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Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: Boom Crash Opera :: "Dancing In The Storm"
Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: Boom Crash Opera :: "Dancing In The Storm" | Warp + Weft: Boom Crash Opera :: "Dancing In The Storm" |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 12:28 PM | |
 Boom Crash Opera :: These Here Are Crazy Times I was with my family on vacation in Aspen, Colorado, where my father was at some kind of conference. We'd been there two summers before as well, when there had been another girl. You know how it is: The thrill of being away from home, of meeting someone you hadn't known since kindergarten. By all rights, it should have led to all kinds of adventures and misunderstandings and stories to last me a lifetime, but no. I blew it; I never attempted anything close to a move, not even when I saw her again in passing in the Galleria Mall in Washington, D.C. by utter chance some four years later. And sure, it's easy to look at it now and say I was just a kid, but I didn't know that then. Even that first summer, when I was just 11 and mostly listening to He's the DJ and I'm the Rapper by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, a certain strain of hopeless romanticism was beginning to thrum in my veins. It was the stuff in the marrow of Hollywood romantic comedies: nice but awkward guys, shy but genuine girls, school dances, exchanged looks of deep significance, awkward pauses leading to fumbling but meaningful kisses. In the summer of '88, love didn't even enter into it; it was about the motions and the moments, about me watching the events unfold in my head like they would on the big screen. Perhaps I'm not even really thinking of romantic comedies. The movie I really remember as having an impact on me at that age was "Stand By Me," a film shot through with nostalgia and the idea of how freighted with importance life can feel at age 12. It seems like there's something kind of deeply weird to be taking cues on how to be an adolescent from a film made by adults casting a rosy glow back on their own childhoods. Like I was always trying to be, in real-time, someone else's idea of what a kid should be. And now, at 31, I'm casting my own light, I suppose. "The Wonder Years," too, was a touchstone. The touchstone, in fact, and watching it now in reruns, I'm still struck by just how right they got the stumbling, self-conscious dance that junior high kids perform around one another. Of course, they got everything else wrong, but hey, you can't win them all. Heck, I couldn't even win one. For me, in my real life, all my hemming and hawing over what to say or do never led to those awkward pauses that led directly to kisses. On that first trip, the closest I came was admitting to this girl's friend that I liked her. The girl, not the friend. At least, I hope that's what I conveyed. I can't really say with any authority what anyone knew then; I was too timid to even try. By the time we returned to Aspen in 1990, not much had changed. This time, I had foreknowledge of that sense that I could make myself into whomever I saw fit for that week, even if I only appeared different to myself. And so when I saw Sarah for the first time, I knew it was happening again. She was older by a bit, I'm pretty sure. Perhaps 15? A cavernous difference at that age, but I actually talked to her. Went over and sat down and tried to chat her up, having at least as much success as I had had two years earlier. But orchestrating contact over the next several days proved difficult, and I spent a lot of time wringing my hands over what to do, over what kind of bold move to make. And then, of all things, there was a change of plans, and so instead of flying directly out of Denver at the end of the trip, my family would be visiting her family in Denver for the night before heading back. This was it; this was the golden opportunity for connection and romance, but I still didn't know just what to do. But stopping at some other little empty skiing town on the way back to Denver at the end of the week, I saw, for maybe the third time, a video for a song called "Onion Skin" by the band Boom Crash Opera. I was fairly into INXS at the time, and BCO were also from Australia, I'd learned. So when we got to Denver, I bought their album, These Here Are Crazy Times, on cassette. That rosy nostalgic glow can't quite cast it as a lost classic these days, I'll admit. It's flawed, bombastic, littered with overreaching lyrics, and "Onion Skin" certainly makes almost no sense. "Whoa-oh, Onion Skin," goes the chorus, "walking around with your heart caved in / when things start to roll / the skin flies off and the teardrops flow." It's pretty stupid, but they were more focused on sounding like a band than INXS, who often relied on synths and drum machines. I'd guess you could say they were somewhere between Midnight Oil and INXS on the Aussie band scale. Their songs treaded some weird semi-political ground, much like their countrymen's, but