Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 3 - The Look

Younglings, allow me to back up once again, and explain why the whole year, and not just the summer, of 1985 was pivotal.

Memaw had worked at First National Bank since 1979. Then all the sudden, she and Mamaw Lee up and bought a fabric store.

Oooo…kay. Didn’t see that coming, but that was another big change in everything that year. 

So, I remember her final days at the bank, when I was allowed to drive the car, a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix, by myself! (The photo is not the actual car - just one I found online. Someday I'll show you what it ended up looking like in the summer of 1990.) I must have gone to run an errand or something. Incidentally I remember being in the break room upstairs and there was an advertisement for some KTel (or other compilation LP) that featured part of the video to Scorpions’ “Still Loving You.” I had yet to hear the whole song but that day would come.

Anyway, we had a fabric store. And I “kinda” had a job there, but didn’t really make a salary. I learned to work the cash register and cut fabric and hunt down notions, but I also finished learning how to sew. I earned my keep by making all of my own clothes as store samples. The cool thing about that was that Appolonia (yes, THAT Appolonia) had her own line of patterns through McCall’s. I made about three of them. (Those are in another blog post…Say Goodbye to the Fabric Store. That’s a pretty interesting post so be sure to check that one out! Please forgive the formatting. For some reason they've changed the ability to edit the text for the photos). 

I made some pretty groovy things up until I went to college. I did try to con Memaw into buying zebra striped spandex in every color, but to no avail. I can also remember one Saturday morning we had American Bandstand on at the store and Giuffria was on there performing (lip-synching) songs from their second album “Silk & Steel” and Memaw said, “I don’t want you in a mess like that.”

Giuffria on Bandstand (I was for sure they'd done "I Must Be Dreaming" but...I must have been dreaming.)

I ignored her, obviously. I mean, Giuffria wasn’t exactly musically frightening. Now if Slayer had been on there…

Speaking of Giuffria, sometime earlier that summer I had bought Prince’s “Around the World in a Day,” decided I wasn’t that fond of it, took it back to WalMart and exchanged it for Giuffria’s first self-titled album. Probably a dumb decision, but oh well. I thought they were Journey at first; David Glen Eisley sounds amazingly like Steve Perry.

So, I had wardrobe options. However, you couldn’t buy ripped-up jeans already ripped-up in those days; you had to create them yourself, and you had to get creative to expedite the process. I had a pair of perfectly boring jeans, and soaked them in water and bleach. Didn’t quite get the results I wanted, so with either that same pair or another one (I preferred Levi’s 501 button-fly at the time), I opted to just pour straight bleach right on them in various spots. Okay, that was cool. The bleach weakened the denim enough to make some rips. I wore them to school one day sometime during my junior year and I sat down in first period journalism…and there went the entire seat of my pants. Luckily I was wearing a shirt I’d made out of some kookoo print that was like a cutaway tuxedo jacket, longer in back than the front, so I was able to make it to the pay phone outside the front of the office to call Memaw to bring me another pair of pants.

Lesson learned. Next…

I wanted to be Nikki Sixx. My hair wasn’t dark enough.

What?

No, it wasn’t black enough. It needed to be blacker.

Memaw, who had been more a beatnik in her college days at Hendrix, was helpful in this sense and introduced me to Clairol semi-permanent hair color. Choose light ash brown, she said, and it will be dark enough. And she was right! This, along with me taking pictures of Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora to the beauty parlors, shag haircuts and body waves in fruitless attempts to achieve BIG ROCKER HAIR, set the stage as it were for the next five or six years. No matter what I did, though, I always ended up looking like Eddie Van Halen. And yes, I had a mullet for a while but that was before 1985. We didn’t call it that, though. It didn’t have a name. 

Well. I had the look. Now I had to learn how to get THE SOUND.