Robert Smith

That earlier post really got me thinking about music and the way it has defined my life for so many years. Of course, I rarely think of anything else. If it were possible for it to be a religion, it would be for me. I remember reading something several years about one of my favorite guitarists. He was described as one of those music fans who would sneak a transistor radio into bed with him at night as a child so he could listen to am radio all night long. And then he never outgrew the practice as he got older. I used to always sneak my walkman to bed to listen to cassettes or radio all night and when I read that I remember hoping I would never outgrow it. I haven't. Many nights it is hard for me to fall asleep unless I'm listening to something on my ipod. It's funny.

Anyway, as I've said before, my music tastes are all over the board. I primarily listen to stuff that accompanies the whole scooter scene, but I'm not governed by it to the point of excluding other things I really love. When I was a kid the first band I ever heard that I liked just for me was Oingo Boingo. They were great. I grew up in a tiny little rural Utah town and the first time I heard Oingo Boingo they sounded like they were from Mars. For the first time I realized that not only was there music out there other than oldies, country and the top 40, but I liked the other stuff better than the stuff all the kids at school were listening to. I can't understate the impact Oingo Boingo had on my young life. It was a complete revelation to me. Now you you have to keep in mind, growing up in my town in the 80's, if you did anything outside the norm everyone in town thought you had to be homosexual, a devil worshipper, on drugs or any combo of the three. In reality, it really just meant you liked R.E.M. Unfortunately you'd get beat up for liking R.E.M. because as I said it meant you were a gay junkie devil worshipper. I mean it was obvious. If you play Radio Free Europe backwards it says "Hey everybody, I'm a gay junkie devil worshipper so beat me up okay. Thanks."

Anyway. I digress. After Oingo Boingo I started listening to anything "new" I could hear. I got into groups like the Violent Femmes and The Dead Milkmen. There was a very brief (and very embarrassing) time when I would have told you Erasure was my favorite band. Shortly after this, I heard a band that took my obsession with rock-as-art-as-life to a new level. I heard The Cure.

This was the first time that my "favorite band" became more than just the band that I had more albums of than any other band. This was when I really understood the concept that rock stars could easily double as prophets. The songs, the look, the life. All of it made sense. All of it felt like it belonged to me alone.



When I was a junior in high school I saw my cousin Theresa who I hadn't seen in many years. The day we "met" I was wearing my Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me t-shirt. Come to find out my cousin is also a big Cure fan. She once sent me a big envelope of photos of Robert Smith that she had cut out of some books. Of course I put them all on my wall. (You can imagine my parents concern that I was hanging photos of androgynous men on my wall.) That same year I started keeping a journal. I remember so many nights when I'd write in it until the early hours of the morning. I'd listen to the Cure albums Faith, Seventeen Seconds or Pornography over and over and over and over. Looking back on it now it makes me laugh because c'mon, give me a break. How ridiculous is that? Pouring my poetic soul into my own books in the still of the night while listening to The Cure. If I did that now I'd mock myself endlessly for being so emo. But I did it. I have the books to prove it.

It's a very good thing that I found The Cure. The first day I ever hung out with Amanda she started talking about how much she liked the band. I asked her if she had ever heard the session they did with John Peel. She hadn't. I have the session on vinyl and invited her over to hear it. She also hadn't heard the Quadpus ep. So anyway, she came over the next day at 4. She brought a cup of tea. We listened to The Cure and a bunch of other stuff and you pretty much know how the story ends.