Haircut 100

There was a great moment in the early '80s when new wave exploded out of punk and music stretched in every possible direction, trying every possible combination of sounds and styles. It seemed to me like the shackles that had imprisoned popular music into either overblown arena rock acts or cheesy disco mutations had burst and there were suddenly no rules and no expectations and anything could happen. At least in England. America is a much larger and, therefore, much slower animal and changing direction is a lot harder, but the tiny, nimble country of England could turn on a cultural dime. I used to love going to the library and looking up the British charts to see what unusual and surprising group of musicians held sway that week. Meatloaf and Barbra Streisand cozied up next to Rip Rig and Panic and Adam Ant. It was a magical time.

When else could a band like Haircut 100 be successful? A relatively large ensemble playing sophisticated and polished jazz-influenced lounge pop, Haircut 100 carved a niche (and a name) for themselves in the free-for-all of early new wave. While most bands were either eating rats with safety pins and calling themselves the Gurgling Pukes or dressing up in outlandish costumes with gravity-defying sculptural hairdos, Haircut 100 was made up of clean-cut college boys that you could bring home to mother – in fact, I did, and she loved them. She loved them so much that she played their album at her wedding reception.

It’s an odd feature of my generation that most of my friends have been to their mother or father’s wedding – something virtually unheard of in earlier years. Being twice shy, my mom wasn’t in any big hurry to get married again, perhaps because she didn’t particularly want to get divorced again. But Frank loved her deeply and the two of them make such a perfect match (certainly much better than my mom and dad – what were they thinking?), that it seemed only natural that they pledge themselves to each other in a meaningful and legally recognized way. She was slow to come around, but eventually recognized the inevitable logic of it and, thankfully for me and him, accepted his offer.

Their wedding was late in the summer, about two months after I moved to NYC. Things were not going particularly well for me at that point. I was excited to be living in the city with my best friend Eric, but I had been unable to get a job. I had applied to a dizzying array of unlikely professions (messenger, diamond sorter, butler), but nobody was willing to take a chance on a kid with no references and no permanent address. By summer’s end, I had run out of money, and hope was not far behind. Although reluctantly supportive of my decision to move to NYC, my mom was beginning to worry that I wasn’t going to make it, and was either going to have to come back home or end up babbling on the street corner with long greasy hair and my prized possessions reduced to what I could fit into a shopping cart. Actually, she had worried about that from the first moment I mentioned our plan to eat the big apple, but as she had gone and done the same thing when she was my age, she couldn’t very well forbid me striking out and finding my fortune without seeming like a complete hypocrite. A partial hypocrite might be okay ("don’t do that" she would admonish me after she let out a particularly satisfying burp), but she didn’t want to be a total hypocrite and so she bit her tongue and let me find my own way.

When I traveled home for the wedding, I still had no job, and I was completely out of money. She gently offered the possibility that I might have to come back home, and that that was okay, but that just served to make me want to redouble my efforts. Not that my home was such a hell-hole of domestic abuse and ridicule or anything, but it was clear that that would be admitting a humiliating defeat that I was not prepared to do.

The wedding was nice, in a surreal way (it is an odd experience to give your mother away), and the smooth sounds of Haircut One Hundred lent the party a sophisticated air. I congratulated my mom and Frank, had the traditional extended wedding photo-op with my new stepfather and his (now my) family, and partied through the night.

The next morning, I gratefully pocketed $50 from my mom, wished the newly-weds well, and set off with fresh spirits and renewed hope for the bright lights of the big city. My soaring spirits lasted until later that evening, when I got mugged in the elevator of my building and was relieved of my $50. Fortunately, by the end of that week I had a job that would sustain me, off and on, over the next six years and my tenuous grasp on NYC got a little stronger. Before long, I was living in a downtown loft and wearing a big black coat and dyeing my hair blue while gobbling drugs and all-night proto-raves, a far cry from the well-scrubbed college-bound youth I had been a couple of years earlier, when, except for my undeniably American accent and the fact that I didn’t play any instruments, I could’ve fit right in with the lads from Haircut One Hundred.

The cover of their album Pelican West (where do they come up with these names?) featured the lot of them in fuzzy white wool sweaters lounging around in the autumn leaves like some Four Freshman throwback – and not one of them looks anything but a perfect gentleman and scholar (well, okay, there is one bloke who looks like he might go a bit frantic with an axe if pushed too far). While everybody else was trying to be as shocking as possible, Haircut 100 seemed to be going out of their way to show how harmless they were (which, of course, was pretty shocking for the time).

Pelican West is filled with many little pop gems, and I could’ve just as easily chosen Favorite Shirts (which features some of the fastest rhythm guitar playing I’ve ever heard) or Love Plus One (or even Lemon Fire Brigade), but I love the little trumpet riff leading into the chorus and the creeping background behind the spoken section near the end of this track, which was a minor hit for them. Their formula wore thin and the leader went off on an undistinguished solo career, but for a moment there in the early '80s, all the world was fair game, anything was possible, and for a music fan like myself it was, truly, a fantastic day.