“Oingo Boingo? What the fuck?” Eric ripped the record from my hands.
We were on the Monday shopping bus. Since Interlochen, the boarding arts high school, perversely chose to run its weeks from Tuesday through Saturday, we got Sunday and Monday as our weekends, which meant our weekend was really reversed as Sunday shall ever be Sunday, making Monday our Saturday. And on Monday, right after lunch, a couple of buses would load up with anybody who wanted a couple of hours off campus (which was usually everybody), and drive the twenty miles into Traverse City, the nearest thing we had to a teeming metropolis.
Traverse City wasn’t much, but it was all we had, and most of us would eagerly anticipate Monday’s trip out of the woods to spend a couple of hours wandering up and down Front street. Everybody had their favorite hang-outs. There was a store that sold all manner of useless knick-knackery, such as the extremely popular cotton tapestries most people used to brighten up their dorm rooms. There were a couple of lame bookstores. The local Big Boy was very popular among the female dancers. On several occasions, I sat with friends and watched them put away giant hot-fudge sundaes that seemed to weigh about as much as they did. Of course, ice cream doesn’t stay in a ballerina’s body for long, but, apparently, the sinful sweetness going down made the painful trip back up a few minutes later well worth it. Needless to say, my primary destinations were the two record stores, where I’d greedily peruse the racks, oogling all the covers and wondering what sonic treasures lay buried beneath.
One day, while wandering around Midnight Records, I saw a display of EPs. I had never seen an EP before, but was immediately taken by the idea. Halfway between a single and an album – both in size and in price – a 10” EP, usually sporting four songs, offered the opportunity to try out a new, interesting band without blowing my entire allowance on some risky album that may very well end up sucking. At that point, I was still very new to buying music, and took a lot of foolish chances. I have, for the most part, given up on buying some music because it comes wrapped in an interesting package, but at that point in my life, it was a pretty common occurrence. And one I would defend. One doesn’t get a good music collection without buying some dogs, and I have plenty of flea-bitten mutts on my shelves.
As I looked through the display, the EP that seemed the most interesting was by some band called Oingo Boingo. The cover featured one of the celebrated cat drawings by Louis Wain, made famous by psychiatrists as an illustrated journey into the mental maelstrom. Suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, Wain’s cat pictures became increasingly menacing and abstract, until by the end, the pictures have lost any resemblance to the physical world and are instead made up of violently angular shards of bright colors. The cat on the cover of the Oingo Boingo EP was about halfway through the continuum. Still recognizably cat, but with menacing eyes, spiky fur, and brightly colored auras surrounding it. It seemed like a good bet, so I snapped it up.
Back on the bus, Eric and Allen gave me relentless shit about it. But, being my best friends, that was their job. They laughed at the cover, they laughed at the name, and when they opened it up and read the liner notes, they laughed at those too. There was a credit on the inside thanking Jed the Fish for “strategic air support” that practically had them wetting their pants. It was years later, when I moved to LA, that I discovered that Jed the Fish was an influential DJ on LA’s legendary KROQ, and, shockingly, that Oingo Boingo was actually popular in LA. Like fill the Universal Amphitheater several nights in a row popular. But that was an undreamed of possibility in those sparse woods.
One of my favorite things to do upon getting a new album – besides sniffing that fresh vinyl smell – was to read the lyrics before I listened to the music. Without hearing the music, it’s often impossible to figure out how these lyrics are going to fit smoothly into a song. Oingo Boingo lyrics are some of the hardest to figure out. The songs are so quirky and the meters so strange that it often makes the rhythm of the lyrics impossible to figure out. So the whole way back from Traverse City, we pored over the lyric sheet, trying to make sense of the meter.
Johnny was bad even as a child everybody could tell.
Everyone said if you don’t get straight you’ll surely go to hell.
But Johnny didn’t care,
He was an outlaw by the time that he was ten-years-old.
He didn’t want to do what he was told.
Just a prankster.
A juvenile gangster...
Huh?