The Glamorous Life: The Summer of 1984

1984. Thanks to Orwell, the number seems ominous but the actual 1984 seems like a pretty good year to me. But what do I know, I was only 12. So, for a 12-year-old – What a summer! There’s too many great songs from the summer of 1984 to limit myself to one tape so this is a “double pack” edition clocking in at just over three hours – or the length of 2 mixtapes on 100 min cassettes. I mean, how could I include fewer than 4 songs from Purple Rain?

I spent a large portion of this summer trying to transcribe the lyrics to “Beat Street Breakdown” by Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious 5. I had taped a version off of the radio and I strongly remember sitting on a big green couch that we had in our house on Cape Cod playing it over and over again while writing down the rhymes. It must have really annoyed my family – but they were probably all out enjoying the summer sun while I engaged in this Very Important Project.

Summer 1984 was a very important moment for the films of my life. It kicked off with Temple of Doom on Memorial Day weekend and then followed not just Beat Street but also Streets of Fire, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Top Secret!, The Muppets Take Manhattan, The NeverEnding Story, Disney’s The Jungle Book reissue, Purple Rain, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Dreamscape, and so many more.

Thanks to the Boston Globe archives (see below), I am now pretty sure that this summer also contained a formative film moment that I often talk about. My best friend Robert had a Big Brother kind of guy that he would often hang out with. I have no other recollections of this person so I don’t really know what his official capacity was – babysitter, caretaker, friendly cousin, I have no idea. What I do remember is that one hot summer day he decided he should take us to a movie… or maybe he just wanted to go to a movie and was saddled with us. In any case, we made the trek to the Harvard Square Theatre which, at the time, was a 3-plex that devoted its huge main screen to daily double features. This day – which I now know was probably August 17, 1984 – he brought us two pretty sheltered 12-year-olds to see a double feature of A Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver. All I remember about this is that I got up about half way through Taxi Driver, informed my companions that I knew it was “going to end badly,” and excused myself to go and look at records at the Newbury Comics nearby. The albums I browsed while my friend was scarred by Travis Bickle may have included some of the following: