My Chuck Klosterman Piece, Part 1: The Wonderstuff

I wrote this a few days ago few days ago in an email to my friend L. There are some minor changes, names, and such.

What year were you born? 1982? I’m listening to a song that came out in August 1988 and you would have been 6 or 7 I guess, and I would have been 16. The song is by a band called The Wonder Stuff. The first time I heard it, I was in an 11th grade photography class. Some girl named Sarah had a copy of it on her walkman, on cassette.

Cassettes were so awful, be grateful you got to skip them for the most part, if not altogether. Plenty of people endlessly extol the virtues of records, there are even some people who fetishize 8 tracks, but no one, no one ever loved the humble cassette. It had portability, but that was it. Of course, if you want the truth, forget about the record and the cassette, what we’ve really lost is the neighborhood record shop and that’s a shame. There was a lot to be said for a good neighborhood record shop, and sure they still exist, but they’re on the margins. They don’t exist for high school kids I suspect. They have MySpace. They have coffee shops too, and that’s pretty cool. At least it sounds cool when you’re 33.

Anyway, the song is called Red Berry Joy Town and it’s on the Wonderstuff’s debut album, The Eight Legged Groove Machine. I can’t tell you much about Sarah, I’m not even 100% sure that was her name. She was overweight but pretty and had blonde and brown hair and I think we might have talked about going to see a band once. At the time, I actually had a huge crush on a girl named Alison who was also in that class. Alison was a year older than me, a very pretty redhead, and way out of my league. Why she hung out with me, I can’t tell you, but I will tell you she was the first of many redheads that I crushed on.

If I had to make a period specific analogy, Alison was the Molly Ringwald character in Pretty In Pink and I was Ducky, though we weren’t as close as those two fictional proxies and I was never as big a dick to Alison as Ducky is to Molly Ringwald. I used to really like Ducky until I realized what an ass he was a few years ago. Well, I still like Jon Cryer, and for that matter Molly Ringwald, even though no one else seems to.

So, Sarah turned me onto The Wonder Stuff and that was all I ever heard of them from other people, or from anywhere They never came up when I was DJing, not a few years later when their follow up came out, and not last year when they had their reunion tour. I’ve always found that very odd. I’ve never heard them played on the radio, in a club, or at someone’s house. I don’t think I’ve ever heard them mentioned in passing in a work of fiction.

The one place I have ever heard them played is on the Cable Channel (Retro-Active), that plays music of that era and on that channel you will hear not just one song of theirs but several of them if you listen enough and I do, as I seem to be unable to get enough of that era. Now, while that channel does play a surprisingly good variety of 80’s alternative, this is still pretty unlikely.

Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there is a real person who is putting together the play
list for that channel and I like to think that that person is a huge Wonder Stuff fan and like music DJs everywhere, he or she is playing what he or she thinks you should be listening to. Of course, this DJ is not only playing what he or she thinks you should be listening to now, but what he thinks you should have been listening to in the 1980s and by playing it with other favorites of yours from that era is in fact rewriting history if you were paying attention to that particular thing at the time.

I like to think that DJ is Sarah and I actually the remaining image I have of her, fits that role quite well. Come to think of it, I like to think Alison and for that matter Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer turn to the Retro-Active channel every once in a while. It’s silly, but I just do