Yaz – Only You

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yod7jc8U94[/youtube]

The spring and summer of 1986 is when I discovered Yaz (known as Yazoo in the UK and on Youtube), and Upstairs at Eric’s and You and Me Both were in heavy rotation on my boom box. As a matter of fact, I may not have played anything else for weeks on end. Just to give you a picture, my car stereo was stolen from my rag top ’66 candy apple red WV bug, and since I could see myself offering up a series of car stereos to car stereo scumbag thieves, while driving a car that effectively didn’t lock (the rag top was held in place by snaps), I carried a boom box around in the car with me, and hid it under the seats while in movies or whatever. Oh, the sound! Oh, the fidelity! Awesome.

Anyway, my friend Dawn introduced me to Yaz(oo), and I was in love. Of course, it was confusing when I first heard Erasure, and gosh, the guy from Erasure sounded JUST LIKE the woman from Yaz, but whatever. Remember, I lived in Stockton. I didn’t know much. And yes, listening to these songs 22 years later, they were pretentious, but so were Depeche Mode, and I loved them just as much.

Dawn and I drove from Stockton, CA to Langhorne, PA in about 3 1/2 days, leaving right after my friend Stephanie’s wedding, and stopping only to sleep for a few hours in Salt Lake City at my friend Rosemary’s house. She drove that first leg with us, but she lived in Salt Lake, so from there and eastward, it was Dawn and me. We didn’t have money for hotels or restaurants, so we lived on warm Mountain Dew that we had brought along, and trail mix. We took turns sleeping whilst the other person drove, and I do believe that by Indiana, we were hallucinating. Either that, or there’s a hell of a lot of corn in the middle of this country. We talked about everything under the sun, as you do when you’re driving almost a thousand miles a day. We talked about God, about space, about love, about sex, about school and dreams and the future. We talked about divorce and man’s inhumanity to man, and whatever else we could think of to help keep each other awake. I saw so many stars out there in the middle of the country, stars like you just don’t see in the city, even if it’s not a huge city. It was a great trip, and it was totally worth missing a week of Statistics I was taking in summer school, getting so far behind so quickly that I had to drop the class and start over.

Arriving in PA, we had the best pizza in the world, Philly style. And here, I’m being totally sarcastic. I’m from CA, and we don’t like our pizza with crappy Velveeta cheese and canned button mushrooms, and we don’t eat the slices folded in half. So sue me if you’re from the East Coast and that’s your taste. You’re welcome to it, let me tell you. I met her friends, none of whom I can remember. I saw fireflies for the first time (lightning bugs, as they called them), and I caught some in a jar like an 11-year old would, making her friends laugh at me like I was an idiot. I didn’t care.

And now, Dawn has gone the way of old friends whom you meet and connect with and have fun, and then later either they change or you change or both, and you realize you just don’t like them anymore. So we didn’t keep in touch, and when I lived in Philly for 2 years, I never even tried to get in touch and let her know I was there. As a matter of fact, I kind of lived in fear that we would bump into each other at some point.

But still, Yaz at some level always makes me think fondly of Dawn, of the summer of 1986, and of my first trip east of Lake Tahoe.

Oh, what the hell. Here’s one more song I used to like a lot, from their album, You And Me Both, Nobody’s Diary. Happy Friday! Enjoy your synthesizer-pop 80s music!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_kzhvYZtQc[/youtube]