster than a lot of other bands in this growing genre. The vocals cut through, the guitars cut through, a sense of purpose cuts through: “Yeah, I will come running” in the mythically titled “The Great Pan is Dead,” “I’ll carry your cross, now baby, it’s a blasphemous world today” in the throbby “Underworld USA.”  Not overpowering the way you expect it to be. Uplifting, almost.

The Other Eighties—A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan

By Bradford Martin (Hill and Wang, 2011; 242 pages)

According to the author’s preface, his “challenge” was to write a book about the ‘80s that wasn’t beholden to “the singular figure” who “dominated national life during the decade.” Pity, then that he couldn’t even keep Ronald Reagan’s name out of the book’s very subtitle.

Speaking as someone who was in their 20s in the 1980s and couldn’t have existed then without an active subculture to escape into, I can testify that alternatives to Reaganism were vast and endless. This was the decade of MTV, videocassettes, CDs, cable TV, public access television, underground newspapers, affordable computerized typesetting, Max Headroom and numerous other new ways to package and disseminate information . The Fairness Doctrine was still in effect until 1987, so talk-radio was legally obligated to offer balanced viewpoints. No, you couldn’t entirely ignore the president of the United States, but it was easy to not take him seriously.

I wish Bradford Martin wasn’t pegging his book on such a specious concept, and I wish he would address some of those new resources which leftists and radicals used to spread the word, rather than simply profile groups and individuals who were illustrative of iconic 1980s concerns. Cultural context is lacking, other than the obvious “a very popular Republican was president.”

Luckily, Martin is a good researcher and a fine storyteller, so his guided tour makes up for what it lacks in perspective by simply engaging the reader with the growth of

In each chapter, he tell an interesting, concise tale of a movement which fell outside the government’s purview. You don’t question his definition of what constitutes a non-mainstream movement; it’s easy to establish what the counterculture consists of when, as the Reagan administration did, the  government pointedly ignores things they didn’t want people to make a fuss about. That includes the AIDs epidemic, punk rock, anti-apartheid activism, new feminist movements and covert military war-waging in Central America. All those areas are ably covered here.

His previous book was The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America, so you might expect Bradford Martin to A.) draw frequent comparisons with the Peace & Love generation and B.) discuss theater. The fact that he does neither is something I find admirable. In a book about the 1980s, he doesn’t mention Andrew Lloyd Webber once. Cool.

I particularly like how he deftly handles the chapter on “Noise from Underground: Post-Punk Music, Culture and Politics.” You can get a sense of his control from the chapters’ subheadings: “Defining Post-Punk,” “Post-Punk and Its Fans,” “Post-Punk and Antimilitarism,” “Race, Gender, and Proletarian Play: Indentity Politics in Post-Punk” and “1991: Nirvana’s Nevermind, Lollapalooza and the Politics of Co-optation.” If that all seems like so much grad-school-speak, Martin’s heart is clearly in it. He’s wary of deeming any particular bandsas too influential or popular, or to label them as something it’s not. He’s documenting a movement, and his concern is not who leads it but who gets swept up in it:

The Replacements and R.E.M. shed light on post-punk’s elasticity. Both came from the small club, independent label roots that epitomize post-punk, yet both achieved popular acclaim well before the genre’s commercial breakthrough in 1991. The Red Hot Chili Peppers shared similar underground roots but relied heavily on African American-inflected musical forms such as funk, rap, and hip-hop. What tied these disparate bands together was less a shared musical aesthetic than a set of influences from 1970s punk, including a do-it-yourself production ethos emphasizing authenticity rather than technological perfection; aural dissonance that consciously challenged mainstream popular music; transgressive subject matter in lyrics and associated visual imagery; and live performances that attempted to bridge the distance between the performers and the audience.

I can overlook all the big words and be thankful that he knows the difference between bands that drew from punk and bands that were punk.

Likewise, he doesn’t make his chapter on ACT-UP and the AIDS crisis all about a central figure like Larry Kramer, deserving as he might be. His interest is in the masses, and in the number of smaller gestures it took in order to achieve a breakthrough in mass consciousness. Martin’s take on the vice presidential candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro is more insightful than any of the obituaries which ran when she died last month, because he discusses the campaign and its symbolism rather than dwelling on her personal attributes.

This book deserves to be taught in classrooms. It reads at times like a textbook. I hope it isn’t relegated to preaching to the choir in courses already earmarked as alternative and countercultural. I’d like high schoolers, whose parents lived through this era, to get ahold of this book. Its thesis—this is not your Reagan America—may be weak, but The Other Eighties is a full-blown history tome nonetheless, creating its own workable priorities whether or not it’s consciously countering the “official” history of the times.

The guy Mar hooked up with when she was supposed to be working is hanging around our house. Right now.

Fergus and Geronimo, Unlearn

They don’t piledrive like The Dirtbombs or dance-off like The Fleshtones, but there are other ways to blend ‘60s soul and indie rock. Fergus & Geronimo do it with choppy sound collages, aura-like sounds accenting the vocals, and good old-fashioned enthusiasm. “Baby Don’t You Cry” is both fresh and familiar, simplistic and profound, thumpy and smooth, reckless and reserved.

