Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

  I am a “hopeless idiot,” and ergo my favorite Hall & Oates song is “Maneater,” except on those special occasions when I prefer “Did It in a Minute,” which shifts my idiot profile to “village.”

  “Kiss on My List” was the first time Hall & Oates made a new-wave hit, but it was “You Make My Dreams” that made them a bona fide new-wave group. They went all-out in that direction, leaving their folkie ’70s adult soft-rock incarnation behind. They’d already been around forever—I remember that when they put out their album Along the Red Ledge, there was a radio ad proclaiming, “It’s like hearing Daryl and John for the first time!” Yet they gambled their history on a dizzy, bouncy synth sound that must have seemed like a fad at the time. They didn’t just go for the new-wave novelty hit—they threw all their non-new-wave baggage aside. They got the haircuts, the suits, the silly pants, and rolled all the way with it, and (of course) got a lot more popular than they’d ever been before. They were not just carpetbaggers. We loved them for trying so hard and for caring enough to get the details right. They had a lot to lose, and no reason to expect that we would embrace them, but (if I may speak for the new-wavedork-circa-1982 community for a moment) we did. They were the only superstars who got the new-wave pass.

  They embraced us right back, churning their “Kiss on My List” profits back into a new wardrobe of brighter, baggier pants. The only other previously popular band I can think of that went new wave and got away with it was the J. Geils Band, but I have to disqualify them a bit, because (1) I’m from Boston, so I overrate this band so wildly I tend to give them credit for things they never achieved, so I have to take even my own crazed enthusiasm with a grain of salt, (2) they were slightly better at being rock than being new wave, and (3) they broke up right after they went new wave, at the height of their Freeze-Frame fame, which meant they never got a chance to make their “Maneater,” although they came close with “Flamethrower.”

  “Maneater” is from the album H2O, which has Hall & Oates’ second-gayest album cover. Since gay was nothing but a compliment in the new-wave book in 1982, there was nothing not to praise about an album with a cover that showed two men perspiring as they stared into each other’s eyes, one on one as it were. They were probably not having sex out of camera range when they took this photo, but you could have fooled any of us. Daryl Hall actually had to explain in Rolling Stone that he was not into Oates that way (“he’s not my type—too short and dark”); he added, “The idea of sex with a man doesn’t turn me off,” which was a pretty freaking badass thing for a mainstream pop star to say in the ’80s. (Boy George never came out and said anything like that—but then, he didn’t really have to, did he?) Naif that I was, I remember reading this and saying, “Wait, that doesn’t mean he’s actually had premarital sex, does it?” That’s right—I was sixteen years old, and still believed that Hall & Oates were virgins. They sure liked each other a lot, though, and we liked them to like each other.

  I first heard this album at my friend Terry’s house, where we listened to it over and over one rainy Saturday afternoon as we played Stratego. We had spent the previous hours of the afternoon listening to the Clash’s Sandinista! and the Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk, so we felt pretty daring and open-minded for being cool enough to appreciate the fact that these commercial pop guys were up to a Stratego-worthy standard of new wave. “Maneater” took the bassline from the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love”—it was pretty obvious, since Phil Collins had just covered the song and had a big hit with it.

  But I love every minute of this song. The long, smoldering intro, building up tension beat by beat. The cheesy ’80s sax solo to end all cheesy ’80s sax solos. The way Oates utters that “oooh!” at the end of the sax solo. The way Hall utters the non-word “ooobaaddaaaswougghew!” at the precise four-minute mark. And the way it warns me about those tough girls they were always singing about. This girl was deadly, man, but she could really rip my world apart?