mostly their songs were about relationships. Download "Dancing In The Storm" or stream below: And "Dancing in the Storm" was about my pretend relationship with Sarah. It's startling, really, to be listening to your brand new tape on your Walkman, watching the mountains of Colorado pass by outside the passenger window, and suddenly be confronted with your own life. That's honestly what it felt like. Even now, it's not too difficult to call up the memory of that feeling. I remember the sensation originating in my gut and spreading up my spine and around my head, a flush of pins and needles that bloomed as soon as singer Dale Ryder started tripping fast over the song's opening lines: "Lying in the dark / I know you are awake / I will not give in / I will not give in / Pulling faces and / admitting not a thing / I will not give in / I will not give in." What's hard is trying to remember a time when I didn't know I could get that feeling from music, but I can kind of make sense of it by thinking of this: When you're a child, you believe the world is made for you, made to cater to your needs, because you don't understand that you're not at its center. And then as you become aware of things like other people's needs and your own mortality, you begin to understand, empirically, that the world is not made for you. But that moment in the car with "Dancing in the Storm" made me realize that it's enough for the world to simply feel like it's made for you, even for just a moment. Despite loving Kick, I had never been able to get into "Never Tear Us Apart," mostly for its weepy overwrought surfeit of emotion, which I now recognize as a strength. But "Dancing in the Storm" was different. It was not a ballad, but instead a rolling, midtempo rock song that just happened to cut deeply into the heart of my own dilemma. Could I give up my reservations and launch myself into something with abandon? Would doing so lead to happiness? The lead-in to the chorus goes, "Gone are the days of complacency / Gone are the nights with no partner," before the song erupts into the positively giddy refrain of "Here we go! Here we go for one more turn We can shake, we can shake the trees and earth We can spin We can spin and not fall down Hold on tight We can both become unwound You and I, going out And we're dancing in the storm." Lying there on the page they don't seem so magical, but kicked loose by the music, they resonated. I watched the world fly by alongside the car, suspended in the song and in love with the idea of love, that thrilling warmth enveloping my head and telling me yes: Yes all this is possible. Even today, when I'm listening to music in the car, I'll find myself gazing out the driver's side window at stoplights, because it seems like music makes more sense when you're looking sideways. I guess it was something like a religious conversion, although it wouldn't be until years and years later while reading Dostoevsky for a college class that I'd come to see faith not as believing in something made-up, but rather as belief in belief. That night, I wrote Sarah a note that was no doubt embarrassing—the confused feelings of a 13-year-old boy cobbled together into something he thought was grand—and when we left the next morning, I dropped it on the desk in her room. Who knew if she even found it? I didn't, at least not until we came back to Denver some three years later and went to her family's house for dinner. I talked myself into believing that my note had either gone unread or had been read and forgotten, and that's how it seemed for most of the night, until one of Sarah's friends came over. As I sat in the living room, I could see them in her room, out of the corner of my eye, whispering and giggling and, yes, pointing. That's when I knew the note had most certainly not gone unread. Amazingly enough, though, I didn't feel particularly foolish or embarrassed. By then, at the age of 16, I'd settled comfortably into never putting myself out there with girls, instead retreating inwards into music and my guitar for solace. But here was the fruit of that night when I'd first starting falling in love with music, when a moment of will and bravado had led me to throw aside complacency and at least try to spin without falling down. The real lesson that "Dancing in the Storm" began to teach me that night, though, was not that all you had to do was try and everything would be all right. What it said, in that alchemical combination of words and music and moment, was that faith was its own reward, and not proven by miracles; that failure should not shake your fundamental beliefs; and that, if everything else fades away, you'll always have embarrassing stories to tell if you follow the advice of one-hit-wonder pop bands from Australia. The ludicrous video for "Onion Skin." I think there are twelve guitar players in this band, plus, love the dance moves and I think singer Dale Ryder looks not unlike Andie MacDowell here: |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 12:32 PM |
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