TEENAGE TYPESETTER ON THE NIGHT SHIFT: Learning to review.

Starting in the fall of my sophomore year at Boston University, I knew I wanted to write about music. Milo suggested reviewing the Slits, since no one had claimed it yet, and I was completely besotted with the record. I loved the Slits, a British band so fierce, weird and proud that they'd posed topless on their record cover, coated in brown mud. The music was off-center, deliberately bash-and-howl, and their song topics ranged from shoplifting, to class warfare ("Typical girls") to just out and out weirdness. It was a hypnotic record, and Milo and I played it constantly, along with other amazing work by the bands emerging from the punk scene.

I must have written three separate drafts of this, over the course of the fall and early winter. Each time, I'd bring my pages to music editor  Kit Rachlis (usually during my typesetting shift -- this was not cool, but mildly tolerated). Each time, he would read it, with his pencil poised over my lines. Sometimes he would lower the pencil to the paper, but he wouldn't make a mark. This was a Very Bad Sign. The fact that he changed nothing, meant it was all so awful there was nothing to edit. He would sigh, and we would talk about the record. What did I like about it? Everything. What was my favorite song? I liked them all. How do you describe music that sounds like it's being made by children who have grown up on an island where a volcano killed all the grownups? Well, if I'd been able to do something with an image like that, I might have been in business as a rock critic months earlier.

Finally, sometime in late winter, after I'd brought in several drafts, Kit pushed my draft to one side, and just as my heart was really sinking below my sternum, he scooted his swivel chair around my chair, leaned down and yanked out a record from one of the piles leaning against his cubicle wall. "You might give this a listen," he said, handing me the Pearl Harbor record. I looked at it. It was a band with a chick singer (that's how we talked) who also looked to be of mixed race like Ari Up.

"Have you played it?" I asked. "No," Kit replied, and then grinned beneath his Pancho Villa mustache. "They're playing at the Paradise. Why don't you listen to the record and go see the show, and turn something in." He slid his chair back to his place and picked up his pencil again. He gave a brief smile and told me, "it might be easier."

I was dismissed. I rose, clutching the record and walked briskly out of the newsroom back to Production. There, I'm sure Karen Bitter gave me a glare (I was a chronic break-taker), and I gave the mostly-good news to Milo. I remember calling up the Paradise, and arranging for a pair of tickets ("me, plus one, please") for the show.

At this point, Milo and I had been to a lot of shows -- mostly national acts. We occasionally went to local shows at local bars, but some places were tough, and requested an ID. I remember being shut out of a B52s show Milo was covering (at Spit, on Lansdowne Street) and Milo pitching a fit at the door.  After that, his friend Joel's girlfriend Cindy gave me her old New York ID -- we looked nothing alike, but the ID was legitimate. This made it easier to get into bars, so we saw the occasional up-and-coming local band, like Mission of Burma, Pastiche, and Peter Dayton (who was a favorite among the critics).

Now, it was my turn to be "on the list." I'd been with Milo, when he was the one holding the reporters' notebook, which he kept in the inside pocket of his brown corduroy jacket. For me (still underage at 19), going to the Paradise as a critic filled my heart with joy. Surely they wouldn't card me if I was "on the list"?

They didn't. I got waved through, with Milo right behind me. I had listened to the record several dozen times and found each successive listen pointed out the band's short-comings, and the lack of catchy melodies, or "hooks," which was an essential ingredient in successful pop. Their big hit was a number with reggae pretensions, "Drivin' " Pearl had a lot of gulps in her voice and the production values put a lot of special audio effects like engine revving, but everything sounded really processed to me. But I made an important discovery, which is that it's a lot easier to explain what you don't like about an artistic project then to say why you do like something. So when Milo and I went to Paradise, I definitely felt like they'd have to defy expectations to prompt me to write a good review.

The Paradise was on the western edge of the BU campus on Comm. Ave. It was basically a narrow, low-ceilinged black box, with two entrances. The room on the left had TVs and comedy on the weekend. On the right was the rock club. There was a tiny bar in the hall, and then a long hallway leading to a pair of swinging doors painted black. It was owned by Don Law, who was to Boston clubs what Rupert Murdoch is to tabloids. And it's one of the few clubs from this era of my life that still exists.

Milo was over 6 feet, but he was sensitive to the fact that I was only 5'4"  and we elbowed our way down front, to the stage-right side of the stage, which was closest to the bar. "You okay here?" he asked. I felt nervous with anticipation, almost as if it was me who was going onstage. He slipped back into the crowd to get a beer -- I didn't want anything because I wanted to keep my hands free. I looked around the club -- I saw no one I knew. There were some jocks with baseball jackets, and some girls with those floofy blonde bangs you now see on pubescent gymnasts. It looked like a bunch of kids from BU (although not my classes, because I was in the geology department, and everyone there wore flannel shirts and hiking boots, with holes in the seat and knees from scooting over outcroppings).

"These are not my folks," I thought to myself, and then felt badly because I really did want to give Pearl Harbor and the Explosions a chance. Even though the singer did go by the name "Pearl E. Gates," which was actually cooler than the band name.

