Saturday, 16 April is Record Store Day. Go online, find your local record store, grab some friends, show up and get on down witchyer bad selves. Here in the Bay Area, my long-time faves are Amoeba in the Haight and Rasputin, well, everywhere, but especially Mountain View and Campbell, right out my back door. Except.......
*Hiiiighly Dramatic Sigh*
John Taylor, Bass Player for Duran Duran, and once, with the inimitable Robert Palmer, Power Station. The white boy has funk and drive. He is tall and lean, with a gorgeous face. I mean, I was always really a Simon LeBon girl, and I know all you dark, sensitive, intellectual girls are with me on this, but......
John Taylor. Will be. At Rasputin Berkley. Saturday. ThentheyplaytheFillmore. AndI’mnotgoing. Cuz I’m old and honestly if it’s not in good weather at the Mountain Winery these days, it seems like a helluva slog.
Last month we missed Flogging Molly in Oakland. Again. They come in the winter and I get sick. I am apparently allergic to the Greatest Band Ever. That night was also one of the worst storms we’ve had in the Bay Area so driving up to the East Bay was Taking Your Life in Your Hands.
As San Francisco/Examiner Music News reporter Robyn Chelsea-Seifert posts: “Berkeley’s Rasputin Music will have a special appearance by poster artist Frank Kozick at 12pm followed by Roger Taylor and John Taylor of Duran Duran at 1:30pm for autograph signing. P.S. Roger and John were the cute ones in the 80s and the labido says nothing has changed in 30 years.”
Simon *siiiiiigh* LeBon sings. Andy Taylor was on guitar. Nick Rhodes pioneered keyboards, his keyboards then being one of the first full set of Fairlight synthesizer computer systems (they used to dwarf him, he now runs the entire show from two racks and a Mac). He knew Andy Warhol. He also wore pink velvet to his wedding and produced Kajagoogoo. John and *SIMON* are the ones you wanna take back to the bus and lick up one side and.....
Roger? Roger??? I mean, Roger was the drummer. Brilliant, but Roger was the one known most for his Freddy Mercury impression. She must *really* like a good redux of “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.”
And yet, she is still On the Bus. She, like me, probably had a Duran Duran 12th Birthday Party. With black, red, white and blue streamers, just like the Arena album cover. I made mix tapes of all the albums, from 1981’s DuranDuran on. We danced in the back yard with Glo-Stix, the old kind where you could puncture one end and tie the other to a long string and swing them over your head in the warm mid-september dark singing
“Wild boys allllways/
SHIIIIIIIIIINE!!!!!!”
with 10 other newly-pubescent girls, while inside my parents readied the cake and pressies. One of which was my First Pair of Nylons. My much older sister, of calmer and more refined taste, somehow peered into my soul and produced a Police/ Synchronicity beach towel. I managed to keep that with me, my towel, right through to the Very Bad 20’s. I still get darkly sentimental thinking about it, and I think about it's loss more often than a sane person should.
Following cake and presents, my masterpiece! A 100-Question Duran Duran Quiz! I spent every penny I had from age 9 onward on Smash Hits, Bop and any other music rag I could get my hands on. In the absence of digital media, I will swear to any Notary that by Grade 9 my walls were completely plastered with Duran Duran posters. With those posters came any stupid, inane detail ever produced for any interview ever, including what their mothers used to make when they’d come home from rehearsals late at night (sandwiches with brown gravy, according Andy Taylor, as told to Smash Hits).
After that night, those posters were hung with the remains of the party streamers. As Life imitates Art, if I hadn’t paid attention to their every detail beginning in elementary school, I wouldn’t have found Andy Warhol or Patrick Nagel at an age that bent my perception of art from the dull to the abstract and took my budding adolescent outlook with it. If not for obsession, my friends and I wouldn’t have paid for a VHS of european Duran Duran videos, including the *immediately* banned, completely risqué Chauffeur. If you find the ever-disappearing link to the real video, be sure you're alone with a *very* good glass of wine. And if you know that at age 12, the world outside of Little House on the Prairie starts to look quite a bit different.
Should I go? Will it be ruining a LITERALLY life-long love? What would I say? “Yah, HIIIYEEE!!! I have TOTALLY loved you since I was, like, nine! I’m almost forty! And I’m saying this out loud!”
Better to stay back, aloof, cool and dark....Waiting for the REAL genius, the TRUE poet, Simon. It’s been 30 years, and now I’m the Joy of Cooking Fairy. He’ll be round, and I’ll be waiting...with Butter Sauce.
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