The Summer 2011 issue of Nostalgia Digest includes an interview with Janet Waldo, known to separate generations as the squealy Emmy Lou on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet radio show, then as Judy Jetson, Penelope Pitstop and Josie (of The Pussycats) for Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons. The Waldo interview is a two-page teaser for a longer interview to be broadcast on Nostalgia Digest’s Chicago-based radio show Those Were the Days on Aug. 27, which will also air some of her radio shows. Waldo played the title role in Meet Corliss Archer, a series about a 15-year-old girl (“Heyyyyyy, Corrrrliissss!,” as her next-door neighbor boyfriend screams) which ran for 13 years—nearly as long as the unchanging age of its protagonist.

I’ve got to patient for two months now; Waldo doesn’t mention Josie & the Pussycats at all in the magazine excerpt.

Only a handful of Meet Corliss Archer episodes are extant today, despite the show’s long run. Another show highlighted in Nostalgia Digest, however, is ubiquitous on the Golden Age of Radio internet stations: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Well over 700 episodes exist from the show’s 1949-1962 existence. It was cancelled in 1954 but revived a year later, and lasted until the very end of the radio drama era. There were eight different Johnny Dollars in that time, including Dick Powell (who did the pilot), Edmond O’Brien (1950-52) and the longest-starring Bob Bailey (1955-1960).

Johnny Dollar comes up frequently on the Audio Noir, Antioch Radio Network and other nostalgia channels. I’d be pretty sick of it, except that because of the sheer mass of episodes available you don’t endure many repeats. Also, it’s one of the few adventure series on any medium to be set in Connecticut. (The few others include that TV show where Amy Brenneman was a judge.) Johnny Dollar is the Hartford-based insurance agent with “the action-packed expense account.” He’s actually hardly ever in Connecticut, always flying off to Texas or somewhere, where he seems to inspire more murders than he’s enlisted to solve.

I never learn much from Nostalgia Digest—the articles are too brief, more extensive info is easily available from books and internet, and it prefers the popular to the obscure—but I nonetheless find it irresistible. It’s very passionate about its vast topic: in the current issue, “Nostalgia” covers Astaire & Rodgers to Paul Whiteman to The Bickersons to I Love Lucy to drive-in movie theaters—some 60 years of pop-cult phenomena. I especially like how little effect new media has had on nostalgia publications like this and Classic Images magazine: still committed to print, and serving a diehard market of feverish collectors and casual nostalgia buffs. The very packaging enhances the nostalgia element.

The Blats came back the very next week, and did that some new pronoun-flouting song of theirs again. Having played it once with the sole lyric “I,” then again as “We,” this time it came out:

He

He He

He He He

He He He He

Which sounded like an explosion of giggles from singer Sonny Blitt, and led to similar mirth in the crowd.

But wait. There was more. A few songs later, Blitt improvised a second-long intro—“we wanted to be fair to the ladies” and blew into, you guessed it:
She

She She

She She She

She She She She

A weaker lyric than any of the previous ones, since only “She” and “chi-chi” really pun into anything comprehensible. But at this point, we knew Sonny was really just laughing at us, even if neither knew what the joke was. He ended the punk rave-up with a long drawn-out Sheeeeeeeeeeeeee, then segued immediately into a whole other song, which started with the word “It.” Sounded like a Southern rocker dropping his chaw. And he said it while looking directly at us.

We think we owe Sonny something for this little exercise. He’s shown us how we overanalyze other people who may just be having fun. On the other hand, how do we know he didn’t have something trenchant in mind all along? Then we maybe didn’t analyze enough.

In any case, we feel eyed, wee (as in small), HEaped scorn upon and even you-sed, even though Sonny never got to that particular pronoun. But do we feel like Sheeeee-it? Not exactly. We’ve really come to enjoy that little tune. Hope The Blats record it sometime.

Only gig of note tonite: The Somatics, The Logicals, The Rapy and Anal Why Sis at the only place which would have them all, the beloved Bullfinch. Boycott the other joints, even if the beer’s cheaper.

I am in a blue bagel funk.

Ezra Holbrook, Save Yourself

In some ways the second coming of Elliot Smith, in others a reliable everyday singer-songwriter, Ezra Holbrook sweet-talks his vocals in a matter-of-fact voice that draws you in. Tingeing the tunes with strings and keyboards (“Another Light Off in the Distance”) or stripping them down to squeaky guitar strums (“Architect-Archetype) underscore lyrical ironies like “back in my arms someday/That’s what other songs say.” A beautiful and bitter album, ending in the “Blackbird”-soft, gritty-underneath confessional “The Wrong, Wrong Eyes.” A 2 a.m. album if I ever heard one.

Mike Spoerndle, founder of Toad’s Place, died earlier this month.