Milo returned with his Heineken. We'd gotten there just before the headliner, as we knew that the chances of door people scrutinizing IDs went down if there was a crowd to get through the door. I thought about what the band was trying to say -- before they ever got on the stage. Alluding to the (then most) horrific attack on American soil definitely had a punk-rock "Fuck You" vibe, yet the album cover showed the band (all guys except for Pearl) wearing vertical stripes and skinny ties and looking perfectly harmless. This burgeoning "new wave" fashion was the antithesis of the ripped, torn and safety-pinned look of punk. Personally, I didn't like most new wave -- it was too smooth and processed. Not weird enough, not dangerous, not improvised. I was grateful to have the chance to write about a "chick singer," but I had misgivings about the situation.

"Just watch the show," Milo grumbled, finishing his beer. Finally, the band came on and they seemed very serious, and a lot older than they had on the record jacket. Pearl's speaking voice had a pleasing huskiness, but when she started to sing, and throw her head back and forth, it seemed mindlessly frenetic.

Their songs started to blur -- "Drivin' " "Shut Up and Dance," and "Don't Come Back" sounded instrumentally-clotted -- too much going on. As for sincerity and charisma -- sadly lacking. They started with a bunch of Meters covers (which Milo instantly identified -- I just knew they sounded familiar) and Pearl was in the habit of pogoing in place when the band members took their solos. She had a whistle on her wrist, and every so often kicked her leg in the air, but she didn't seem to connect with the guys behind her (named Peter Bilt, and the Stench brothers -- oh for the era of punk rock, when everyone had a nom de guerre).

I wrote some notes, including song titles, which I knew was crucial if you're reviewing a live show along with a record. But ultimately, I started to feel let down. This band wasn't fun, wasn't interesting, and wasn't whipping the crowd into any kind of action. I'd been to a Plasmatics show at the Rat when I was a freshman at BU and when Wendy O. Williams brought out her chainsaw, it had been thrilling and appalling all at once. There was little that was explosive about the Explosions, but I knew I could write about what I was seeing.

Over the weekend I drafted and drafted and started writing about the record, and then realized it would be easier to just write about the show, with the occasional allusion to the record. Record reviews were three and a half double-spaced pages (and paid $35, a fee that did not rise, in my recollection, ever in subsequent decades).

I wrote in the front room of our three-room flat on Pearl Street in Central  Square, Cambridge. It was a "railroad-style" flat, with a front room, tiny hall with adjacent bathroom, kitchen, complete with 1940s carved wood trim and a bedroom with a window that overlooked the tiny shed where the trash cans resided. There was a built-in desk in the wall on which Milo's green Olivetti rested, a durable machine that actually typed "elite" style, which meant there were more letters per line than a "pica-style" machine. So I knew I didn't have to go three and a half pages -- three pages would probably do it. 

My typewriter was a Hermes desk model given to me by my dad (in lieu of any offer to assist with tuition). After so much typesetting, it was a lot easier to whale away on an electric keyboard. We had a stereo in the front room, and I am sure Milo was spending his time in the kitchen, reading the papers while I was toiling. After I wrote a few labored lines, I put the record on. I skipped between a few songs and realized I couldn't tell the difference between the record and the show.

Milo came out. "It's not very punk, is it," he opined, picking up the jacket. "I know," I said and realized I probably shouldn't hear the songs again unless I wanted to quote from them, and there was a lyric sheet for that. I wrote more, and tried to write about the songs themselves, rather than the performance. I realized I could use the idea of "Pearl Harbor" as a metaphor (which is exactly the sort of move any critic would have done, but I needed to discover this on my own). And where that was a "sneak attack," this show, and this band and the record weren't. There was no mystery here -- just a bunch of peppy pop songs that didn't stick in your head once they were over.

I am pretty sure I brought the review in to Kit on Monday afternoon before my shift. We'd arranged a time for him to edit it the following day and -- god be praised -- he rearranged some sentences, cut out some extraneous adjectives (he didn't like "very" or "a bit" or any hedging). We worked on the lead, and somehow came up with: "Pearl Harbor and the Explosions are a sneak attack designed to make dance-oriented punk palatable," and kept the show review to the bottom quarter of the review. We finished the last page, and then did a quick read from top to bottom again. When we were done, Kit put the pages in his outbox to go to Copy.

"That's it?" I asked. "It's going to be in the paper?"

"Yeah," Kit grinned. He stubbed out his cigarette (he liked to smoke while he was editing).

"It's going to be in the paper this week?" I asked.

"Uh huh," he said, and then paused. "Good work."

I exhaled -- I hadn't realized I had been holding my breath.

"You might even get to type it," he said.

"Ha," I laughed, and then thought about it.  "I probably should."
"I would," Kit replied, and then smirked. Then he turned back to the next stack of pages while I walked back through the newsroom. I was returning to the Comp Shop, where other people's stories awaited. But this time, sometime tomorrow, mine would be among them.