When I invoke 1985 here (which is pretty frequently), I generally do so with a patina of giddy, rose-tinted nostalgia. It was a pretty momentous time for me. I started the year off as a high school senior and ended it as a college freshman. New York City was still a vast, colorful playground of underground record shops, wild clubs and live music venues, and many of my favorite bands were just hitting their respective strides. I was young and living in an exciting place while so much was going on. Here in the present day, had I access to Mr. Peabody and Sherman's Wayback Machine, 1985 might regularly be my target destination.
But as groovy and happenin' as I may have considered 1985 to be, there was, of course, a whole generation before me for whom the year represented the end of all things. I may have been discovering a whole new crop of bands, scenes, places and things to do, but for these folks, the cool, significant stuff had already happened and things were now in decline. Had there been an internet to waste time on in 1985, many of these folks would have logged their laments about same on blogs. But since there wasn't, they took to public access cable television, the veritable blogosphere of its day.
The gent below is one Stephen Saban, a founding editor of Details (from way back when it was actually a cool magazine). In this fleeting clip from -- wait for it -- 1985, Saban exhumes a laundry list of storied New York City clubs that had long-since closed by that point. He does so with much the same reverence of place and resigned world-weariness that myself and some of my fellow bloggers express in similarly-inclined missives today ... although Saban probably has a few more bona fide credentials to back up his hipness.
So yeah, no matter how cool you think your particular, youthful, happening New York City heyday might have been, there's always somebody older than you to point out how you were too late and missed the genuinely neat-o stuff. You can either be depressed by this or take some solace in it. It's evidently all relative and cyclical. But, enjoy this trip back in time...
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