Photo by Christian Spies on Unsplash
Between the age of fourteen and twenty, I played keyboard in a rock band that started in the drummer’s garage and had its last gig at CBGB. We were mostly a cover band, learning tunes that spanned genres and decades, from The Who and the Rolling Stones to REM and U2 to Metallica and ACDC to Depeche Mode and The Cure. But we also wrote our own music—songs about nuclear apocalypse, alienation, betrayal, and approximations of what we thought love might be. Our band never “made it,” as they say, but I would argue that we weren’t necessarily the worst thing to come out of New Jersey in the eighties, either. What’s indisputable is that the memories I have of those years take up an outsized role in my imagination. The memories inhabit the vast space I tend to allot to nostalgia in my daily life, and, for whatever reason, have become central to my sense of self. I’m the first to admit this may not be warranted or even healthy, considering the fact that I’m now fifty years old and in the thirty years since our last gig, I’ve never played in another band again. But I’m okay with the terminal wistfulness for musical days past. There was something sweet and not bitter, something blood pumping and vital about those years, when what was short-lived could feel the most alive.
Our band had the good fortune to play in a variety of venues, considering we were just kids. They may not all seem enviable, but at that particular moment in our young lives, these worlds were our stages: a middle school assembly, a middle school dance, a high school battle of the bands, a 4th of July festival in the park, a college formal, a few nightclubs in New Jersey, and, along with a few other no-name bands, a showcase night at CBGB in 1990. But the performances I tend to remember most fondly were the private ones, the times when we weren’t introduced by anyone, or paid by anyone, and we just made music for a small group of people we knew, in tight quarters. I’m thinking in particular of the “show” we played in our guitarist’s basement one weekend when his parents were out of town and some friends of ours came over for a small party.
There were three of us in the band at that point. We’d gone through multiple personnel changes during high school and arrived at a core: me on keyboard, the guitar player, our drummer who had recently learned a new instrument and was now our bass guitar player, and the drum machine that had replaced our drummer. That was it. Three guys and a drum machine. In our guitar player’s cramped, carpeted basement, we plugged in our amps and set up the microphones as close to the back wall as we could get. We turned off the overhead lights and plugged in a strobe light alongside a hazard warning light we’d stolen from a construction barricade by the side of the road. We also laid a novelty traffic light at our feet, facing it out onto the dance floor; the light once belonged to the guitarist’s older brother, who had used it as a college dorm room decoration. It blinked red, yellow, and green at random intervals.
Three guys, a drum machine, three different blinking lights, and a group of kids crowded together in a basement in New Jersey in the summer of 1988. That’s the striking memory. That’s the priceless gig.
We played “True Faith” by New Order that night. We played it twice. Maybe even three times.
* * *
New Order released “True Faith” in 1987 as a single after writing and recording it in ten days. The song appeared on their best-of collection, Substance, that same year. The song opens with barrage of electronic drums—a jackhammering bass, high hat, an attacking snare, all reverberating together. Before long, a D minor chord enters the fray, played on the synthesizer along with a pogo stick bass. The song is in the key of D minor but the chord progression does not exactly feel sad—D minor, F major, C major, G major. There’s something contemplative about the progression, something pondering. The opening sequence repeats three times, with a bass guitar warbling a melody beneath the chords. Then the lyrics come in.
“I feel so extraordinary.”
The line looks different on paper than it feels in the song. The first few words are sung over a D minor. What kind of extraordinary is this? It’s not extraordinary as in, I feel amazing, or even, I feel remarkably well, but rather, I feel odd, I feel strange, I feel out of the ordinary. The lyric continues: “Something’s got a hold on me.” There’s something else at work here. I’m not myself. “I get this feeling I’m in motion, a sudden sense of liberty.” Freedom. But from what? All the while, the chords slowly descend in a one-step down, one-step back up fashion—D minor, B flat major, C major, A minor.
There’s a story being told in “True Faith” about the past, the present, and the future. It’s not quite clear what the story is, it’s certainly not linear, but the song evokes an unhappy past, a sudden awareness of now, and an ambivalence about tomorrow. The lyrics evoke this story— which is really more of a feeling—in partnership with the music. The song propels you forward even as it achieves a kind of circular introspection. “True Faith” is somehow plaintive and hopeful, an expectant elegy.
The chorus begins: “I used to think that the day would never come.”
Which day? Today? Is today the day? “I’d see delight in the shade of the morning sun.” Ah, there’s something new here, emerging from the old. “The morning sun is the drug that brings me near, to the childhood I lost replaced by fear.” What happened in childhood? What was lost? And are we getting closer to that childhood, before it was replaced by fear? Has the day finally come when we can delight in the morning sun because it returns us to some vanished moment or feeling?
“I used to think that the day would never come, that my life would depend on the morning sun.”
There’s a striking honesty to “True Faith.” You find yourself lending the song your ear in sympathy. You find yourself actively listening to this abstract tale of then, now, and tomorrow. And soon enough you find yourself relating to this confessional about the day that was never supposed to come. You are sharing in that day. You too are delighting in the morning sun. You are closer to that childhood. You are free from that fear.
The words “true faith” are never sung in “True Faith,” but that’s precisely what the song is about.
“I can’t tell you where we’re going. I guess there’s just no way of knowing.”
* * *
I don’t know how well our band was able to capture or express all of this sentiment when we covered “True Faith” in the basement that night. But I do know that the song generated something in that tiny, blinking underground space. It generated something in and among us, the band and the crowd, something possibly extraordinary, something akin to delight and fear.
Irradiated by flashes coming from the strobe light and the novelty traffic light and the construction barricade light, we played and we danced. We were all seventeen, eighteen. It was the summer after we’d graduated high school. Many of us had grown up together in that small town. Most of us would head off to college in the fall. I would not be in the same town as my bandmates after August. I would not be in the same town as any of the kids in that room after August. It was a summer of long goodbyes. The childhood I lost replaced by fear.
I looked up from my hands playing “True Faith” on the keyboard to the faces in front of me. So many with their eyes closed. I watched their bodies reel. So many people that I’d never actually seen dance before. The traffic signal kept changing from green to yellow to red, over and over again. Green, yellow, red. What were we supposed to do?
In the guitar player’s basement, there was a second room, a room without a door. It was a much smaller room, with only a stool and a tiny table and white shelves from floor to ceiling. On the table were brushes and paints. On the shelves were ceramic figurines, some bare white, some painted bright, and many a mix of the two, half-finished. Horses and dogs and deer and ladies dancing, owls and gnomes and turtles. This was the hobby of the guitarist’s mother. I wasn’t sure if it was still her hobby. Every time we’d hang out in the guitarist’s basement, the figurine nook would look the same to me. Untouched, like a preserved room in a colonial house in a historic reenactment village. In all the years I’d been coming to the guitarist’s house, the same ceramic squirrel stood on its hind legs in the exact same spot on the table, unfinished, with its brown painted body and its ghost white head.
As the night wore on, we played louder and louder, and the basement rattled and ricocheted with noise. The bass from the drum machine grew more forceful and pronounced. People danced and jumped and pressed together and sang along. I didn’t think about the figurines then, but now I often wonder about them, vibrating on the shelves that night, dancing off the dust. Dogs and owls and gnomes in motion. A tortoise quivering. The squirrel juddering closer and closer to the edge of the table. So many small statues, with a sudden sense of liberty.
Adam Golub is professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he teach courses on literature, popular culture, music, monsters, and childhood. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Indicia, Pulp Literature, The Bookends Review Best of 2017, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us (McFarland, 2017) and he has published academic articles on topics including fandom, true crime, the blues, and postwar film and literature.