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

by Rob Sheffield

  “I dunno.”

  “Oh. Me neither, Stephen Patrick! But what about that girl?”

  “Love is just a miserable lie.”

  “I love you, Stephen Patrick! You know so much about these things!”

  His songs were a Magic 8-Ball of the damned. Whenever I would contemplate a really big adventure, like maybe washing my hair and putting on clean socks and leaving my room, Morrissey was there to talk me out of it and provide me with excellent reasons to keep hiding in my room where I belonged. When I did go out, to attend class or pick up a bag of Zeus Chips, I felt guilty for cheating on Morrissey with life.

  He was perfect at expressing the fascistic demands on life that sensitive boys routinely make on the planet. I agreed completely. The failure of the rest of the world to arrange itself according to my moods, whims and desire to be recognized as a genius without actually doing anything—why, that was just proof that this was the wrong planet to be born on, and Morrissey knew I deserved better. Who were all these people I had to deal with every day? Why did I give them my valuable time? Girls, man. You try to talk to them, they just tell you things like “You’ve been in the house too long.”

  Whenever I played him for other people, they usually winced and said, “Jesus, that man cannot sing.” This was proof of my sensitive ear, and proof that Morrissey and I only really understood each other. My mom thought he was cute, but that’s about it, although she really just liked his last name. “Morrissey!” she said. “He could be a Kerry boy!”

  I was just going through the basic paradox of adolescence, which Mozz was remarkably candid about: I Want the One I Can’t Have, and It’s Driving Me Mad. One hundred percent of teenagers dream about making out, but they only dream about making out with 5 percent of other teenagers. This means our dreams and our realities are barely on speaking terms, so we look forward to making out with people who aren’t real, keeping us in a nearly universal state of teen frustration. It screws us up for the rest of our lives, as we keep hoping for the unattainable. It’s like if you planned your whole life around meeting Garfield, the cartoon cat. I do not know anyone who claims they want to own a cat someday, but they’re holding out for Garfield. If I met somebody who broke up with their cats every few weeks and said, “He just doesn’t eat lasagna” or “I don’t know, he was nice, but seldom seemed to be thinking sassy wisecracks about the slobbering dog,” I would have to assume this person was an idiot. Yet practically every teenager on earth channels their deepest sexual and romantic yearnings into fantasies.

  Why are we designed this way? Who knows? I was in the flush of young manhood, with all the supposed vigor of youth, yet I was surly and hostile to everyone I met, including myself. I let my Walkman do the talking, and all it had to say was “Stay away.” I would have been this way even if I’d never heard the Smiths—but it was Morrissey who convinced me my most appalling qualities were heroic achievements. I guess that’s what rock stars are for.

  I took being a Smiths fan seriously. I wondered what “vicars” or “moors” or “rusty spanners” were. I was mesmerized by the way Morrissey pronounced words such as “plagiarize,” “guts” and “delicate”—was that a Brit thing, or just him? I loved the song where Morrissey confessed he had a nightmare that lasted 20 years, 7 months, and 27 days. Assuming he meant his life, I calculated that I would turn this precise age on September 29, 1986, and eagerly awaited the revelations that would greet me. As it turned out, nothing happened that day at all, although I recall eating some frozen waffles.

  I imagined myself as intimately familiar with the geography of Manchester, just from hearing Morrissey sing about it. The guy was sure into locations—under the iron bridge, the alley by the railway station, the fountain, the patio, the scholarly room, the darkened underpass, the YWCA—whew. That’s a lot of turf to cover, especially for a guy who never moved out of his mom’s house. Yet as Morrissey understood, my room was the scariest place of all.

  I broke up with Morrissey after the second Smiths album, Meat Is Murder, came out in the spring of 1985, because he was just . . . too much of a jerk. I was desperate to get out of the humdrum town Morrissey had helped me build in my brain. My life had gotten totally grim—I just sat around my dorm room in a depressive stupor, too distracted by gloom to get any work done, too afraid to shave or answer the phone or go outside. Morrissey had turned into a lame self-parody, and so had I.