  Why the hell didn’t I meet any girls like this? Where did all these she-cats hang out? I was more than willing to be chewed up, digested and/or spat out by this heart-breaking, love-taking, dream-making maneater. Okay, so the beauty is there, but the beast is in her heart. Where’s the downside, Hall? He wouldn’t say. All he told me was “I wouldn’t if I were you. I know what she can do.” And all Oates added was “Watch out!” I have to admit, I was intrigued. But since she was a night creature, it was fairly unlikely she would wander over to Terry’s house in the middle of our Stratego game. Oh well. I was a cautious Stratego player—always look for the bombs before you go looking for the flags. And as they say, lucky in Stratego, lame at love.

  When I listen to “Maneater” now, it’s on the Hall & Oates greatest hits album Rock ’n Soul: Part 1, which I stole from my sister Tracey. She won it off WHTT by calling in to the station as soon as she heard the intro to “Say It Isn’t So,” and the DJ announced her name on the air. (I got it on tape!) This added a level of unspeakable excitement to an already exciting record. Instead of stealing it when I went to college, I waited until Thanksgiving break, which allowed me to get away clean. I still don’t know if she realizes where her copy is. But I do know she thought Hall was the cute one.

  It’s a little weird to listen to “Maneater” now and realize it reminds me of my sister. But songs that give out sensible advice, as most Hall & Oates songs do, always remind me of my sister Tracey, because she was the person in my life who made me smarter. Like Hall & Oates, she was fond of pointing out what a moron I was, and yet instead of making me defensive about it, she had a knack for convincing me how right she was. She is still exactly this way, and so is her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, who already laughs at what a bad chess player I am. The last time I was able to fool my niece about anything was when I convinced her that the restaurant sign that says EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS means it’s illegal to wash your own, and even then she only bought it for about ten seconds.

  When I was a little boy, I begrudged the way Tracey understood things I struggled to even see. When she would correct my grammar, I would call her Miriam Webster, who I thought in my childish ignorance was the author who wrote the dictionary. Tracey set me straight on that one too. Tracey is the sister who makes me less dumb. I spend a minute with her and she breathes in my dumb and breathes it back to me as smart. She does not even have to try to do this. Nobody else in my life has this same effect on me.

  When I had my first apartment in Boston, I had Tracey over for tea. I was so proud of myself. I was a sophisticated man of the world, having my sister over to my place for tea. We sat on the couch, sipping from our Thermoses, enjoying a spread of EZ Cheez and Lorna Doones, as I said things like, “How are your classes going?”

  As she was leaving, Tracey said, “Hey Rob, I don’t know if you ever have, you know, girls over to the apartment?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Buuuut, if you do? They really like the toilet paper to be on the little rolling thing.”

  “They do?”

  “Yes. We do.”

  “The rolling thing that spins around?”

  “Yes. They like the toilet paper hanging from the rolling thing.”

  “But you can reach it. It’s just there on the sink and—”

  “We just do.”

  “It’s easier to—”

  “We. Just. Do.”

  So I put the toilet paper on the rolling thing.

  One of the things she keeps reminding me, often in so many words, is that my sisters are right. About everything.

  But when you’re a teenage boy, you can be narrow-minded about things that are girlie, things that are frivolous, things that are pop. Boys always want to be taken seriously, and they always want to transcend the tawdry emotion of the pop singer—it’s a fairly standard response to the rigors of young manhood. You could trace it through the past century back to Ezra Pound in 1915 denouncing the lyric poem as unmanly in his hugely influential essay “The Serious Artist.”
The lyric was weak and feminine—a truly virile poet should be writing epics. This isn’t so different from how people talk about culture now. Rock epics are for boys; pop hits are for girls. When you’re a boy, pop is scary because it’s a maneater. You sing along with a pop song, you turn into a girl. That takes some degree of emotional risk.

  One of my new-wave idols, Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, used to tell a story about the days when he was an abrasive art-school punk. One night in the spring of 1980, he was at the Electric Ballroom in Manchester, England, talking to Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis, frustrated by the dead end of their doom-and-gloom musical styles. “I don’t think I was able to offer him any solace, nor he I,” Green said. “We were feeling pretty dejected and found our respective ways out of it.”

