WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, CT (1979) “First Semester, Freshman Year”
I was an average, ordinary college student. I went to class, I did my homework, I ate in the dining hall with my hall-mates.
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In my last week in Portland, as I began packing for college, a picture formed in my mind of the kind of person I would meet there. Not the average person, but the kind of person I would want to know and be friends with.
This person was probably from New York or Boston. He was a maybe a grade above me and would of course be cooler than me. Cool in a New York way. Like Lou Reed. Whispery talking style. Dangerous a little bit. He’d be smart, since you had to be smart to go to this college. But he’d be kind of “street”, too. He’d be wise in the ways of the world.
He’d be punk, of course. But not doctrinaire, “cartoon” punk. He would know who the Buzzcocks were. And Wire. And The Cure. He would also know about underground literature. And Europe. And Sartre.
In my mind he was faintly dark-skinned, something like Alan Vega of the band Suicide. Mediterranean, I guess, though I didn’t know much about the different ethnicities, being a very white person from very white Portland, Oregon.
Whatever he was, this person would not be typical of my college. But he’d be the guy I would gravitate to, the guy who knew about the stuff I wanted to know about.
*
So what sort of clothes should I bring to college? I was sort of punk in 1979. Not all the way there, but heading in that direction. I dressed like the other suburban kids who showed up at punk shows in my town.
My hair was cut above my ears. That was the first step, the first indicator that you had rejected the feathered-hair/permed-hair/shag-hair mainstream of the 1970s.
I also wore suit coats. That was another significant fashion choice. Maybe that made you more “new wave” than punk, but whatever, same difference. “Punk/New Wave” was the name of the one small bin of new music in most Portland record stores.
Tom Petty, on his early album covers, was a good example of those transitional times. He still had the girl-friendly feathered hair but wore a black motorcycle jacket on his first album cover. And then a skinny-armed, extra-small suit coat on Damn the Torpedoes.
Skinniness in clothes was the look of the future. Skinny ties. Skinny-sleeved coats. “Stove pipe” black jeans. Neatly cut. Shirts and pants in bright primary colors. That’s what the 80s were going to be.
My mother had the idea that I should dress normal when I first arrived at college. The styles would be different back east, she promised. It would be better to see what the other kids were wearing, before making a show of my fledgling punk self.
That seemed like a good idea. So I packed my Levi’s and sneakers and button down shirts. I think I was wearing Wallaby style shoes, or maybe desert boots, which were a common style then.
[I know I also brought a white LaCoste shirt because after I’d been at college a couple weeks, I cut the green alligator out of this shirt and wore it sans alligator (my skin showing through the hole). This being my first public “punk” gesture.]
*
When I arrived at my first-day orientation, I was glad I was dressed normal. All the kids who showed up with some sort of “look” or “statement” appearance looked silly and like they were trying too hard.
One thing though: nobody was punk at all. Not even a little. A few of the kids from Los Angeles had a touch of new wave about them. But they’d probably picked that up from movies more than music.
*
I moved into my hall and met my roommate. He was a nice kid from Sacramento. He was very politically active: anti-nuclear, save the whales, recycling.
He had no clue about music or style, which was fine. I was not a snob like that. He was interesting in his own way.
He always had a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in our mini-fridge, which I occasionally helped myself to when I was drunk or stoned, which I was a lot.
The other kids on my hall were a standard mix of well rounded, high IQ, self-starters. They had esoteric hobbies and/or unusual origin stories. Which was what you’d expect after you’d gone through the college application process.
I was also like this. I’d been the editor of my school paper. I had good SAT scores. I played sports. My esoterica: I worked summer construction jobs in Oregon with illiterate back-woods road-crew guys. This had taught me “empathy and understanding”, as I explained in my college essay. (Someone told me to write that.)
*
The college had told us not to consult our parents when it came to choosing our first semester courses. In fact, it would be best, if we waited until we were physically on campus, to even look at the catalogue.
This was good advice because then you could ask around about different teachers and classes and figure out what was what. I ended up with:
---THE AMERICAN NOVEL AFTER WW2, taught by a popular macho professor who wore a cowboy hat.
---CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC taught by Alvin Lucier, a famous and eccentric composer of experimental music.
---INTRO CALCULUS taught by a kindly, white haired, mathematician … who turned out to be insane.
---INTRO TO ECONOMICS/GOVERNMENT? I don’t remember which. A routine boring lecture class.
*
So then, for maybe a month or two, I was a nondescript, average, ordinary college student. I went to class, I did my homework, I went to the dining hall with my hall-mates. We all sat together, having instantly bonded into an almost family-like intimacy.
