Mixtape, p.1
Mixtape, page 1
MIXTAPE
Stories and essays about the 1980s
SIMON CASTLES
Mixtape: Stories and essays about the 1980s
ISBN 978 1 76109 514 6
Copyright © text Simon Castles 2023
Cover image: Adobe Stock
All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.
First published 2023 by
Ginninderra Press
PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015
www.ginninderrapress.com.au
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. Memoir
Toto recall
The road behind
Round and round
Cream and punishment
Highly strung
Dogs love soft rock
Price check on love
The house next door
II. Essays
Minutes to midnight
Born in the ACT
Famine and fame
Summer of when?
iPhones killed the boombox star
For the love of CDs
Billy Joel and the tyranny of cool
Following Fonzie over the shark
III. Stories
Madonna
The high tower
INTRODUCTION
One Christmas when I was a teenager, my guitar teacher and I gave each other mixtapes. This was a common thing for friends to do in the 1980s, the cassette having become – on the back of the invention of the Sony Walkman and the falling price of boomboxes – the most popular way to listen to and share music.
Cassettes didn’t sound as good as the vinyl that preceded them, nor the compact disc that came after and ended the cassette’s brief moment in the sun. But what the cassette lacked in auditory quality it made up for in a democratic essence. A blank cassette was cheap, back-pocket portable and – after some careful curation at the stereo, or poised over the radio, hitting the record button when a favourite song came on – made to be shared with others. It encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude to music love.
The mixtape my guitar teacher gave me has stayed in my memory for a very specific reason, and that was his decision to follow ‘Panama’ by Van Halen with ‘The Music of the Night’ from the musical Phantom of the Opera. Whatever you think of these two pieces of music, it is doubtful anyone had paired them together like this before, or indeed since. Andrew Lloyd Webber just doesn’t usually follow the guitar heroics of Eddie Van Halen.
But therein lies the magic of the mixtape. They could be or do anything its creator wanted. They were deeply idiosyncratic, and this was true not only in the song selection but in how the card in the cassette case was designed and how the track listing was written out.
As Nick Hornby wrote in the ultimate mixtape novel High Fidelity, ‘To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.’
Anyone who has made a mixtape wanted it to be a good one. Indeed, they wanted it to be the best one ever. The mixtape was like a letter, but it was also of course like a personal soundtrack. You wanted the songs, and the order of the songs, to say something about you; to express something about how you felt – about the world, life, hopes, dreams and love – that maybe you didn’t quite have the words for. You wanted the song choices to somehow express your feelings for you.
This book is called Mixtape because it is a mixture of things, many of them revolving around music. It contains memoir pieces, essays and short stories. Some pieces are long and some are short. There is fact as well as fiction. But the common thread running through them is that they are all, in one way or another, about the ’80s, the last decade before the arrival of personal computers, the internet, emails, mobile phones and text messages.
Like a good mixtape, I hope this book says something real and true about that time.
Part One
MEMOIR
TOTO RECALL
The school choir I was in was broken up by Toto. It began when our choir came under the control of a new teacher, Miss Norman.
Miss Norman was an elfin dynamo in heels, a wearer of a deep red lipstick that would spot and smear across her front teeth when she became excited. She had a new teacher’s enthusiasm combined with a shakiness of voice and manner that suggested she’d ridden the express to breakdown station before, and was ready to hop on again.
Before Miss Norman’s arrival, the choir – all boys, like the school – had primarily sung about God and school spirit. But Miss Norman wanted to shake things up, to make the choir more relevant to the times (the times being the ’80s, though I think Miss Norman would have been happy if we just appeared to exist after the invention of television).
She introduced to the repertoire a doo-wop version of ‘Blue Moon’ and then a Billy Joel song called ‘The Longest Time’. It went well, too. Excited not to be singing about Jesus, we belted out Billy Joel at presentation night as if he was the baddest thing to ever happen to popular music.
The success made Miss Norman giddy – but giddy in a way you knew was a mistake. You hated to see enthusiasm like that at my school, you really did. Crushing enthusiasm was kind of what the school did best. The Latin on the school emblem may have said something about it.
Anyway, Miss Norman decided our next song would be her ‘absolute favourite song in the world’.
That song was ‘Africa’ by Toto. Miss Norman wanted us to hear the song. She pulled the cassette out of her bag and, with a kind of ceremony, slipped it into the music room’s boombox. You could see she had played the tape a lot – it was worn and crusty, and stained, as if with wine and tears.
She played the song several times through. She kept her eyes closed throughout and swayed gently, a smile playing on her lips that strained to something like resignation as the song swelled and dipped. At the line about it taking a lot to drag me away from you, it was as if she was no longer in the room, but somewhere else – a place where drums echoed in the night and men were men.
