1982 by Jian Ghomeshi Read Free Book Online

younger, more ethnic Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper always seemed to have eye makeup streaming down his face back in the ’70s. Cool kids had liked Alice Cooper then. Maybe it was still cool to have smudged eyeliner. Maybe that would be rock. Or punk. But my streaming makeup would be purple. And purple probably wouldn’t count. And denial would be impossible if the eyeliner began running. It was all a disaster.
    I needed to end this. I quietly closed my locker and clicked the lock without looking up. Then I ran down the hall with my red-and-blue Adidas bag. I could hear laughing. I didn’t talk to Jane Decker for a couple of weeks after that. And I didn’t wear the purple eyeliner again.
    THE EYELINER AND THE SHOES and the hair were all about being cool. I knew that Bowie was cool. And if I could just be more like him, I would be okay. And Wendy would probably start to notice me as well. It really came down to music in those days, and the divisions were profound. The rift was particularlystrong between the rockers and the punk/New Wave kids. The preppies had long made themselves irrelevant with their indiscriminate tastes. The preppies were into sugary pop stuff like REO Speedwagon and Air Supply, and that was just embarrassing. Some preppies liked Bruce Springsteen, and I secretly appreciated that, because I had liked Springsteen and I’d learned to play “Hungry Heart” on acoustic guitar in Grade 7. But now I didn’t really tell anyone I liked Springsteen. Springsteen may have been a working-class hero from New Jersey, but I didn’t know that. I just knew that the preppy kids liked him. Joel Price had gone to see Springsteen in Grade 8, and he was definitely a preppy, who would never wear second-hand clothes or pointy boots. Our gym teacher, Mr. Manly, made me wrestle Joel Price once in gym class in Grade 8. Joel pinned me right away and looked at me and laughed. I decided I didn’t like wrestling. And after that I wasn’t sure I liked Springsteen much, either.
    If you were a New Wave kid or a mod in 1982, you liked the Jam, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the English Beat, and Bowie. In contrast, if you were a rocker, you wore a Zeppelin T-shirt with a “Zoso” logo that represented Jimmy Page, and you blasted AC/DC and you probably had a keen appreciation for Journey guitarist Neal Schon. I had empathy for the rockers, because I was a big fan of Rush. Rush was a legitimate rock band. And also, Toke had gone to see Ozzy, who was also a real rocker, and Toke told me about the concert in such detail that I pretended I’d been there and recounted the show to others. But now I was more New Wave. In fact, Rush was also trying to be New Wave, but no one was really buying it. There was no cross-pollination between the rockersand New Wavers. Still, amongst all the divisions, the one thing that united all of us was a bitter disregard for any kind of manufactured-sounding stuff: corporate pop and rock, man. No one liked a rocker who became a commercial sellout. Joan Jett fell into this category. Her omnipresent song “I Love Rock ’n Roll” was a number-one hit in America in 1982. That would qualify as too popular. Her song was getting played in the wrong stores at the mall. She was definitely not cool.
    In our teenage world, you were defined by the concerts you attended. I was intent on building my live music repertoire to establish my credentials. I had started going to rock concerts when I was eleven, and I’d got off to a bad start by alternative standards. The first real concert my parents took me to was Billy Joel. He wore a suit jacket and sneakers and sang “Just the Way You Are.” Later in life, I would decide that Billy Joel was a real talent. But at the time he didn’t seem very cool. Then, to really set back my reputation, my parents took me to see the noted Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Hill at the Ontario Place Forum. He was the “Sometimes When We Touch” nice guy. “Sometimes When We Touch” was a