Lene Lovich

Christian and I reached the door of the club and, holding our breath, handed our tickets over to the doorman. We bought them when they first went on sale, but the club was a drinking establishment and, by law, you had to be 21 to get in, and both of us were considerably shy of the mark. The doorman took the tickets without flinching, ripped them in half, and ushered us in. We high-fived and headed for the main room. It was a few minutes before the advertised 9:00 starting time and we wanted to get good positions near the stage. The dark room was filling up quickly, so we bought a couple of beers and staked out some territory near the front of the stage. We chatted and grinned and drank and loitered around, waiting for the show to start.

Lene Lovich’s second album, Flex, found her sharpening her unique musical vision. A powerfully strange album, she sounds even less of this earth than she did on Stateless. The more traditional rock elements have been stripped away even more and the album is full of unsettling atmospherics and almost mythical musings. The opening track, Bird Song, sets the stage. A low, ominous, pulsing electronic drone creeps in, laying a foundation over which Lene trills an impossibly high yodeling bird call. The band, all bass and airless rhythm guitar, kicks in and the album is off and running. Flex is even more alienated than Stateless and her unconvincing stabs at love songs have been dropped entirely, starting with this opening song about a bird who tells Lene of her lover’s infidelities. But the song really kicks into maximum weirdness during the chorus, when a deep, Slavic male chorus comes wordlessly in, anchoring Lene’s stratospheric flights of vocal gymnastics. The contrast is wonderful and is repeated throughout the album, which ranges in material from the geeky Egghead to a song about Joan of Arc that sounds, at points, like a game show theme, to the haunting and oblique atmospherics of The Freeze.

Flex, like Stateless before it, also splits the tracks between originals and covers, and again, the covers are twisted around so completely as to sound like originals. One of those covers was the first song I ever heard by Lovich, during a dance performance by two visiting teachers from NYC during my sophomore year in high school. Called You Can’t Kill Me, it’s a strange, post-apocalyptic song full of spidery guitars and bone-dry lurching rhythms that explodes into an vast soundscape that feels like the end of some epic Russian film, with lines of soldiers marching hopelessly across the frozen tundra.

Another covered song on Flex is, like Nick Lowe’s song on Stateless, an homage to the healing powers of the night. It also employs a wonderful technique of rhyming the first part of each line instead of the last:

This was Tina’s favorite song.

She was my first girlfriend – a beautiful, petite blonde dancer, who, like many beautiful petite blonde dancers, was a little unbalanced. Being a dancer – especially a young ballerina – is an extremely stressful occupation, and much of your time and energy is spent trying to control your body and keep it from growing. It’s perfect for masochistic control freaks with unrealistic romantic fantasies and, more often than not, that’s who it attracts. Dancers also, as a side note, are some of the hardiest partiers I have ever met. This surprises most people, who assume that dancers want to take great care of their body at all times, but the extreme discipline required to be a dancer often leads to a need for extreme indiscipline, and most of the dainty, fragile-looking waifs I knew in the dance department could drink/smoke/snort you under the table.

Anyway, this is not to say that Tina was an insane party freak, but she did put a lot of pressure on herself and, like many of her colleagues, resorted to dangerous practices to keep her weight down to its unrealistic number and the sheer exhaustion, not to mention the malnutrition, that this engendered often left her a little emotionally fragile. She was also way ahead of me on the cynicism curve. In high school, I still thought that people were basically good and life was meant to be celebrated. She hated people and life, for her, was more about enduring than enjoying. She had a dark side and her best friend Robin would encourage her to wallow in it, much to my dismay and frustration. So while I was trying to reassure Tina and get her to be open and positive, Robin was encouraging her to shut down and turn against everybody. Kill ‘em all! was her cry and Tina quickly adopted it.

Robin also had a blinding crush on my roommate Eric that just made everything all messy for a while there. One weekend, early in February, Eric returned from a trip home with a couple of bottles of alcohol – rum and vodka – and we gathered at out usual table for Saturday dinner and made plans for sharing it (due to the perverse tradition of Interlochen, classes run from Tuesday through Saturday, so Saturday night is the big start to the weekend). We needed something to mix the rum with and, being broke, couldn’t spare the change for sodas. So, I went upstairs to Health Services and complained that I had a cold, which was usually enough to get them to write you a note to get a big can of apple juice from the cafeteria to take back to your room. Not today. For whatever reason, they decided to give me an entire physical and, after poking and prodding and measuring and peering for half-an-hour, determined that I wasn’t sick at all and sent me on my way, sans juice.

So, Eric and I signed Robin and Tina into our rooms and brewed a pot of tea so we could make hot rum tea to drink. You may never have heard of drinking hot rum tea and there’s a reason for this. It is extremely nasty. But we were determined, and after a couple of cups, we were all feeling pretty giggly. Then Robin excused herself to go to the bathroom and the weekend, which started off so promisingly, went with her, straight into the toilet. After a couple of minutes, we noticed that she wasn’t coming out, so Tina went over and knocked on the door and asked if she was alright. A wailing sob came from the other side of the door. Robin’s unrequited love for Eric mixed with the rum tea and sent her over the edge, and she refused to unlock the door and come out. Tina pleaded with her for half-an-hour, but she wouldn’t budge.

Irritated, I left them all there and went to my work-study job, setting up chairs and taking tickets for the weekly Saturday night movie. I was pretty drunk, but managed to hide that fact from my supervisor, one of the strictest Resident Advisors on campus. I set up the chairs and took my place at the door so I could collect tickets, but I was itchy waiting for the movie to start so I could go find out how the drama was unfolding back in my room. Eric suddenly stopped by and said that Robin had finally come out of the bathroom just about the time that Tina passed out from too much rum and too little food. He went for a walk with Robin to try to calm her down, and then she burst into tears again and went running off into the woods. Irritated, Eric went back to the room and found it empty, and so he came over to see if I knew anything. I didn’t, so he stamped in frustration and took off. A few minutes later, Robin showed up reeking and reeling, and started sobbing again about Eric while trying to kill herself eating tacks. I quickly (and not-too-gently) pushed her into a side room away from the prying eyes of the RA’s, always eager to bust somebody, and collared my friend Dave to help me keep her hidden and alive until I was finished taking tickets and could deal with her. But she proved too much of a handful for him and escaped before I was finished.

When I got back to my room, it was empty.

As it turned out, that was just the beginning of what quickly turned into the worst weekend of my high school career. Before classes started up again on Tuesday, Tina was abducted and molested by some of my hall mates, Eric got alcohol poisoning, Dave got suspended, I got into a screaming fight with my work-study supervisor that almost got me in a fist fight, and, come Monday afternoon, I was riding around in the frozen wasteland of rural northern Michigan, severely hung-over and being humped by a huge white dog while driving miles with a stranger who had picked us up after our car had died unceremoniously on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. All in all, not a good weekend.

But I digress.

Lene Lovich offered Tina a musical model of dark female power, and Tina eagerly lapped it up with the teary relief of finding a kindred spirit. Lene was strong and different and did things her way and didn’t give a damn what other people thought and Tina treasured her and held her close, often including quotes from her in the perfumed notes she left almost daily in my mailbox. Unfortunately, the severe individuality and take-it-or-leave-it stance of Lene Lovich’s vision was reflected in her shrinking sales numbers as most people decided to leave it. Not only were there no hits from Flex, there was no way any of the songs could ever be a hit, so individualistic and quirky were they. So, after Flex, Lene was in trouble with Stiff Records and her career was in jeopardy.