Rooty

My recent rehash of the mid-nineties is not just about following up early nineties redux in an orderly manner; it's also about some serious middle school memory rambling. The other night I was in the midst of one of those brief, cursory conversations about how awful and damaging middle school can be. And word, it was brutal sometimes, but it also marked the beginning of a particular kind of experience--secret-keeping, in-cahoots-ing, cigarette-and-liquor-stealing, drop-me-off-at-the-mall-ing friendship. Sure, I have a criminal tendency toward rose-colored glasses, but I'm pretty sure Pillow and I had a good time shopping and staying up late and making up languages and rumors and generally trying to look older and cooler. I've previously touched on pop cultural stylings of that moment (stuff we gathered from MTV), but we, being wildly smart and sophisticated, spent a lot of the middle school middle nineties gearing up for the mad reduxing of the next millennium.

Although we were in a certain amount of isolation from burgeoning "hipster" ideas, we shopped vintage and generally became obsessed with the seventies and eighties in film and song. I recall a pair of dark denim late seventies Gitano jeans I loved to wear with my inherited seventies concert tees and a load of bright, big eighties and raver jewelry. After three years of art school, I hate to use the word "organic"; but I look back at that time, and think, we were organically finding this future style. We just knew that it was correct to look backward.

Pillow used to live across the street from me in a big, lovely, dark, haunted, Victorian house that was much easier to get lost in (lose parents in) than mine, which was lovely too, but bright and circular and sound-carrying. So it was the site of most of our ecstatic, sleepless sleepovers. I recall the day she first played Blondie for me. "Heart of Glass" positively blew our minds. I recall the day I brought over a copy of T. Rex's Electric Warrior. It was all new to us, a window onto tight glamorous and shabby clothes, slim, slow sliding, drugs, decadence, something totally removed from the pink and green we were presented with at school and club and such. (Though, I should note that a lot of this stuff came directly from our parents, not always the pink and green types. Por ejemplo, as a yout', Papa Able wrote for Creem.)

These days, those first redux loves are so much in the/our canon that I've been dismissive or disinterested. It's not like I've ever not loved them; I just get full of other stuff. But lately I've listened to "Life's a Gas" and been muy moved. I'm hearing Marc Bolan as I did in 1997, in Pillow's living room, as a damn revolution of a voice, as an aesthete hippie (just like us, a brother, a key). Below, I've included a performance from 1971(ish). And the color scheme is right in step with my memories of all those, much-posted-about middle nineties MTV images . . . hmmmm. Pillow and Able--endlessly onto something.