In which I continue to waste your time.
ABC: That Was Then But This Is Now
And sometimes, your memories just don't stand up to the light of day. ABC was a band that I absolutely hated back when they were relevant — the new romantic stylings of radio-saturated hits like Poison Arrow and The Look of Love came off as the kind of lounge-quality cheese that just made my skin crawl. In retrospect, I can see and understand that they were trying to work some kind of Roxy Music update... but that doesn't change the fact that, unlike Roxy Music, everything they did pretty much sucked.
All of which helps to explain why I was so surprised when they released That Was Then But This Is Now as a single... and I liked it. I mean, honestly: it was confusing to me how a band I hated so much could produce a song I liked so much. I was comfortable hating them. It worked for them; it worked for me. This song just... confused the issue. And in the early-mid 80s, as I tried to navigate my way through multiple rings of middle school hell, if there was one thing I didn't need it was extra things to feel confused about.
But there it was: a drama-soaked chorus punctuated with clean, clear piano strikes, slashing through the rest of the song's quasi-political lyrical cheese like a samurai sword through a rotten watermelon (can we pause here for a moment to appreciate the stunning beauty of that metaphor? Thank you.). Let's face it: when you're a seventh-grade boy trying to figure the world out, you're easy prey for that kind of a hook. And I was hooked, albeit much against my will. Even at that tender age, however, I was cognizant enough to realize that one song I liked was not enough to countermand my profound dislike of everything else I'd ever heard by the band... and so, in the end, ABC's Beauty Stab did not become a part of my then-nascent collection of cassettes.
Despite that, the chorus (or, at least, the part of it containing the song title and those clean, clear piano strikes) stayed in my head for decades... until last week, when I finally took the plunge and downloaded the song. And you know what? I still like the chorus. And the rest of the song is just horrible. Seriously. The lyrics? "Can't complain, musn't grumble/Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble"... I mean, there's a special place in hell for people who write like that. That thing they do in Singapore? Caning? Yeah, that seems about right to me. Whoever wrote those lyrics should be caned. A lot.
THE WHO: One Life's Enough
It's strange to think of it now, but my introduction to The Who was their inglorious swan song, 1982's It's Hard. The cover shot - the band dressed in skinny ties and black suits, looking awkwardly at the camera while they stand around a teenaged boy playing a video game (Asteroids? Centipede? Ms. Pac-Man?) in what can only be construed as a half-assed attempt at echoing the narrative core of Tommy - gives you a pretty good idea of how successful the album as a whole turned out to be.
Not that I was aware of any of this when I first bought the album (pardon me: cassette) back in '83. All I knew is that this was the band that used to smash all their instruments and they were just as important in the pantheon of rock as the Stones and the Beatles and they had a cool logo with an arrow that I could try to emulate on the inside of my Trapper Keeper (before I moved on to attempting to recreate the Def Leppard font) and they had a crazy drummer (who, uh, I didn't realize died several years before this album was ever released) and, well, all of that was more than enough justification for me to consider it a pretty cool addition to my life. For a little while, at least.
But while the bulk of this album eventually receded back into the dustiest corners of my memory (and rightfully so), one song stayed with me. A tiny sliver of a song, only 2:21. Barely even a song; a sketch set to music. But it stayed with me.
One Life's Enough is a piano ballad, and to be honest it may have been one of the first piano ballads I ever heard and responded to. Listening to it now, I see how that simple, gentle piano figure is almost completely overwhelmed by the then-cutting edge synths that Townsend & Co brought into the song. But the synths are completely beside the point: this song is all about the piano, and Roger's Daltrey's unusually restrained and gentle vocals, and a brief and unexpectedly poignant set of lyrics that capture in lovely and almost haunting form that moment of first love, first contact, first time. But it's not the eroticism of the lyrics ("Throw back your head/let your body curve into the long grass of the bay") that resonates for me as much as the sense of nostalgia — of being unable to stop yearning for that one perfect moment long ago when life overflowed with passion and the infinite excitement of the unknown becoming known. "That was a life enough for me," Daltrey sings as the piano flutters beneath him, and then he and we are lost and helpless before the memory of a time gone by, a place we can no longer see, the people we no longer are.
Then, too soon, it is over.
