Tones on Tail - Rain
Late at night. Alone. Circa 1992. You know, before this whole internet thing… god. When I first got to BU in 1990, my phone bill was $500 a month. I would call my friends, and we’d just sit on the phone for hours. I don’t even know what we’d talk about. This isn’t weird, of course, people do it all the time to this day, but I do not. It amazes me when I see people do it now, but when I was young, just… so… brimming with friendship and love and emotions and a need for connection and insecurity and loneliness. Phone time. Endless hours of it. And when I couldn’t? Letters. I didn’t really master journaling until maybe 1992 or 1993. Before that, letters. I still have them all. I went through them about five years ago. It’s utterly insane. Hundreds of pages. 5, 10 letters of 18-20 pages each every week. So many friends from home, other friends who had gone to school. This is what social networking was, I guess, before the internet. Friends who were far away. Whenever people diss the internet - especially young people - I just think about how hard it was to feel a connection to someone you loved before the internet. Or, harder still, just knowing the little day to day things that they were up to. Things you might not even think to mention in a quick phone call.
This song encapsulates that for me now: “it’s hard to shake this feeling, writing very long letters as soon as it rains.” Tones on Tail. We all love them on a good 80’s rock night, of course, Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya go! or Christian Says, if you’re at a more discerning 80’s disco. But “Rain,” for me, was always the song that best exemplified them. Maybe not exemplified. That resonated with me most. This peculiar era of Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins’ career after Bauhaus and before Love and Rockets. I notice how Daniel and Kevin and David got a good little nostalgia racket going on now - do a Bauhaus reunion, and when that zeitgeist fades, do a Love and Rockets reunion. I’m a huge supporter of them also throwing Tones on Tail into the mix. That would be awesome. It would make me and about 5,000 people around the country very happy.
Also, as an aside, the “Night Music” album came with a live bonus track - an appallingly recorded version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” But it was recorded at The Channel, in Boston, which was super exciting for me when I was in school in Alaska and thinking about how I’d go to Boston soon. I loved the Channel. MIss it still.
