The Soft Boys Save the World

I must have been only 14 (or maybe 15 by the time I'd gotten around to actually hearing the music I listened to) when I'd heard the Soft Boys roaring through "I Wanna Destroy You". It was on some freebie compilation tape that my older Journey-Springsteen loving brother, of all people, had acquired. Some music savvy friend of his was probably trying to do him an early favor in life and turn him away from the darkside with 90 minutes of new wave fun (it didn't work; but a hapless night involving a J. Geils show, a stolen microphone, concert security, a wildly artistic and colorful water bong, and the local police seemed to, rather sadly, turn him off of music completely). But I, on the other hand, I was more than happy to toss that tape into my cheesy Tandy cassette player and bathe in monotone bliss of Blondie, the Plimsouls, the Modern Lovers, a few others (a weird prescience on the mystery compilers part lead to the inclusion of some first album Tom Petty, and early Cars), and this wildly strange band called the Soft Boys. To my very good fortune, this compilation was a smart one, two or three songs from each artist, balanced across all ninety minutes like a swell late-night DJ spinning his honest pleasures. I was in heaven.

But various tracks on the tape stood out at different times for different reasons. The Soft Boys "I Wanna Destroy You" was abetted by the inclusion of their rock-easy "Tonight" and the Byrds-ian weirdout "The Queen of Eyes". I'd be completely full of shit if I claimed that these songs stole me away more than the others on that tape (they did stand out - but much of it did to my learning ears) but Petty caught my adolescent anxiety first, then Jonathon Richman, and probably the Plimsouls shortly thereafter. But believe me I noticed these guys calling themselves the Soft Boys; enough so that I'd spend the next few years with them on my tattered 'hit list' of records I'd like to own someday; casually eyeing record bins for a copy of this unusual sounding bands record (I didn't even know what it was called! But such was the joy of teen record hunting...oh the days).

Years later I remember finding a copy of something by the Soft Boys called Underwater Moonlight - on cassette -in a punk boutique shop in San Diego - probably early in 1985. It was part of one of my scavenger hunts gone wild and wound up in a bag with a half-dozen other cassettes, a few 45's, and a Bauhaus record that I wanted very much. A quick scan of the song titles confirmed that this was the band and these were those songs, I should have been more giddy but that old comp tape was long gone and the moment past. The guy at the register complimented my taste while ringing up Moonlight and muttered something about Robyn Hitchcock. My confused "who the fuck is that look" was met with a smile and the explanation that Hitchcock was the force behind the Soft Boys and that he just happened to have this "amazing new record" out. He nodded toward a copy of something titled Fegmania! and recommended it, so I grabbed that and threw it in the bag also, promising to let him know what I thought when I came back in a week. In the car I played something else (I'm fairly certain it was something by Gene Loves Jezebel...what was I thinking?!) and drove home with nothing but a trancelike focus on playing that damn Bauhaus record (being vinyl immediately conferred the honor of importance to my purchases back then, cassettes were trials for music I was unsure of, but to buy the vinyl copy held a glorious sense of permanence). So sadly, I don't remember when I actually got around to playing Underwater Moonlight for the first, full time. I do recall playing Fegmania! though, figuring that if it was the same Hitchcock guy why not go new instead of old. I jumped in feet first and really dug Fegmania! I thought it was a wild, psychedelic, anti-hippy type record (that eventually got purchased in its vinyl form - the coup de grace) that bestowed some essential Anglo cred for a transplanted Midwesterner in Anglo-hip Southern California (I came out to the Pacific coast without so much as a single Jam record - sacrilege!) So I think the Soft Boys tape got lost in the short-term shuffle. I was too busy remaining current and desperately trying to (foolishly) shed my Ohio-ness.