When she opened her eyes, and saw only us, a bunch of oily, stinky fifteen-year-olds, it must have been crushing. But she handed out the sheet music anyway, stepped to the piano and counted us in.
It’s a curious song, ‘Africa’, which is off Toto’s fourth album, Toto IV. The opening verse features drums in the night (because that’s what happens in Africa), whispers, a woman on a 12.30 flight, and an old man who the narrator goes to for wisdom or melody. It also features a line about wings being lit by the moon and reflecting the stars that are a guide to some kind of redemption. So much going on there. So magic them wings. But it was the second verse that caused the problem, and in particular the line about Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti.
It was my mate Frawls who pointed out the problem. Frawls, unlike the rest of us, understood music and timing and performance. On an average day, he could be heard wandering the school corridors singing snatches of Britten’s War Requiem to himself, happy as Larry.
The rest of us had precious little talent (precious little here being a generous substitute for no). We were accepted into the choir for one reason, and that was a willingness, in a school full of thick-necked rugby players, to stand up and sing Billy Joel a cappella.
‘The line about the mountain has too many syllables in it,’ Frawls said after we had stumbled through the song once. ‘It doesn’t fit the music. There aren’t enough beats for the words.’
Miss Norman looked at Frawls as if he’d said Jesus Christ was a dickwad, and told him he couldn’t be more wrong. She immediately raised her hand and counted us in again. One, two, three, four…
But we believed Frawls – and the more so as the afternoon wore on and we repeatedly failed to sing the line successfully.
We would always start the line confidently, but then find there wasn’t space or time for the Serengeti at the end – and how the hell could there be when the line already included the words Olympus and Kilimanjaro?
Sometimes, we would rush the line’s early words in the hope that this somehow put time in the bank for the latter ones. Other times, we would reach the final word with great assurance, punch out the first syllable, and then realise we were out of time and sort of dribble the rest. Mostly, we just shot out the line – fast, blank and unemotional.
But not once – in a good thirty attempts – did we sing the line well. Not once did the song sound remotely like what Miss Norman must have imagined in her head when she decided the choir would sing Toto, and bring her inner and outer life into some kind of beautiful harmony.
To this day when I hear ‘Africa’ on the radio, I marvel at the way singer David Paich manages the line, even as I continue to believe Frawls was right in saying the line has too many syllables in it for the music.
But mostly when I hear the song, I think of Miss Norman. I think of her pained expression as we massacred her favourite song in the world over and over again. I think of how her hands shook as she pressed them to her temples. I think of how the choir broke up not long afterwards, and how Miss Norman left the school.
And I think how it would be good if Miss Norman later found a choir to sing her song. A choir that knew it must – somehow – do what was right, sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.
THE ROAD BEHIND
The mythology of the classic road trip, the Kerouac kin d of thing, is all about the road ahead. But when I think of road trips, I think of the earliest ones I took, which were all about the road behind. Particularly the gravel road behind.
My family had a grey Volvo station wagon. There were seven of us. Mum and Dad were up front, Dad the driver, Mum the provider of sharp intakes of breath to indicate danger. Mum also gave out the Minties, one each about every five hundred kilometres. We chewed them as slowly as possible and then sniffed and gnawed at the wrappers for extra sustenance.
My three elder siblings were in the centre row of seats. Which just left me and my twin sister Jane. We were in the car’s third row, in seats that faced backwards. Our seats were black vinyl and hotter under the sun than anything under the sun. Lava times infinity, as Jane put it.
The rear-facing seat was introduced by Volvo for design and safety reasons and – my hunch – because the Swedish thought it would be funny to make the world’s children carsick. Well, joke’s on you, Volvo: I had only one Mintie in my stomach, and there was no way I was giving it up.
Every Christmas in the ’70s and into the ’80s, my family drove from Canberra to Lakes Entrance in eastern Victoria. We took the Monaro Highway, which runs north–south between the coast and the Great Dividing Range. The trip, Mum assures me today, took six to seven hours. Oh, Mum and her silly ‘real time’ ideas. It was a journey of at least two days.
The road between Canberra and Cooma was okay, and from Cooma to Bombala it was tolerable, even as the countryside became wilder and the death wish of the marsupials more keen. But things got rough south of Bombala. The word ‘highway’ is generous for what the Monaro was back then. The road was gravel for about fifty kilometres, and trees were known to lie across it, presumably having died of boredom.
Most of the trip, the windows were all down. This was air conditioning. I didn’t have a window, so I could only look with envy as those in window seats were blasted with refreshing hot wind and exhaust fumes. How lucky they were to have their faces made rubbery and numb by the thunder of rushing air. To have their lips rearranged and their eyelids turned inside out. Oh, to be whipped and strangled by my own hair.
