devil’s daughter

i was, i am embarrassed to admit, a serious late bloomer when it came to music. i didn’t really discover music as a life-changing force or have any real musical interests of my own until 9th grade. up until that point, i just listened to whatever was on the radio, usually on a station my mom liked, and i also listened to the record albums that she and dad had.

however, in retrospect i don’t think i was completely ignorant. by luck or like, i used to listen to a radio station (i think it was k104 in dallas) that played a lot of old-school rap and soul — although i guess it wasn’t exactly old-school back then! stuff like grandmaster flash, sugarhill gang, curtis blow, donna summer — these were the songs i was listening to and liked and knew all the words to.

two of my favorite songs from that era were the donna summer/barbra streisand duet “enough is enough,” and diana ross’ “upside down,” which i can remember listening to over the intercom in my bedroom (houses from the early 80s always had intercom systems installed, for some reason). i also loved the soundtrack to “fame.”

the first cassette tape of popular music that i can remember owning was the police’s “synchronicity.” dad’s sister carol gave this to me when i was ten years old, and i absolutely loved it. in fact, it was just a few years ago when i finally threw out all my old cassette tapes that i realized i still had it — a twenty year-old tape. it still played, albeit badly. amazing.

the first record album i can remember requesting as a gift was a blondie album. i wanted the one with “call me” but should have been more specific in my request because mom bought me the newest release, “heart of glass.” i guess i had thought there was just one. i was disappointed but tried to hide it and show my appreciation. my friend katie bressler and i loved to listen to blondie records after school at her house, and i wanted “call me” for my very own. i also distinctly remember listening to the “xanadu” soundtrack in her living room while playing the board game life and dancing around in our socks.

i had a cassette tape of sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band. i used to listen to this and “synchronicity” while falling asleep at night, on a little tan colored fisher price toy cassette player. with sgt. pepper, i’d usually fall asleep by the time “a day in the life” was on. i remember waking up once from a bad dream and hearing the end of “synchronicity ii,” and the song was just so sad and scary and i think it must have been affecting what i was dreaming about.

when i was 12 or so, i bought van halen’s “1984”… which was not so unusual for someone my age at the time. however, i got in trouble for it because the front cover featured a baby smoking a cigarette. for some reason, this was not cool with my parents! go figure.

and there was this one song that i loved when i was really little; i remember hearing it on the radio all the time when we lived in houston. i always remembered a few of the words to the chorus — or at least, what my six-year-old mind interpreted them as — but had never known what the song was or who sang it. but its memory was imprinted so strongly in my head. that mystery song haunted me for probably 25 years until one day a few years ago i realized in one of those “d’oh!” moments that i had the internet and could probably find out what it was. and, with a little searching, i found it: andy gibb’s “love is thicker than water.” my misremembered lyric scraps were “utah utah, it dreams as only dream, devil’s daychild, devil’s daughter.” of course, i got most of it wrong except for the “devil’s daughter” part, which is how i finally was able to use the power of technology to solve my mystery. it was really strange, how much relief i felt at finally figuring it out.

in 8th grade art class, one of our art projects was to make a record album cover out of scraps of tissue paper and glue. i sat at a table with a fat dark-haired girl named (i think) monica and a popular but, how shall we say, academically uninterested girl named kelliey (yes that is how she spelled her name – KELLIEY). monica designed a tears for fears album cover, and i had to pretend i knew who they were so i wouldn’t look as uncool as i was. i did one for a made-up band called erha. the album was titled “infinity fish from another planet.” monica and kelliey didn’t get it. which was fine, because by pretending it was something esoteric that they weren’t cool enough to know, i could hide my own shame.

in 7th grade (i think), i had to do some sort of survey for a class assignment where i asked my friends and classmates questions. i can’t remember anything else about it except asking a girl in choir (named something like jasmine solis, or monica or veronica… i can’t quite remember) what her favorite song was. she wrote down “crazy for you.” i was so pleased and surprised by this, because i liked that song too! only later, i realized she was talking about the madonna song, whereas i was thinking of the lionel richie song by the same name. madonna was much cooler, of course. and i had no idea how the madonna song went. i don’t remember how i discovered that i was mistaken as to which one she meant, but i imagine it probably involved a great deal of embarrassment on my part.

so i guess that i wasn’t completely ignorant of music; i just had a nonchalant attitude long after my peers had discovered it and begun to develop tastes of their own.

but then something happened… i don’t know if i just woke up one day and realized there was a whole world i was missing, or if starting high school suddenly made me realize that i had a lot of catching up to do, musically speaking.

the bands i remember immediately falling in love with included genesis, peter gabriel, and laurie anderson. the fact that brad robertson (who i had a serious crush on) and chris owens (his best friend) loved these bands too, i’m sure helped solidify it for me.

i discovered genesis when i heard “invisible touch” on the radio in 1986 and thought it was really a great song. i decided to learn more about this band genesis (oh, what did we do in the days before the internet?!) so i bought the cassette tape. it was about this time that we got cable and mtv, and so i was seeing the videos for that song and for “land of confusion,” with the dc follies puppets, and i was hooked. i started buying up their previous albums with my allowance, learned peter gabriel used to be in the band, discovered “lamb lies down on broadway,” and the rest is history. i thought (and still do!) that it was one of the things that made me unique: not only was i a genesis fan, which was not that unusual in itself, but i was a fan of old genesis, peter gabriel-era genesis, and nobody knew that he used to be in the band. everyone just thought genesis was phil collins’ band and peter gabriel was only a solo artist. but i had this special knowledge, and so did brad and chris, and nobody else even cared. when you’re that age you are desperately searching both for things to make you fit in and things to make you unique. it’s a strange time period.

from then on i was seriously into music. i had a lot of work to do both in developing my own tastes and interests as well as trying to catch up on all the years of music that my peers knew but i’d missed out on. even now sometimes i’ll hear something from the 1980s that i know i should know, yet don’t. i rarely admit that to anyone, just pretending that i don’t remember all the words or keeping my mouth shut altogether. of course, now everybody knows my deep dark secrets. 🙂