The middle of the ocean is probably the best place to listen to music. I mean to really, really dig in and hear the stuff. Especially if you are part of a US Navy staff squadron that has no duty (Navy-speak for work) on the ship and nothing but time while you are "along for the ride". Believe me, six months is a long, long ride. Fortunately, I had a reliable walkman, a box full of spare batteries, and a bunk/locker (sleeping arrangements were a six foot long hinged box with a two inch thick mattress resting on top of the lid that opened to reveal an eight inch deep well in which all of your possessions rest) filled with some three hundred cassettes. The cassettes were neatly placed in two carrying cases and gently placed in there own half of the locker, the other side was crammed with wrinkled, dirty uniforms, a few civvies (civilian, or "real" clothes), perpetually filthy socks, hats, and whatever else lay beneath those cassettes in the realms of importance.

Six months is a lot of time too. I mean the hours really start to add up. Thus, I wound up getting to know each and everyone of those cassettes very, very well...so well, in fact, that I really began to loathe quite a few of them by the time the deployment wound down. In turn, I also became extraordinarily committed to a few of the albums that I'd previously dismissed in small ways only to discover their pleasurable depths in the many extra hours I had lying there in that bottom bunk with a book, my music, and the curtains drawn. Pushing this memoir aside, its probably anti-climactic to now disclose that Underwater Moonlight was one of those records. Ahh, but it was, and under those extraordinary conditions I learned to love the Soft Boys.

As things were, nevertheless, when I got back Stateside I put aside my six months of repeated listens for newer sounds in late summer 1986. Somewhere between that last year in the Navy and the return to my life I'd left my copy of Underwater Moonlight with some lucky friend or hapless stranger (it could have been either considering the overbearing music snobbery I'd become known for - always entering other peoples cars clutching a handful of tapes that would be the only ones played during that particular trip lest anyone deal with my pouting and sneering) and forgotten about it entirely.

Twenty-one years is a long time to wait for deserved and real recognition, but that's exactly how long it's been since Kimberly Rew, Morris Windsor, Matthew Seligman, and the inimitable Robyn Hitchcock first lay their Underwater Moonlight eggs under the skin of a shifting and agitated music world. Looking back and hearing this masterwork for the first time again you quickly realize that this was music caught in-between and across the grain. Stranded, so to speak, on an island between punk rock's fading fury and new wave's first swell. Hitchcock's obvious fondness for psychedelic sonnets wrestled with the urge to make (or mock) pop music in the most classic styles. The Beatles clashed with the Beach Boys (the closing harmonies of "Positive Vibrations" bring focus to this approach as the band sweetly sing the word " vi-i-brations" over a jangling sitar) while Hitchcock soaked pure sonic joy with odd and sometimes creepy lyrical psychedelia (try "I Got the Hots" "here I am / looking out at the crystal world / floating currents of human eyes / baking land under creamy skies" on for size). But the band was not entirely elliptical, the simple political anti-war message of "I Wanna Destroy You" painted the band as a minor-ly brilliant straight pop band that took to balancing its straight songs against vicious, sly humor, queer experimentation, and general all-around shrewdness. Such was the singular and uncanny eminence of Underwater Moonlight. But silence flooded the void behind the records appearance, the English press dismissed them as quirky and too pop and the Stated never really got introduced to the pleasures ("We were the wrong ship on the wrong planet" Hitchcock recently told journalist David Fricke).

So it should be no surprise that after two decades Matador Records has reset history and are attempting to do the admirable thing in giving this lost classic some of its just due. It should also, however, come as no surprise that Matador has bloated this re-issue into a two disc affair that stretches the exceptional moment of Underwater's ten original tunes into an uncalled for excess. Such is life in the CD era, and that's not to complain about the quality of the songs because the nine tunes that follow the appropriate ten are quite fine slabs of Hitchcock-ian warped pop (the second disc is a little shaky in quality and probably only of cursory interest). But this record - the right and proper Underwater Moonlight - deserves every bit of the admiration for it's brief and brilliant original vision. The record, quite simply, stands out as a staggering listen that is clearly more than enough to state the Soft Boys inarguable place in rock mythology. Anything more is just, well, filler. With that in mind, ignore the minor complaints and get this package just to experience the exhilaration of (re) discovery, and the bewilderment of why you may have never heard this stuff in the first place.

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