Anytime I get together with my old friend "Whitey", we tend
talk about old times and have some laughs. It’s only natural. Dave (his first name) and I had
been out of touch for 9 years before we reconnected just over a year ago. It
happens..A lot has changed for him . He’s a husband, a Dad and a business owner.
So we don't have as much in common anymore, but I’m really glad for the way things have turned out for him.
We recently went to the Van Halen concert together so it’s
natural that we would reflect on other shows we went to together.
The one we talked about this past week was the time we drove
to DC to see Wang Chung at a nightclub called the Wax Museum.
They were doing a club tour in the spring of 1984.
Now
before you get to judgmental and say ‘what? they sucked!”. You gotta remember
this was before they sold out with the whole “everybody Wang Chung Tonight”
thing.
Plus "New wave" music was considered kind of cool and edgy.
Their single at the time was “Dance Hall days”. They had
started a few years earlier as “Huang Chung’ and were signed to Clive Davis’
Arista Label. After making no progress in the States, they changed their name
to “Wang Chung” and signed to the prestigious Geffen label.
Geffen definitely promoted them.
Their videos were starting
to be shown on Mtv.
I remember I “rented” their album and taped on a blank
cassette. (there was actually a store in town where you could lay down an $8
deposit and take home an album, if you brought it back the next day, they would
give you $7 back. This was a great way to build up a music collection when you
had little or no money!)
“Points on the Curve” was produced by Chris Hughes who had
worked with Adam And the Ants as well as Tears For Fears , so his pedigree was
pretty good for 80’s new wave, which is what I considered Wang Chung at the
time.He also went on to work with Ric Ocasek, Howard Jones, and Paul McCartney.
He also later did the mix for" Let My Love Open The Door" (E. Cola Mix) That everyone loves.
So anyways...I talked Whitey and our buddy Charles into going down to the
show. The drinking age in DC was only 18. Charles and Whitey were already 18 as
they were born in 1965, I was still only 17.
Back then we were trying all kinds of tricks to “alter” our
ID’s. This was in the days before there were any “watermarks” on licenses, etc.
The
latest craze was to take clear scotch tape and put it over the birth date and
then use a No. 2 pencil to delicately alter the last digit of the year. I must
have changed my “6” to “5” to put me at "18" for the night. I then had to
hope the guy at the door didn’t ask me to take my license out of my wallet…
So we set out to DC in my beat up '76 Audi with the broken sunroof and ripped up seats, pounding some beers and eating pretzels on
the way.
We got to the club and went in. I remember it was dark and felt kinda
mysterious. I don’t think I had ever been in a night club before, at least not
one of this size.
I can’t remember if the other guys showed their ID’s first or
not ,but the guy looked at mine and waved me forward! We were in .
What a relief! I have no idea what our
back-up plan was if I couldn’t get in...
I’m sure we went to the bar and grabbed some drinks and then
staked out a place close to the stage. One of the things that really enhanced
my memory of the show was finding these videos on YouTube.
The stage setup was exactly like this and the room seemed
about this size.
I sent them to Whitey and he said the same exact thing.
I felt like I was branching out. This wasn’t a hard rock
concert at the closest enormodome (ie: Cap Centre). I had been to DC to see a
show at Constitution Hall but this was a club show . I felt slightly hipper that
night…
Also to give you an idea of our state of mind we were just
weeks away from graduating High School so we were already on an adrenaline high
from the anticipation of that event and the 2 weeks at the Ocean that would
follow…
The band came on and we were having a good time.
Now all of our
concert experiences had been in large arenas at that point in our lives. At
those shows it was anything goes as far as drink and drugs. This was a club, I
think you were supposed to just buy drinks from the bar and enjoy yourself, and you
were probably still aloud to smoke cigarettes in those days as well.
Well, in
Whitey’s mind this was a “concert” and people get stoned at concerts, so he
whipped out a joint and fired it up as if he was seeing Judas Priest and the
Capital Centre! Charles and I laughed ,incredulous that he would do this.
Amazingly, no one from the club staff came over and said anything. We figured we were going to be kicked out at any minute.
In between
songs when it was quiet, Whitey even raised the joint in his hand and yelled
out “dedication for Whitey!!!” Charles and I laughed and because we were so
close, Jack Hues, the lead singer, said
with a puzzled look “dedication for who?”.
“Whitey!”,Dave repeated.
“Ok, this is dedicated to Whitey” Hues shrugged, slightly bemused. We laughed
hysterically and were thrilled by the ridiculousness of it all.
I would think the band closed with “Dance Hall Days’ and
then we were off into the night for the long drive home. (It always seemed like
a really long drive from DC back to Baltimore
County..) I was driving
so I’d didn’t indulge as much as the other guys that night.
Now on these long drives I would find that everyone would
fall asleep or pass out and I was left to drive the distance with only myself
and the radio to keep me awake! So I would turn up the radio really loud and
roll down my window so that air would come blasting in the cabin of the
vehicle. Anything to make these assholes suffer with me. .haha.
Well ,Whitey passed out and slept the whole way back. He “came
to” when we pulled up to his house. He mumbled a goodbye and stumbled up his
walkway to his door….
I woke the next day, a little groggy as per usual on weekends,
and went out to my used and abused car.
I guess I was giving it a “once over”, to
at least clean up any empty beer cans, when to my shock , I saw what
looked like a pile of dog shit on the floor of the back seat!
My mind raced.wait, we did have a dog...no...
I had to think for a second…wait
”Whitey!!!”
said
my inner voice in disgust.
(imagine how Seinfeld says “Newman”...)
All of those pretzels that Dave had eaten on the way down had come up on the way home and formed a pile of
doughy delight. Imagine my disgust as I had to go get paper towels and clean up this mess he left.
You figure
the guy might have said when we dropped him
off “oh hey man, sorry, I puked in your car”. (He had already
thrown up in the front seat floor the year before) I think that car saw more body fluids than a medical lab....
I called him later to yell at him and tried not to laugh at
how ridiculous it all was. I’m sure he gave me a “sorry man, I didn’t know. I was
out of it…”.
I easily forgave him knowing we had created a great memory for
ourselves.
Life would get more complicated after graduation and we all would have our up and downs....
….I’m happy to say we survived and just last week attended the Van Halen .
my how times have
changed …
We both had to get up early the next day and we’ve both
calmed down quite a bit since the old days, so our numbers we quite different that night 28 years ago...
Total beers drank= zero
total drugs consumed = zero
Pepsi’s drank= two
years of friendship= Thirty
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