Electric Youth
Billy Joel recently released a new song called “Turn the Lights Back On.” It’s his first original music since 1993, but you would never know it. I don’t mean that as a dig. I’ve always been a Billy Joel fan. I mean that this song has all the hallmarks of Billy Joel’s music sensibilities: rolling piano chords, a straight forward narrative, the intrinsic made-for-popular-airplay quality, the high probability that the song is about Christie Brinkley.
I’ve always thought of Billy Joel as embodying a kind of time capsule. The peak of his career spanned the late-1970s into the early-1990s where he churned out albums bloated with instant hits: “She’s Got a Way;” “Only the Good Die Young;” “Always a Woman;” “Pressure;” “My Life;” “We Didn’t Start the Fire;” and, of course, “Piano Man.” Throughout this long tenure he’s never ventured too far from his essential self. He didn’t have a pop-synth-80s reinvention like Elton John or Bowie. He stayed in his lane, even when he performed in Moscow and single-handedly ended the Cold War with good old fashioned American rock-n-roll music! His live shows really drive this home. A Billy Joel song in concert is as faithful as the studio recorded version. There might be a bit of vamping here and there, maybe a couple of lyrics changed as a shout out to the hometown crowd, “Go ahead with your own life, MIAMI!” (crowd loses its collective mind every time) but generally speaking there’s no radical departures. No sudden appearance of electric bagpipes. That’s not a dig, either. I appreciate the familiarity, the nostalgia his music evokes, the sense that you know exactly who are and where you belong inside of these songs. It's okay to want your art to feel like a cup of soup and warm blanket sometimes.
Billy Joel was not my first concert, though I have seen him a handful of times and have never been dissatisfied. I tell people he was the first musician I saw live because it’s a lot easier than saying who it actually was: Debbie Gibson. Who? Exactly. At least if I say Billy Joel there is a good chance you’ll recognize the name from someone’s Karaoke bachelorette party.
Debbie Gibson was one of those confectionary, sanitized, parental-friendly pop singers who crop up at some point in every generation’s music scene. Debbie Gibson had a very all American look with shiny blonde hair, doe-eyes, and the girl really could sing. She wrote her own songs and was only sixteen when the single “Only in My Dreams” became a break-out hit in 1987. A string of airy, radio-happy tunes followed with titles like “Shake Your Love,” “Out of the Blue,” and “Foolish Beat.” Honestly, they all sounded like they could have been written for an ABC family sitcom about a teenage pop star being raised by her single dad and manager aunt. Marla Gibbs starring as the no-nonsense-nosey neighbor. I was into Debbie Gibson. I was twelve. I was also into the Muppets, musical theatre, and pretending to like softball because my best friend at the time played on a community league. In short: I was Debbie Gibson’s core demographic.
By the end of 1988, Debbie Gibson’s debut album, Out of the Blue had gone triple platinum. All the media crush followed along with a national tour and the guarantee of a sophomore release. That album would be Electric Youth, produced in 1989. It earned mixed reviews. Electric Youth contained more syrupy ballads and mid-tempo songs than what one writer for Billboard called “toe-tappers” on Out of the Blue. But the Debbie Gibson pop-sation machine was operating at full capacity by that point. There was not only the usual touring and media for Electric Youth there was bold new merchandise: Electric Youth FRAGRANCE! Naturally I begged to get it and for a time it bumped my Love’s Baby Soft spray out of rotation. How to describe this perfume? If HALLS cough drops sold a cherry-scented air freshener, that’s what Electric Youth smelled like. I doused myself in it every morning before I left for school hoping the boy I liked would like me back just like in one of Debbie Gibson’s songs! He did not. The reasons for that were many, but chief among them that I smelled like a cherry-scented-cough-drop-air freshener.
A girl in my sixth grade class named Jessica invited me to see DEBBIE GIBSON! LIVE IN CONCERT! I heard it just like that in my head—all caps announcer voice-- exactly the way it sounded in the radio ads.
Jessica was everything I was not. She was pretty. She had long, thick black hair that was all one style. Some of us were not so lucky in that department. We had layers that made our hair look like shag carpet, which would have been okay except that we added crimped sections and curled our bangs into a singular log very similar to the tube in a roll of toilet paper. Then we used a weapons grade shellack—sold over the counter!—that passed for hair spray to cement everything in place. You could have pushed any one of us out of an airplane at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet and not a single strand of hair would waver. Most of us looked like we had gotten ready for school in the morning by licking a light socket. The overall effect could be summed up as “Hair by Picasso.”