At night we would study at the library or in our cinder-block dorm rooms. But not too hard, because socializing was important too. We’d linger in each other’s doorways, chatting, listening to each other’s music. Figuring each other out.
Ours was a co-ed dorm, including bathrooms and showers. This was a new policy at the college which sounded interesting but which nobody wanted to do. We took it upon ourselves to divide the bathrooms into boys and girls.
There were other unusual innovations. The school seemed determined to move beyond any kind of Traditional American College experience. This was not the 1950s!
For instance, there were sports teams there, but you would never know it. I loved football but I never saw our team play. I don’t even know where they played. Not on campus, not that I ever saw.
Another example: the handful of fraternities that had survived the 1960s, were considered outdated and a joke and dangerous to women.
Much preferred and promoted were special interest or minority group houses. There was The Malcolm X house. The Women’s Coalition House. A Vegan house. And several others.
*
So then classes started. In my AMERICAN NOVEL AFTER WW2 class our first book was On The Road by Jack Kerouac. People seemed excited about this book. I had never heard of it.
The cover of the assigned paperback edition had a 1960s-style yellow sun on it, which suggested deep philosophical truths were to be revealed inside.
But On The Road wasn’t about the 1960s, it was about the 1950s. And the characters were just these weird people, who didn’t have jobs and didn’t do anything. The run-on sentences were hard to follow. I could barely get through it.
But in class, people claimed to love it. One of the characters was supposedly a “Christ-like” figure, whatever that meant.
*
My INTRO CALCULUS class also presented problems. The professor was supposedly a brilliant mathematician. So brilliant, he had written his own text book for Intro Calculus.
But his book had been rejected by whoever publishes math text books. So he had made copies of it himself and put those in the bookstore. So you had to buy his homemade xeroxed textbook, that he wrote, for $20.
Then in class he would do crazy stuff like stand on his desk. Or say funny off-color things, that I couldn’t hear because the class was in a huge lecture hall.
I was pretty good at math, but I was totally lost for most of this class. And with only the professor’s personal textbook as my guide—no internet, no secondary sources—I was lucky I didn’t flunk out.
*
September continued. A slight chill came into the air. The leaves began to change. Singles Going Steady by the Buzzcocks was released.
On the weekends, my hall-mates and I did the standard activities. We went to dumb parties and danced to cover bands playing “Louie Louie” or “Rock Lobster”. We drank cheap beer. Got drunk. Smoked a little pot outside, under a tree.
We would go out on Saturday night in one big group, then return in smaller clumps, wandering home at 1:00am, across the grassy campus, back to our hall.
There, we’d stay up later still, drink a little more beer, talk, loosen up, start to really reveal ourselves.
*
SELECTED HALL-MATES
The most unusual person on our hall—to me anyway—was a very mature local girl who was on a sports scholarship. She was a lesbian, with the calm demeanor of a star athlete. She also had a heavy New England accent, occasionally using words and phrases that seemed to be from another century.
Another girl was a certified rich kid/jet-setter. You could tell she felt somewhat obligated to hide her lifestyle from her more ordinary hall-mates, but it all came spilling out of her within a week or two (emergency trips to Greece to meet her lover, etc.)
The guy I liked the most, and who became a life-long friend, fell wildly in love with the rich girl. He was also from a very rich family but played it the exact opposite: smoking Marlboros and dressing in dirty jeans and old t-shirts throughout his spotty college career.
Another kid had a tragic secret. He hadn’t gotten into Harvard! His dad went to Harvard, his grandad went to Harvard, his brothers went to Harvard. And here he was, doing bong hits every night at our school, which was also pretty fancy. But it wasn’t Harvard.
There was a Jewish girl on our hall whose parents were distinguished professors and worked with the State Department. Her father had survived the Holocaust. She brought me home with her at Thanksgiving to the upscale town of Newton, Massachusetts. To impress upon her parents how unusual and interesting I was, she told them I had worked at a gas station.
Another guy was 100% Polish and had grown up in a small town in Pennsylvania with his working-class immigrant parents. He got drunk a lot and chided the rest of us for being such mamby-pamby bourgeois brats ….
Anyway, so there we were, a pretty divergent group, stuck with each other, and quickly realizing that we didn’t have that much in common after all. But it didn’t matter. We were hall-mates. Freshman hall-mates. We would remember each other—vividly—for the rest of our lives.