  I have to admit, it was acrimonious. I went from idolizing the Smiths to despising them. Shit got ugly. I blamed them for all my problems—and if that didn’t make me a true Smiths fan, what could? Hell, Morrissey had taught me everything I knew about blaming my bad personality on people I’d never met. In a way, hating him was my sincerest possible act of fandom. Like Darth Vader light-sabering Obi-Wan Kenobi, I proved the douchebag student had become the douchebag master.

  But I taped over Meat Is Murder with the new Madonna album, Like a Virgin. She was another pushy, needy egomaniac as untrustworthy as Morrissey, equally full of bullshit and bent on my destruction, but I had a feeling it was time to pay her brand of bullshit more attention. At least she had something to teach me that I didn’t already know. And even though I was disturbed by her worldview, I liked her songs a lot better than “Meat Is Murder.”

  I started forcing myself to leave my room, going to indie rock shows, even when I didn’t feel like it. The club DJs would put on Smiths records, and the big-hair new-wave girls would perk up whenever their songs came on. What was wrong with these girls?

  Then, just when I’d gone to all the trouble of purging the Smiths out of my system, they did something really offensive, which is they got good again. The first night my friend Martha played me The Queen Is Dead in her room, I was consumed with rage at the fact that it was so unmistakably, ridiculously great, and the fact that Morrissey was making fun of himself and doing a much better job of it than I could. Morrissey had beaten me to making all the changes I wanted to make—he was now funny, self-deprecating, apologetic about what an asshole he’d been to me, and (unfor-fucking-givable) blatantly trying to make me like him again. Bastard. I hated him more than ever, and decided to never listen to the Smiths again.

  I was up in Boston for the weekend, kicking around the record shops on a cool summer evening. I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen since high school. Vincent had changed a lot. He was now bleaching his hair. He was out of the closet. He was obviously hitting the gym. And he was obviously a Smiths fan. It must sound pretty weird, but this was a time when the only people in the world who dressed like Morrissey were Morrissey fans, so we could spot one another pretty easily.

  I was wearing a cardigan, and Vincent was wearing a lime green tank top, so it only took a minute for us to start chatting about the Smiths. We found somewhere to sit and eat french fries. The Red Sox game was on TV. We talked barely at all about high school, a great deal about gender ambiguity in “Still Ill,” and a little about the Red Sox. He wasn’t a baseball fan, so he was curious about what was happening on the field.

  “This guy is Wade Boggs.”

  “He looks like a charming man.”

  “He is. He’s a singles-hitting third baseman who never knew his place.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dwight Evans, right field.”

  “He is his mother’s only son, and he’s a desperate one.”

  It was rare to spend a whole night talking about music with somebody I vaguely knew. He knew all these details about Morrissey I didn’t know—the way he revered James Dean, the name of the French actor on the cover of The Queen Is Dead. We debated whether Keats and Yeats versus Wilde was really a fair fight, given that Wilde idolized Keats and once kissed the soil on his grave in Rome.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “A double play,” I explained. “The runner on third got caught.”

  “Will he get home?”

  “He hasn’t got one.”

  “Barbarism begins at home.”

  We didn’t have m
any friends in common, so we ran out of gossip fast, but we just kept talking in our private Smiths language. By the end of the game, we’d discussed The Queen Is Dead to death, and I’d learned which members of the 1986 Red Sox were hot. Jim Rice grounded into a 6-4-3.

  “That’s it?” Vincent asked. “It’s over.”

  “It’s over.”

  “In a way, it never really began.”

  “But in my heart, it was so real.”

  We shook hands at the train and traded addresses. We never wrote those letters and never ran into each other again. I thought it was strange to spend an evening having so much fun with someone I didn’t know so well, and to not hang out after that, because I was too young to know adult life is full of accidents and interrupted moments and empty beds you climb into and don’t climb out of. A few months later, the Red Sox lost the World Series.