It reminded me of a weird afternoon I spent with him once in the mid-1990s, ostensibly interviewing him for the New Haven Advocate. It was a seemingly random chat, not geared to any particular event the club was hosting, or to any big change in the place itself. I later realized that Spoerndle was asserting his dominance, trying to get back in the papers as the famous face of Toad’s Place because he was getting squeezed out of the day-to-day operations of the club. He was being deposed for good reason, by all accounts (including, occasionally, Spoerndle’s own). His drug problems weren’t just legendary during that period; they were public, reported in great detail in the local newspapers he was then trying to court.

Anyway, that particular afternoon I spent with him was set up through the encouragement of the Advocate’s publisher at the time, Gail Thompson. She and Spoerndle shared Cleveland, Ohio roots and had formed a fast friendship despite some otherwise major differences in taste and lifestyle. At her urging, I dutifully met Spoerndle for lunch and an hour-long tour of Toad’s, in search of a story. There wasn’t one, except for the one I didn’t feel like telling just then, about the end of a magical era in local club rock.

For someone barely hanging on to his empire, and his sanity, Mike Spoerndle had an awesome swagger, the balls of a dinosaur. I was (and am) an underground and indie-rock fiend, but all he would talk about was the very biggest bands who’d graced Toad’s, and how he’d convinced them not only to play his place but leave autographs or memorabilia behind. He told a long story about the lengths he’d gone to in order to get the exact type of grand piano Bob Dylan needed for his pre-tour warm-up show at Toad’s in January, 1990. According to Spoerndle, during that entire four-hour, five-set evening, Dylan approached the piano only once and played just one quick chord on it. This story, to me, explained Spoerndle’s overbearing attitude: he was playing in the big league of egos.

In the late 1980s, when I worked at New Haven City Hall, I remember Spoerndle calling to complain because Mayor Daniels had declared a snow emergency downtown—a blizzard was due, but so was a Toad’s Place dance party. Spoerndle was livid and unrestrained in his vehemence. I’d never experienced such chutzpah from a local businessman directed at the local government, let alone at the weather gods.

There are those in New Haven who will tell you that Toad’s Place was never the same after Spoerndle left. That’s unfair to Brian Phelps, who’s ably kept the club going all these years. It’s the music industry that changed, not Toad’s. In the 1970s, considered the golden age of live party bands at the club, it helped that the drinking age was only 18. In the ‘80s, when Toad’s truly lived up its motto “where the legends play,” it helped that many of the up-and-coming superstars who played there did so as opening acts on package tours arranged by promoters and record labels. The sheer volume of signed acts which visited the club improved the odds of many of them becoming hitmakers down the line. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when Toad’s scored appearances by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and The Rolling Stones (Spoerndle’s litany and legacy), it helped that there were no casinos in Connecticut yet, and almost no clubs and large and well-kept as Toad’s in the state.

So the club was at the right place (on the touring circuit between Boston and New York) at the right time (when touring was still mandatory for breaking a new album).

At the same time, Mike Spoerndle was the guy who made the canny decision to give up on his main career choice—chef and restaurateur, a field he’d prepped for by studying at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America—and turn his European eatery into a nightclub.

It was Spoerndle’s idea to set the Toad’s stage against one of the wide sides of the club rather than fitting it  to one of the narrow walls, as most clubs do. This strategic placement meant not only that sightlines were good from just about anywhere in the room, the openness had a pronounced psychological effect on bands, who would strut and posture and interact with the audience in ways they wouldn’t on more confined stages.

Then there were the T-shirts—those $5 fashion necessities that found their way into the wardrobes of countless rock stars, and earned Toad’s eternal renown when one was worn by a member of U2 in a popular poster during the band’s first flush of international success.

Somehow, during our conversation that afternoon, it had come up that I didn’t own a T-shirt. I guess Spoendle assumed that, because I was in his club several times a week, I had dozens of Toad’s shirts in my closet. I didn’t have any, I confessed—a local band CD or a third rum & coke always seemed a more pressing purchase.

“I’ll give you a shirt,” Spoerndle insisted. He must have repeated the offer a dozen times during our lunch at Yorkside (right next door to the club) and again as we ascended the stairs to his office. As I geekishly scoured the Toad’s filing cabinets for fun info (a Ramones rider; tech requirements for Todd Rundgren), Spoerndle pretended to sit at his desk and go to work. Almost immediately he spilled a giant glass of soda all over the desk.

At which point, he reached into a box under his desk, pulled out several pristine Toad’s Place T-shirts, and mopped up the spill with them.

I never got a Toad’s Place T-shirt from Mike Spoerndle. It seemed like he’d forgotten I was there. I wandered about the office, said muted goodbyes and slipped out sheepishly.

I ran into Mike Spoerndle a number of times in the following years, everywhere from the Branford Green to Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theatre. He was always effusive and energetic and open-hearted. In the space of very short conversations, he could confess, unsolicited, some very large sins and talk about what he was doing to overcome them. He developed the fervor of someone keen to rehabilitate himself.

That’s how I’ll remember him: as grand and multi-faceted a Connecticut character as the great P.T. Barnum—a showman, an ambassador, a philanthropist, a one-man maelstrom, a rocker.