Icehouse

When I was sixteen, I moved into the dorm at Interlochen. I had already been attending classes at the boarding school for two years, but because I was only a day student and returned home across the highway every night after classes were over, I was never really a part of the community. Feeling neither here nor there, I decided I wanted to move into the dorm for my last two years so I could really experience the Academy and be a part of its culture.

My mom thought, ultimately, that it was a good idea, but she also understood that that was going to be my first real step out of the nest, a critical transition that would permanently alter our relationship. So while I “slept on my bags by the door”, waiting for my junior year to start (how she always describes that last week), she was upstairs in her room, weeping for the baby that had finally grown wings that were strong enough to fly away for good.

Moving into the dorm did prove to be a good thing, and those two years turned out to be two of the most memorable and most significant years of my life. But my mom was right, I was never able to come home again in the same way. And for all her wailing and gnashing of teeth, she sure seemed to make the transition pretty quickly herself, suddenly getting a color TV and a video game console (Atari, I believe) and a couple of kittens seconds after I moved into the dorm.

After that year, I moved back home for the summer, but things had changed. For one thing, I was more independent than I had been a year earlier, and wasn’t used to clearing plans with anybody before I acted on them. This was brought home to me forcefully right after the school year ended.

A couple of my non-Academy friends, Mel and Lenore, were going to spend the night camping in the neighboring State Park and invited me to visit their campfire. I told my mom where I was going and headed out into the woods. The campfire was great and it was wonderful fun to reconnect with old friends and to meet a new one, named Brenda. We talked long into the night about everything and nothing, in that special adolescent way, and, since I never really felt like leaving, I didn’t. I was attracted to Brenda, and, after a night of wide-reaching and intimate conversation, she seemed to become attracted to me.

Dawn slowly spread across the sky while we continued to poke at the fire and tell stories. Finally, we stretched and stood up and decided to go skinny dipping. Well, all except Lenore, who was pretty shy about such matters and took the opportunity to go get us some towels while the three of us headed down to the beach. There was a slight illicit thrill in getting naked with two girls and splashing about in the water, but nothing happened (Dear Forum...). Lenore returned with the towels and we jumped out of the lake and got dressed. They walked back to the campfire and I walked out to the highway to begin the two mile trek home. I felt great – it was a beautiful morning after a wonderful night, and I was happy to just be young and alive. Halfway home, Brenda drove by and yelled, “I love you!” out of the window of her car, and that only added to the perfection of the morning.

I got home, humming a tune, and sat down in the living room. Ten minutes later, my mom stormed in the door, with that peculiar mix of absolute relief and blind fury that only parents of teenagers can summon (or need). “Thank god you’re alive where the hell have you been I’ve been driving around all morning looking for your broken bleeding body I’m so glad you’re okay so now I can kill you myself.” And my perfect morning went straight down the tubes.

Of course, in hindsight (and, being a parent myself now), I can fully understand and sympathize with her reaction, but at the time, it really cheesed me off. What was I, six? I could take care of myself. I was in Interlochen, for god’s sake, where people left their keys in the car and didn’t even know the houses had locks. What the hell was going to happen? Yeah, maybe a phone call would’ve done wonders to ease her troubled mind, but there weren’t any phones out in the middle of the woods and, frankly, it hadn’t really crossed my mind. I had grown up a lot that year and wasn’t used to being anybody’s kid anymore and having to report in every couple of hours. Anyway, it was a rude awakening for both of us and quite a bring down from such a wonderful morning.

The only other time I ever saw Brenda was when I went to her house with Mel and Lenore a few weeks later. We sat and chatted for a couple of hours while Brenda played some of her favorite records. I was impressed with her collection (as atypical for the area as mine was, although in slightly different directions) and the two records I remembered the most were a smutty, funky album by some short guy from Minneapolis named Prince (this was about three years before 1999 and Purple Rain ate the pop world) and some Australian new wave band named Icehouse. I wasn’t impressed enough with Prince to want his album, but the cool, detached sounds of Icehouse caught my ear and I went out shortly after that day and bought a copy for myself.

That album (which, I believe, is the only album in my collection in which the band, the album, and one of the songs share the same name) was good, but I never could get all the way through it. I liked the sound, but it all just seemed sort of samey after a while, and so I never really listened to the second side. But, side one had some great tracks and I liked it enough to be interested when their second album, Primitive Man, came out while I was at the University of Chicago. I toyed with buying it for a couple of weeks, and then I heard this track in a record store and decided it was worth the chance. Curiously, it was side two of this album that I ended up listening to the most, and if I could stick the first side of the first album together with the second side of the second album, I ‘d have the perfect Icehouse record.

I particularly like the way this track slowly shimmers out of the silence – a perfect opening track. The band’s sound is a lot warmer than on their first record, and the lyrics are filled with evocative fragments of romantic longing and odes to time gone by. The sounds are clearly synthetic (no drum kit ever sounded like this), but not cold or clinical, as much electronic music is accused of being. And the lush backgrounds make a perfect bed for Iva Davies’ heartfelt singing – I always sort of thought of him as the Australian Bryan Ferry.

This album – particularly, as I said, the second side (which this track opens) – is strong all the way through: lush, romantic, filled with longing and the kind of beautiful sorrow that I could wallow in during my sentence in my own lonely icehouse in Chicago. Although they (well, he) churned out a couple more albums, Icehouse never captured that wonderful wistfulness as well as on this second album, filled with broken pieces of clay and the fading light of selfish despair. And wrapped up in the memories of Brenda, who loved me one golden morning, as I walked down the road between boy and man.