Some Like It Hot

When I was a fourteen-year-old in the summer of 1985, I went to a nerd camp for a few weeks. [For the record, it was at Alma College in some “gifted & talented” program based on my SAT scores, which were above average for my age.] While there are more than a few records that scream “Summer Of ‘85” at me, one of my favorites was The Power Station, a supergroup featuring Robert Palmer, two members of Duran Duran (John Taylor and Andy Taylor), and two members of Chic (Tony Thompson on drums & Bernard Edwards on production). I'm not sure if they ever played in the same studio for the sessions, and their live performances encompassed one Saturday Night Live gig, so their status as a "band" is up for debate.

But it was a fave for a couple of reasons: (a) I had a super-massive super-unrequited crush on one of my fellow students, and the album closer “Still In Your Heart” spoke to my teenage emotions; & (b) I sang their version of the T. Rex song “Bang A Gong (Get It On)” for a talent show, backed by a teenaged pick-up band. [I cringed typing both those reasons. Ah, the blunt and dumb preoccupations of youth.]

The Power Station was a fantastic example of a specific studio-driven sound of mid-'80s music, explosive and chopped up like so much cocaine on a mixing board. And even though my socioeconomic status couldn’t allow me access to the marching powder, my love for that album was and remains epic and prodigious, just like the sound itself; I played the cassette to death, and bought the CD as soon as I was able.

[As an aside, one of the trails I explore in my History of Rock & Roll class is that you can tell an alternate history of rock through the drugs being used and how they influence the sound. For example, the movement of rock in the ‘60s from brash and short to heavy and elongated tracks well with the drugs of choice moving from amphetamines to hallucinogens. The '70s? Marked by mellow Mary Jane and granola-crunching singer-songwriters with bonzo beards and bloodshot eyes. But in the ‘80s, cocaine became so integrated with music that you can actually hear the shift, especially in the booming hollow gated drum tracks which must sound like the BEST! FUCKING! THING! EVER! when one is using cocaine. The work of Tony Thompson on TPS typifies the “cocaine drums” period; when Tony was with Chic in the ‘70s, his drum sound was warmer and funkier, but on TPS and Madonna’s Like A Virgin, it’s more processed and uncanny, which fit the zeitgeist but doesn’t always age well.]

A couple days ago, I broke out my old 25-year-old cassette to play in the car, and I was initially dismayed to hear that the sound quality had taken a turn for the apocalyptic, damaged and slowed by age. It sounded overprocessed and nightmarish, but I decided to stick with the tape even through the distortion. And the weirdest thing was that I started to like the new version I was hearing, from the fuzzed vocals to the pounding rhythms to the hypnotic depressant melodies. If I stripped it of the labels and pitched it as a new band, no doubt some hipster websites would trumpet it as a triumph of a new sub-sub-genre (Warlock House? Torpor Tunes?) and the blogs would blaze with praise. But it's just the same old Power Station, filtered through time and decay, yet still possessing the power to surprise and entertain, a true harvest for the world.