Jessica’s clothes matched. She wore popular brands like Esprit and Benneton. Her parents were young and attractive and similarly put together. But Jessica’s ultimate status symbol: she had pool---IN GROUND. Where was this, Beverly Hills?
Sixth grade runs along social fault lines that are a whisper away from rupturing into the dreaded, ruinous, IBS-triggering cliques. You’re all mostly friendly with one another, except for that one kid who still eats boogers. There is just no rehabilitating from that social atom bomb. But quietly alliances are forming. I could already see it happening. When we came back from winter break and were allowed to rearrange our desks, Jessica formed a pod with Rachel, Kristen, and Amanda, three other girls who also matched, who carried Esprit bags, who had somehow managed to master the art of all-one-hair style. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous and didn’t secretly hope I might get asked to be a fifth in their cool desk crew.
So imagine my surprise when Jessica called to ask if I wanted to go with her to see Debbie Gibson in concert. There were only two takeaways for me: 1. I was hanging out with Jessica 2. I was going to my first real music concert.
Did you think anything of the fact that aside from group social stuff like Girl Scouts and birthday parties where it was customary to invite the entire class, you had never done anything one-on-one with Jessica?
Your honor, I did not.
Did you think it weird that she had called to invite you on Friday night when the concert was the very next day?
Your honor, I did not.
Did you take into account the sweltering afternoon on July 17 of that same summer when your mother, tired of listening to you whine about boredom and the heat, suggest you call Jessica and, essentially, invite yourself over to swim in her pool? And did you also stop to recall how Jessica put the phone down for a really, really, really long time while she asked her mom if it was okay and then said it was, but she had piano at 2pm and it was already quarter to one in the afternoon, and how awkward and quintessentially not cool it all was, but your mom drove you over to her house anyway?
Your honor, I did not.
I was hanging out with JESSICA. I was going to my first ever live concert of DEBBIE GIBSON LIVE IN CONCERT!
I don’t know about Jessica, but I had a great time. The show was at a janky civic center in western Massachusetts, one of those junk drawer type arenas that can accommodate a bit of everything: dog shows; live music; boat expos; indoor soccer. To me it could have been Lincoln Center. The sweeping grandeur of the sticky stadium seats; the enormous stage littered with amps and mics and keyboards; the huge lighting rig blinking red, blue, and gold gels in time (!!!) to Debbie Gibson’s kicky tunes. And, of course, Debbie herself! There she was—for real!—rocking her blue fedora and oversized white shirt and stylish L.A. Gear sneakers singing her teen heart out sounding just like she did on my Out of the Blue cassette. It was, to that point, one of the best nights of my life.
I briefly thought that maybe after this Jessica and I would level up our friendship to hanging out at the mall or maybe she would invite me over to swim in her pool. Of course that never happened. Jessica continued her ascent into popularity and I went on to be in marching band. It was many years later that I realized I was not Jessica’s first choice of a concert date or even a straggling fourth; I was not on the list at all. I was the “let’s not let the ticket go to waste” pick, which is a hairline fracture of margin above “babysitter.” I’m glad I didn’t know at the time, glad my social ignorance saved me. Not just because it would have soured the experience, but because it meant I got to stay in a certain kind of adolescent bubble for just a little while longer, a place where you still know exactly who you are and where you belong.
Lens Zen!
Signs of spring are HAPPENING on the earlier side this year. My seasonal affective disorder heart is soaring right alongside my climate change anxiety. For now I am going to split the difference and feel grateful for the return of warm light and color while also keeping the battery on my snowblower charged because—New England.
Long live Aqua Net and junk drawer arenas! And here’s hoping the booger eating kids have made peace their unforced errors.
P.S. Worth noting that the house kitty corner to us had a pool, and I was never once invited over. Nothing says “fomo” like hearing the sounds of a neighborhood pool party from the street.
Can't say I was listening to Debbie Gibson, (we were traveling in China Tibet and Nepal at the time) but I do actually remember who she was. I believe David Baerwald (David and David)" Boomtown" and Hiatt's Bring the Family were more on my turntable....