Dancing on the Ceiling: The Summer of 1986

This certainly seems like the year when I was becoming musically ‘awake.’ I have very strong memories of playing Lou Reed’s Mistrial on my walkman endlessly. Sadly, most of the songs that I remember loving from that one have not aged well – “Video Violence” and “Original Wrapper” were favorites at the time but now I have trouble listening to them. In better news, a lot of this stuff has aged pretty well and I actually like some of the pop songs better now that I’m not being subjected to them every 40 minutes on the radio. And, of course, “It’s Tricky” is still a stone-cold banger. Struggled a little bit with including The Smiths but Johnny Marr still seems like a good guy even if Morrissey has become even more of an insufferable prick.

This was a big summer for music in movies – Labyrinth (a great movie with a wonderful soundtrack), Club Paradise (a horrible movie with some good songs), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (a notoriously unreleased soundtrack) all came out this summer. Songs from all of them are included even though I’m cheating with “Twist & Shout” and “Oh Yeah.”

I was not a cool punk 14-year-old but I definitely had a first pressing of The Lemonheads first 7" Laughing All The Way to the Cleaners because my friend from camp’s brother was in the band and I thought that was so cool. That 7" is not available on Spotify but “Fucked Up” made it onto their first LP so I’ve inserted that instead.

Also, once digging in to this, I realized that – for me personally – Sept and Oct of 1986 were very significant for music so I made a whole second mixtape from just those two months. That’s also included below with more notes… But first here’s the Memorial Day through Labor Day playlist:

Part II: The Fall of 1986

I have no idea how I discovered Love and Rockets – I was never a huge goth kid so it certainly wasn’t from their connection to Bauhaus. I assume it’s thanks to WFNX which I must have started to listen to consistently starting in 1985/86. Regardless, their September 1986 release Express was my favorite album for a very long time. The second time that I was mugged in the Harvard Square T station, the asshole punk stole my cherry red walkman with my Express tape in it and I was almost as upset about losing that as my friend Jade’s studded leather bracelet which I tried to hold on to but was ripped from my hand. Ask me how much I hated the MBTA cops after that incident… All of this is a roundabout way to say I was happy to find a way to include Express in this project. Below is a ‘mixtape’ including songs from albums that were released in Sept and Oct 1986 which had a pretty big concentration of my teenage faves plus some that I should have known at the time but didn’t (looking at you Raining Blood). Oh, I also still have my vinyl copy of True Stories that I got signed by David Byrne at the Tower Records on Newbury Street.