  One night that winter, I went to an indie rock show at the Grotto and the DJ played the new Smiths import twelve-inch “Ask.” I couldn’t believe Morrissey was admitting he was wrong about all that stuff he’d said a couple years earlier. He was coming right out and saying that people being nice to one another was a good thing, not a sign of weakness or moral corruption. I was stunned to hear it, partly because it was my old nemesis Morrissey saying it but partly because I was hoping it was a lie. It sounded like so much work, I didn’t know if I could handle it. But he made it sound like trying would be fun.

  I was leaning against a wall in the Grotto, watching the usual big-hair new-wave girls do their usual “oooh, we love the Smiths!” dance, and completely failing to muster up any of the bile against them that had once made me feel so safe and strong and adult. I was just a kid leaning against a wall in a smelly rock club, enjoying some mediocre guitar bands, and avoiding eye contact with anyone. I had big problems, and Morrissey wanted me to know that, but he also wanted me to know that they were temporary problems. He and I had been through a lot together, but nothing would ever come between us again. And alas, nothing ever did. I haven’t been able to get rid of this guy since.

  THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS

  “Pretty in Pink”

  1986

  Some things annoy you forever, and some disappear. It ’s impossible to predict. For instance, throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, people made little quote marks with their fingers when they said something “clever” or “ironic.” God, that was annoying. I assumed it was going to bug the shit out of me forever. And then, for some reason, people stopped. If you’re under thirty, you have never made little quote marks with your fingers. When you watch Say Anything, you think it just looks silly when that girl tells Ione Skye, “I know we used to be [quote fingers] ‘ultra competitive.’” You probably wonder what ’s wrong with her.

  I don’t know how this massive cultural change happened so suddenly, with no public outcry or debate—but it did. America, we got this one right. How did this [quote fingers] “happen”?

  The same thing with the way people on an airplane used to clap when the plane landed. I guess if the plane crashed, we were supposed to just fold our arms and boo? I assumed, without giving it much thought, this was going to annoy me for the rest of my life (along with everything else about air travel). Then sometime in the late 1990s, I noticed that air applause had died out. Nobody talked about not clapping anymore—they just stopped clapping.

  Some annoyances persist forever, like the Eagles or “last time I checked.” Some are gone before you know it, like Dire Straits or Paris Hilton. You can’t tell which is which until it’s too late. I mean, everybody assumed Wilson Phillips were going to stick around for years. If I’d known how temporary they were, I would have enjoyed them more.

  But there’s one prediction I feel confident in making. “No worries” is going to annoy people forever.

  “No worries” is the best thing to happen to sullen teenagers since I was one—even better than vampire sexting, GTL or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. When I was a sullen teenager, we had to make do with the vastly inferior “whatever.”

  “No worries” beats “whatever” six ways to Sunday. It’s a vaguely mystical way of saying “I hear your mouth make noise, saying something that I plan to ignore.” It has a noble Rasta-man vibe, as if you’re quoting some sort of timeless yet meaningless proverb on the nature of change—“Soon come,” or “As the cloud is slow, the wind is quick.” In terms of ignoring provocation, “no worries” is just about perfect.

  I first noticed it at a rock show in the late ’90s, where somebody was accidentally kicking my friend’s calves. When this was pointed out to him, he smiled and said, “No worries!” Three times in a row. But the fourth time, he finally understood what we were saying and stopped kicking. He was a perfectly friendly and agreeable guy. He just hadn’t even heard us, because he had a magic shield to protect him. He had “no worries.” I did a Rolling Stone article on MTV’s Carson Daly, which meant following him around all day while people bugged him for decisions or reactions or favors. He kept saying, “Yeah, no worries,” which struck me as the most brilliant possible response to any stupid request. Suddenly, “whatever” was just not sullen enough.

