What becomes a legend most?

When I was attending Winston Churchill High School in lively Livonia Michigan ("Explore, Discover, Enjoy," as a commercial of the time said of Livonia), back in the halcyon days of 1988, there was a radio station that broadcast from Plymouth/Canton High School -- our neighbors to the south-west. It was low-powered enough that reception of the station was a touch and go affair, but on clear nights, I would sit in my room and listen to it as I hung out with friends or worked on various arty projects, like making a collage out of pictures of Robert Smith and Morrissey that I cut out of Smash Hits.

This radio station played what was then known as college rock. The Cure, R.E.M., Echo & the Bunnymen, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Smiths. Locally, it was known as squid-music; squids were a group of us, at first basically what would now be considered Goth -- I suspect the term came into usage because of the tendency of some of us to have dyed-black tendrils of hair hanging down into our mascara-ed eyes. Squids encompassed punk rock kids, femme Depeche Mode fans, and nouveau Hippies. You can see here that I'm not actually making this up; it's a bit of local color that I'm almost proud of.

Anywho, so on this radio station, they played a lot of stuff that I've since forgotten about by bands I only half remember. But among all the musical flotsam, there was one song that I remembered clearly in spite of only having heard a few times, that I would sing to strangers if I thought they might recognize it (this is true! I sang it to some middle-aged ladies when I was working at Borders! Why I thought that they might recognize the song eludes me. I suspect they were sort of mortified.), but that I never knew who the artist responsible was. It was bouncy late-80s synth-pop, so catchy that it borders on annoying, and the chorus of this song went:

Just like Hemingway, he showed me any way
You can be a hero all you have to know is what to say
And if I want to die just like Hemingway
I'll put a pistol in my mouth and blow my head away.

Now that's entertainment. I've searched for it intermitently over the years, in song indexes, and searching for it through P2P file-sharing -- which, incidentally, is wrong, and something that we here at The Cornjob Memorial Library would never, ever condone, kids -- but without an artist, it was next to impossible to find.

That is, until today. On a lark, I googled what lyrics I had, and discovered the name of the artist; I used this to find an mp3 that had been posted with the band's (named Blue Clocks Green, incidentally; no wonder I didn't remember it!) apparent permission.

It would not be an overstatement to say that this is my Holy Grail. Well, OK, it would be overstating it, rather severely overstating it in fact, but I'm trying to indicate how happy I was to find it; for a while, I honestly wondered whether it had even existed at all. No one from high school remembers it, which seems impossible, and there really didn't seem to be any evidence that the horrors of puberty (I was an extremely late bloomer) hadn't driven me briefly, if quite catchily, insane.

But it exists. It is weird to hear it digitally -- the radio always played a slightly worse-for-wear 7" single. But it remains one of the most infectious earworms around, perhaps even rivaling the glory that is Salt 'n' Pepa's "Push It" for the song most likely to get lodged in my head for ever and ever. The synthpop music is dated, of course, but it brings up images of Molly Ringwald doing the Ringwald Shuffle -- you know, arms up, elbows at a 90-degree angle, head down, boots scooting in the Breakfast Club library to some synthy glop. This is like a song that was left off the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, the one that would've accompanied the part where a spurned Ducky shot himself outside the Prom in the original ending*. It's absolutely fabulous. I love the fact that this fey synthpop name-checks Papa Hemingway; I have no patience with him as a writer, but if his life -- or more to the point, death -- could inspire a song this enjoyable, then even I can't write him off completely.

If you have the constitution to stand such a catchy song, it's available as an MP3 here, at the bottom of the page, after the story of the band. I highly recommend it.

In less ecstatic news, I got a haircut. And my hair is not, nor has it ever been, dyed black.

Song (duh!): Blue Clocks Green, "Hemingway".




*This was not, in fact the original ending; I made it up, out of my imagination. Although it is true that, in the book, Molly Ringwald's character ended up with Ducky at the end, which all us squid-types agreed would've been a better ending.