The following anecdote was prompted by an invocation by my friend John Darnielle (of Mountain Goats fame) on Facebook. How’s that for name-dropping?
While my high-school listening habits were largely dominated by stentorian thrash metal, pugnacious punk, splenetic hardcore and histrionic goth rock, I was by no means immune to the charms of the pop music of the day. My favorite, go-to bands may well have been the Circle Jerks, Venom and the Lords of the New Church, but I was as versed in the sonic outpourings of populist favorites like Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, Thomas Dolby and Run-DMC as anyone, largely thanks to our collective fascination with the then-still-nascent MTV. I can safely say that the first few years of MTV’s video rotation burned themselves firmly into my cerebellum. I doubt I am alone in this assertion. I can’t remember whole volumes of bullshit I allegedly studied in high school, but I can pinpoint a fleeting, trivial bit of a Thompson Twins video without so much as blinking.
This is a true story. About fifteen years ago, I was sniffing around the Apple Store in SoHo (on Prince Street, above) trying to figure out how to buy a digital camera. My daughter had just been born, and for the purposes of sharing photographs of my newborn little cherub, I figured it was time to make the jump to digital. But, by the same token, I had no fucking clue what I was doing. So, I was perusing around the tables, and looking at different models and being clueless, but there was this guy next to me basically doing the same thing, with an endearingly equal amount of cluelessness. The weird thing, however, was that he looked CRAZY familiar. I found myself staring at him, trying to divine the reason why.
It finally dawned on me.
I tapped him on the arm. "Excuse me, man," I said. "This is going to sound SUPER weird, but are you the lead guitar player for Tommy Tutone? Like, not the curly-haired lead singer I always assumed was Tommy Tutone, but the guitar-player dude in the skinny tie & blazer in the video for '867-5309'"?
There was a long pause.
He looked me dead in the eye.
"Whoa .... you're good."
It was indeed Jim Keller, erstwhile guitarist for Tommy Tutone, who I recognized from a music video from 23 years earlier.
Meanwhile, I can barely remember my own social security number.
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