With the windows down, it was impossible to hear anything. We would shout at Mum to turn up the stereo, but our words were blown away, out over the baking plains, baffling wallabies. When the message did somehow finally make it to the front of the car, Mum would lean in towards the stereo, against the wind, and at least appear to turn the knob in the right direction. And we would go from hearing nothing, to hearing nothing.
Once we hit the unsealed road, the windows had to go up. Bits of rock and gravel pinged against the car and, had the windows been down, would surely have taken out my twin, who had a way of attracting flying objects to her head. The car was quickly coated in dirt and dust, which made it virtually invisible to the many logging trucks that were busy carrying away the forest.
As we slowly roasted, I would stare out the caked and crusted rear window at the dust swirling into clouds off the tyres. I found it impossible to anticipate bends in the road ahead because I saw only the bends in the road behind. My head and stomach swayed in the wrong direction. I breathed still and stale air, also known as my brothers’ farts. It was around this point my Mintie would most seriously consider ejecting itself.
The car rattled and shuddered over the gravel. Voices vibrated, taking on the staccato rhythm of the car’s failing suspension. I would hearDad speaking, his voice bouncing up and down on one syllable, struggling to bounce onto the next. What is he saying? Something about stopping in Cann River for a milkshake is my guess. For if milkshakes hadn’t been invented, and Dad hadn’t had the promise of one down the road, he would never have set out on this trip in the first place. He might not even have risked having a family.
We’d reach Cann River hours or possibly days later. We’d peel ourselves off our seats, leaving a layer or two of seared skin behind, our screams of agony hidden beneath our cries of freedom. Then we were out on the street. I’d be happy to be out of the car, but more than that I’d be happy to be simply facing in the same direction as the rest of the family. And that direction was towards the milk bar, where beyond a doorway of colourful plastic strips to keep out flies, there were milkshakes waiting.
ROUND AND ROUND
Our ideas and feelings about public transport are, like most things, formed young. The early trips and experiences forever set the parameters of hope and expectation. A bus to Bondi. A tram rattling toward St Kilda and Luna Park’s big mouth. The first time we catch a train with our mates and no parents.
My feelings about public transport are mostly shaped by Canberra’s bus network, called ACTION, and particularly a night service it ran in the 1980s.
The last bus from the city left at 11.51. You had to be on it. Civic, the quaint name given to Canberra’s city centre, was an isolated, strangely threatening place in 1987. Taxis were rare, and no teenager could afford them anyway. At 11.46, I’d stop whatever I was doing – hot chocolate at the Pancake Parlour – and run.
The late bus had two drivers, and who the driver was made a difference to how the night ended. Some nights it was a bloke we called Sunshine Sam, and, later, just Sunshine. Sunshine was, I guess, being paid to drive the late bus, but you got the sense he would have turned up either way. You even wondered if the bus was his, and on Saturday nights he simply took it for a spin and picked up a few of the lost and lonely along the way.
Sunshine could not stop smiling – maybe he’d tried it once and realised it wasn’t for him. He loved Bananarama, and kept a ‘best of’ in the tape deck. Maybe it was stuck there. The later it was, the louder he played it – ‘Shy Boy’, ‘Cruel Summer’, ‘Venus’. You really haven’t experienced the nation’s capital until you’ve been driven past its buildings and monuments to a song about a goddess on a mountaintop.
The late bus was what was called an area service. It didn’t follow the usual route, but went in the direction of an area and then incorporated three routes in one.
Sunshine took this as permission to drive wherever the hell he wanted. He treated the whole of Canberra as an area to be explored. He’d get on a roundabout – one of Canberra’s many – and go round and round, three or four times, as if giving himself time to think. Suspense would build among the dizzy passengers as to which exit he’d take. Eventually, he’d shoot the bus off its coil and into the dark night.
This was a lot of fun. A magical mystery tour soundtracked by Bananarama’s fab three. And while Sunshine kept you guessing, he always delivered you, in a roundabout way, where you wanted to go. If the bus wasn’t full, he’d even drop you at your door.
He’d pull up at your driveway in a forty-foot, bright orange bus, the engine labouring, the hydraulics heaving and sighing. The doors would fold open, and a shaft of light would pierce the nature strip, as the neighbourhood was given a short, sharp blast of ‘Love In the First Degree’. You were home, and Sunshine disappeared with a wave.
Other nights, though, the late bus was driven by a bloke we called the Darkness. We called him the Darkness on account of him not being Sunshine. The Darkness was about three hundred years old. He wore the same thick woollen suit every day, whatever the season.
You heard the Darkness before you saw him. He chugged and wheezed and spittle flew from his face in terrifying arcs. He had a long black cigarette holder he never removed from the corner of his mouth. He smoked whole cigarettes in a single inhalation, the tip burning down like a bomb’s wick in a cartoon. His face was set in eternal grimace, as if he’d been prematurely embalmed by a work experience kid in an Iron Maiden T-shirt.