  A week later, Ian Curtis killed himself, and Green began playing disco. Ian Curtis’s old bandmates went disco too, renaming themselves New Order. Green never looked back. As he proclaimed, “Fear of pop is an infantile disorder—you should face up to it like a man.”

  ROXY MUSIC

  “More Than This”

  1982

  One thing we all learned from our radios in the ’80s:

  Taking Kenny Rogers’s advice? Always a good idea.

  Walk away from trouble when you can.

  Don’t fall in love with a dreamer.

  Never count your money when you’re sitting at the table.

  Love the world away.

  The best part of life is the thinnest slice.

  Actually that last one was Air Supply, but it sure sounds like something Kenny would say. I have no clue what it means, but like everything Kenny says, it drips with the wisdom of a silver-fox Zen sage.

  Don’t take your love to town.

  It don’t mean you’re weak if you turn the other cheek.

  Love will turn you around.

  He sang this in the movie Six Pack to his foster family of zany orphans who tagged along on his stock-car racing adventures. This song turned Diane Lane from a child actress to the mature, grown bombshell she became in the film Streets of Fire, where she got to sing Meat Loaf songs to Willem Dafoe and the guy from Eddie and the Cruisers. Love did turn her around!

  Sail away with me, to another world.

  Most often, one does not sail to another world, especially if one is an island, and Dolly Parton is the other island in the stream. But do not argue back with Kenny. He doesn’t need to hear your lip, buddy. K-Hova’s been around the block, and he knows what ladies like to hear, and it isn’t complaining about how they picked a fine time to leave you, with four hundred children and a crop in the field. Kenny knows how to give them what they want, without losing his mind. These are all good lessons, and I tried to learn them by heart. You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.

  No woman made me break as many of these rules as Ms. Calasta.

  Ms. Calasta always showed up late for class with a mug of coffee the size of a cinder block. She kept her hard pack of unfiltered cigarettes propped up on her desk, with a disturbing illustration of a salty old sea dog on the cover. My temples throbbed when she cleared her throat after a smoking break. I still dream of Ms. Calasta, who taught me so much, like the way modern literature reflected the alienation of a godless universe, and how if you hold your coffee mug at a certain angle, you can reduce a high school boy to Camembert.

  She was a pheromone parfait in a pencil skirt, always rocking a severe bob of red hair and glasses that she could have used as a shiv. Years later, in my college French class, I would see the movie Les Diaboliques and realize that Ms. Calasta had stolen all her facial expressions from Simone Signoret. But it was all new to me. Where did she come from? How had she gotten this cool? Nobody knew, but we all worshipped her. The class was full of stoners, thespians, hockey players and bookworms, but everyone seemed to idolize Ms. Calasta. I was certain I loved her best.

  It’s always dangerous to have a crush on your teacher, because the crush filters into whatever you’re supposed to be studying. Thanks to my Latin teacher, I will always feel a certain nescio quid whenever I will have used the future perfect tense (like just now). Whereas my crabby math teacher means that I will never truly enjoy full erotic release in the presence of a hypotenuse. Ms. Calasta had that effect on my reading and no doubt still does.

  As near as I could guess, she hovered somewhere in her forties, looking back over her shadowy past with the elegant disdain of a 1930s bank robber in the back of the getaway car, glancing over the landscape as it trailed behind her. The clincher was her deep, hearty laugh, which involved downturned lips, a few seconds of sustained eye contact, a coda of hacks. Then she’d say the name of whoever made her laugh, as in, Oh Raaahhhb. Whatever she laughed at, you’d say again. She had a way of making you feel like an adult, as if you might slip up and she’d find out you were really just a sixteen-year-old boy reading The Great Gatsby for the first time. She would ask us questions like, “Have you ever argued about the death of God with someone you were sexually or romantically involved with?”

  Not even Kenny Rogers could advise me how to handle this one. I could neither hold nor fold her.