*
My career as a normal college student didn’t last very long. I started a band halfway through my first semester. We practiced in the tunnels under the dorms. Our drummer would later co-found The Blue Man Group.
We were an art-punk band, I guess. One of our first songs, written by me, was called “Playground of the Rich”. We never played any gigs, but people heard about us and seemed interested in the project. Which seemed like a good sign.
Then I joined an established campus band just before Christmas. By then I’d found a friend in the hall above ours, who was super into Reggae and all things Rasta/Jamaica.
He was a big-time stoner, and so was I, and we became fast friends. In the course of that first semester, he went from being a super preppie banker’s son from Indiana, to a long haired, bearded, Rastamon.
Style-wise, I didn’t transform quite so quickly or so radically. I remained somewhere in the general vicinity of “college student”. Maybe “art school student” was the look I ended up with.
But once I got in a real band and was writing songs and doing the music thing, I had a buffer between myself and the school. I no longer thought of “college student” as my primary identity.
I still went to my classes. And I continued to absorb the atmosphere on campus. The “elite-ness” was interesting. My class was filled with the sons and daughters of famous writers, celebrities, high-level politicians. It was fun to get a glimpse into that world.
But ultimately, it wasn’t a great fit and in the middle of my Junior year, I took a leave of absence. And I never went back.
*
The interesting question for me is, what exactly did I learn at this college? It’s hard to say exactly. I want to say that very little factual information was transmitted to me, but that would be wrong.
I learned who Jack Kerouac was. And Samuel Johnson. And Voltaire. I learned there had been a revolution in Russia and also in China, both of which produced some super-cool iconography which looked great on post-punk posters and album covers.
I learned about Freud and the still relatively new field of Psychology. I didn’t actually take any classes in this subject but seeing all the female students go nuts over the teachers and texts and ideas around this topic was a clue that mental health was going to be a big deal in the future.
And of course, I learned about rich people. And smart people. And people from influential families. What they were like. What they do. How they operate.
*
Decades later, I had a friend who grew up in rural Eastern Oregon whose kids were applying to college. They were bright kids and good students and they had a chance to go to Ivy-level colleges. His wife once said to me: “But won’t they pick up the habits of rich kids? And become entitled and lazy?”
I said, “No, they’ll pick up the habits of smart rich kids, they’ll work their asses off and max out their talents.”
Which I guess is a good summation of what I learned at that college.
Hmm... My college career couldn't have been any more different than yours. Academically it was horrible until Sept. of '83 when U of P somehow strangely accepted me and it was my last chance before becoming a complete flunked out loser. Fortunately it went uphill from there - I studied hard, good friends, good profs, good study partners - but it was still horribly difficult and I still hated it. But as I've said before, once outta there I never looked back.
Suzanne and Naomi, and Joe Carducci really introduced me to great bands beyond my initial exposure (Pistols, Ramones, Buzzcocks and the Damned).. they all knew their stuff .. Suzanne and Naomi knew all the great west coast bands and Joe augmented my knowledge of West Coast contemporary punk.
In college it was jeans and t-shirts until I graduated, many years later (hah hah!) but anyhow at none of those places was rich or poor of any consequence whatsoever. None, zilch nada. Harvey Mudd was a terrible horrible experience. It was my first experience with abject failure after being such a golden boy (not that my parents every expressed that sentiment!). It was the only time I considered offing mysef - for many reasons stacked up like 1000 cow pies. That lasted for like 2 days before I vowed to make changes and improve everything (which lasted .. for awhile). That was the BAD part of Harvey Mudd.
The GOOD part of Harvey Mudd was going into the city or elsewhere to see the Germs (TWICE!!!) Black Flag (with Keith Morris - the only decent lineup), the Mau Maus, MIddle Class, The Jam, Iggy Pop, (a whole story in itself), the Cramps, the Clash before they released all those sucky albums), the Buzzcocks, the Wierdos, Agent Orange, The Alley Cats, Sham 69, Public Image at the Olympic Auditorium, .....etc. Such a great combo of groups that I'd never be able to see again (well, mostly!) and all the other suffering was well worth these memorable shows.
Anyhow I DETESTED East Coaster and all their music except The Ramones and Blondie (before they ruined their lives with those terrible disco songs) so all that stuff would've been completely foreign to me. I do like your retelling of those experiences and I'd say you did pretty good for yourself in the East Coast during college. Great writing as always Blake!
This is a valuable point of yours: "They'll pick up the habits of smart rich kids, they’ll work their asses off and max out their talents.” Also, I wore a polo with an alligator on the chest that was Godzilla-sized, a parody of a different sort.