  Every time you say “no worries,” you have chosen a non-aggressive and nonconfrontational way to inform me it’s not your problem, and I admire you for that. It’s a bit like “ma’am,” an expression I picked up living in the South and wondered how I’d ever functioned without it. You can say “ma’am” to mean anything from “Excuse me, you’re blocking this supermarket aisle” to “I’m sure the flight attendant would put that in the storage bin for you” to “Are you really pretending not to notice the line starts over here?” But “ma’am” doesn’t translate in the North, where it just startles and offends. In my hometown, “ma’am” is something only a hit man would say. The first time I tried it was when I was driving around in Randolph with my dad, looking for the bakery where we were supposed to pick up my sister’s wedding cake. He pulled over and said, “Ask this lady for directions.” I rolled down my window, cleared my throat for the nice Irish woman in her front yard weeding the hedges and said, “Ma’aaaaam?” She jumped about a foot in the air.

  When we pulled away, my dad asked, “Why did you call her man?”

  “I didn’t. I called her ‘ma’am.’ ”

  “You what?”

  There was no defense.

  What I should have said was, “No worries, Dad.” But sadly, this hadn’t been invented yet.

  When John Hughes died in the summer of 2009, I grieved because he’d never gotten to use “no worries” in a movie, though he’d already given us so much. Being a sullen teenager when those John Hughes movies came out—well, it must have been like how it felt to be a real-life button man in the Gambino family when Al Pacino started making gangster flicks. Today we remember those films as a unit, but they came out one by one, year by year. After seeing one installment, we had to wait months for the next. We had no way of knowing Sixteen Candles was a bridge to the still-unimaginable Breakfast Club. And we had no way of knowing they would culminate in Pretty in Pink, the apex of the Molly Trilogy. Hughes personally had nothing to do with St. Elmo’s Fire, but since it came out between The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, it went into the canon too—it was to the Molly Trilogy what Mean Streets is to the Godfather movies.

  Throw in Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful and you get the mythic canon of an ur-American teen utopia. Thanks to years of weekend-afternoon reruns, these movies still define high school agony, even for kids (especially girls) who weren’t born when they came out. You’re never more than a few minutes away from hearing somebody quote Judd Nelson (“Could you describe the ruckus, sir?”) or Anthony Michael Hall (“Not many girls in contemporary American society today would give their underwear to help a geek like me”). This guy could really describe a ruckus. He knew how to listen.

  When he died, it was startling to realize how famous he was, especially since he hadn’t directed
a movie in years. But despite his reclusive ways, he was arguably Hollywood’s most famous director. Even at the time, he was as famous as the Brat Packers in his movies—when Pretty in Pink came out, everyone called it the new “John Hughes movie,” even though he’d farmed out the actual directing to his associate Howard Deutch. In the 2001 sleaze comedy Not Another Teen Movie (one of my favorite films of the past decade, to my shame), the kids go to John Hughes High, while the football team plays in Harry Dean Stadium.

  It’s a sign of how 1980s teen culture keeps on resonating—even people who were born in the ’90s can O.D. on borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s. Maybe that’s because it was an era when teen trash was the only corner of pop culture that wasn’t a high-gloss fraud. Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse; whether we’re talking Kathleen Turner flicks or Steve Winwood albums, the decade’s non-teen culture has no staying power at all. The only sign of life was teen trash, the most despised, frivolous and temporary stuff out there. Alyssa Milano wasn’t lying: “Teen steam! You gotta let it out!”

  To simplify brutally, there were really only two kinds of movies in the ’80s:(1) Movies in which Judd Nelson might conceivably pump his fist while crossing the football field

  (2) Movies in which Mickey Rourke sweats a lot and symbolizes something

  It goes without saying that the first kind remains lingua franca, while the second kind was forgotten by the time the ’90s started and seems both hideously dated and joyless now. One of the reasons we remember these movies so clearly is that they were so much more honest than the Hollywood adult movies of the day. There was a feeling of expensive mendacity to all the aging baby-boomer dramas, all those sensitive flicks with William Hurt or Michael Douglas or Melanie Griffith backlit with baby oil all over the lens. The moment that sums it up for me is the truly loathsome opening shot of Top Gun, with the caption “Indian Ocean: Present Day.” That totally sums up where Hollywood culture was at in 1986: the ruling principle was that the “Present Day” would always look, sound and feel exactly like 1986—too horrible a thought to even contemplate.