  Ms. Calasta laughed warmly at my enthusiasm for music and pop trash. She found it fetchingly jejune that I knew all the words to all the songs on the radio and read celebrity magazines. I even knew the oldies from the ’50s and ’60s that she’d grown up on.

  “Oh, Raaahhhb,” she said. “You have so much passion for the Shirelles. Tell me about that Skeeter Davis song again.”

  I was a dreamy boy, always bumping my head on ceiling fans and tripping over chairs, but she saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself, and I became more like whoever she thought I was. She gladly read my stories, poems and plays. She listened to the tapes I made her. After hearing me gush about music, she called me “Dolores Haze,” after the radio-listening, comics-reading nymphet in Lolita, but unfortunately, that was a joke I wouldn’t get for years.

  Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me. She was teaching us about Gatsby, the way he disappeared into his own Platonic conception of himself, the way he followed the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, drunk on the impossible past. But what did I know about the past? I didn’t have one yet. I could only covet hers.

  “Daisy and Gatsby had a connection,” she mused. “But not sexually. Gatsby never could have fulfilled her.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I wrote it all down.

  When I go up into my parents’ attic and dig out my high school copies of these books, I am dumbstruck by all my feverish scrawls in the margin. I guess I really identified with the narrator of Notes from Underground. Looking at the novel now, the guy just seems every bit as much of a tool as I was, so either I was easier to impress then or I was just mesmerized by my frantic love for Ms. Calasta. I fished for details of her past, but instead I got more book recommendations, and devoured every one—John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

  This was also the period when I was cultivating arcane devotions to obscure saints. In a way, Catholic devotion was preparing me for my adulthood in the record collector/taper/critic world—collecting relics, obsessing over hagiography, looking for physical traces of the divine in the most ordinary things. It’s no coincidence that so many record geeks grow up Catholic—it really prepares you for that path. Praying the rosary was twenty minutes, just like an album side. And it had five mysteries, just like (most often) the five songs on an album side.

  When I discovered Roxy Music, it was like I’d been waiting to hear them all my life. Bryan Ferry took romantic obsession even beyond Kenny Rogers. Where Kenny had merely urged me to “Love the World Away,” Bryan Ferry insisted that for the new-wave love-boy, the whole world would be obliterated by the sheer intensity of your devotion. Bryan Ferry wore a tuxedo and oozed ironic romantic despair. He had barely
any voice at all, but his vocals were full of ornately stylized emotion; you could hear how many times he’d rehearsed every quiver, but somehow, that just made him more believable. “More than this,” he whispered. “There’s nothing.”

  This song was more than a hymn—it was a religion in itself. No wonder he did the video in a church, standing under a cross that only existed to shine light on him. And just like Gatsby, he took romantic obsession to the point where he disappeared into the Platonic conception of himself. He spends the video watching himself up there on a movie screen—an awkward, ungainly man dancing like a foxy disco lady. He clearly knew how funny he was, but all his emotional playacting didn’t detract from his sincerity—it was his sincerity. He was a self-parodic Casanova in the privacy of his own mind, and every song was an invitation to the swinging party going on in his mirror—the more, the Bryan Ferrier.

  I’ve loved this song since the first moment I heard it, yet I really have no idea who the girl is he’s singing to or what she’s like. I guess this is a song about desire so complete, it doesn’t even need an actual girl in it. He is beyond such details. If she won’t accept his love, he’ll have to adore it himself. The end of the song is just Bryan Ferry murmuring the words “more than this” and “nothing,” so that every time, they describe a new shade of blue. Gatsby would have understood.

  Thrillingly, Ms. Calasta answered the letters I wrote her from college, always beginning with “Dear, dear Rob.” She got a little exasperated I was still calling her M s. Calasta. Every time I was back home from college, I went over for coffee. One sunny afternoon, she taught me to smoke, on the barstools in her kitchen. She had the same hard pack with the same disturbing sea dog cartoon. I tried to seem nonchalant as my virgin lungs filled with smoke.