I want to preface this by saying that this piece is full of music links, and you really need to click on all of them, even if to absorb what they are for a few seconds. The music enhances the entire 90s experience that I am writing about, and I would have been remiss in my duties as someone chronicling a blip of that decade without including them. Writing this, I had them all on play, and it was like time-travel. Enjoy! Oh, and enjoy that header pic of yours truly.

It would take an entirely new, separate blog to describe what it was like to come of age in the 90s.  I might even do it.  I don’t want to sound like a Baby Boomer rhapsodizing about how they experienced their youth in the greatest decade ever (although, let’s face it, they did witness the birth and evolution of rock & roll that went from novelty ditties like “Who Wears Short Shorts,”  to the art rock of The Who, and tying it all up with that face melter, Jimi Hendrix), but being a kid and then a young adult in my decade was a pretty fantastic experience, to put it mildly.  

Things in the 90s started off embarrassingly—kind of like this, although I will forever maintain that this song from the then-massive hair metal scene makes me want to screw a stranger, beat him up, then wake up in a zoo.  Then, as we all know, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana annihilated all of that with one song.  I don’t need to link to it.  It’s legendary.  It’s actually become classic rock now, which makes me feel nauseatingly ancient, since classic rock is supposed to be this sort of overplayed CFOX twaddle.

I loved Teen Spirit, as did everyone.  It was one of those rare songs that brought people together, no matter what their musical genre of choice was; I can’t think of the last song that had such an effect on everyone.  Maybe Hey Ya?  And that was twenty years ago.  But back to Nirvana: that song, and its iconic video, and its power, spun my generation round into a 180, allowing many of us to ditch the facade and just be ourselves.  Half the people in my high school (myself included) suddenly started combing through Value Village for plaid flannel shirts and baggy corduroy pants and vintage T-shirts they could wear over long-sleeved shirts.  Doc Martens, Chuck Taylors, and Vans appeared on their feet instead of Reebok high-top trainers and pointy patent-leather flats.  The boys grew their hair long; the girls ditched most of their makeup.  We finally had permission to look as unkempt as we felt, and to feel comfortable when we generally didn’t.  It was glorious.  It was a very unisex time.  

Grunge didn’t last for very long; once Kurt turned his head into ground hamburger, it officially went kaput.  He ushered in an era almost overnight, then curb-stomped it to smithereens just as quickly.  It lasted from late 1991 until early 1994, and then the next few years were a blissful time of equality in music, at least: women defiantly picked up guitars and drumsticks and basses and started bands and wrote rock-ass songs without ridicule, and their fans were comprised of as many young men as women.  Lilith Fair happened.  Feminism was the norm.  My generation was almost, almost there as far as changing the world and achieving true egalitarianism.  

…then the powers that be and the music industry decided that this would not do, and brought in an uneducated teenage girl with a stage mother from a hick town in Louisiana, turned her into an appallingly lascivious Lolita-type pop star, and it’s never been the same since.  In fact, everything has just gotten worse.

There’s your ninety-second summary of music and Generation X in the 90s.

*   *   *   *   *

I wasn’t really a grunge fan.  Everyone was set afire by That Song, but apart from the relief of being able to finally express myself aesthetically (I’d always just expressed myself verbally and through the written word), the music was just too…depressing.  Too minor-key, still too dominated by men, it didn’t have the sort of energy that I was attracted to in music, and the lyrics were not uplifting whatsoever.  Not at all.  I wasn’t into Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains, nor any of those fellas who led the scene with many imitators in their wake.  No, I was very much drawn to old-school 70s punk and goth instead: The Damned.  The New York Dolls. The Clash.  Bauhaus, of course (I eventually went full-speed, velvet-cape, black-lipstick gotharoonie for a few years).  The Sex Pistols, naturally.  

And my favourite band in the world back then, The Ramones.

(My favourite bands changed every few years until my 30s. Then, I just listened to everything I had ever listened to up until that point, and I still kind of do.)

While my peers were skateboarding around to this sort of stuff–and that’s perfectly fine, as it was the sound of the era–I was much, much more interested in the four guys from Queens who had matching costumes, always looked sulky, and played what sounded like the same song again and again…except if you listened carefully, it really wasn’t.  They just played their tunes so quickly, and with such a warp-speed fuzzy guitar, that it seemed that way.  Sure, they may have used the same four or five chords in many of them, but so what?  How many do you need?

Dee Dee wrote most of the songs, which were mainly about mental institutions, mentally-ill women, men, and children, medication, and love.  This was because Dee Dee was bipolar and had spent some time in an institution, but he was also really quite the romantic. The two are not mutually exclusive, thanks.

And so had the real treat of the band, the lead singer, Joey, with his crippling OCD.

Look, I know Joey wasn’t typically good-looking with his M&M-sized eyes and caved-in mouth and dearth of chin, but a teenage girl will always, always daydream about and develop intense crushes on lead singers in rock bands, no matter how utterly plain or even teeth-grindingly hideous they might be.  It’s just how it goes, and it’s a tale as old as…rock & roll.  Joey was the lead singer of my band, and I thought he was the sexiest thing in pink-tinted glasses.  

My best friend Allison, whom I wrote about in my last, fairly sombre blog post, hadn’t really been much of a fan (she wasn’t, surprisingly, into a lot of music, but had been listening to really hardcore thrash punk because her boyfriend at the time was into it) but when she learned I was obsessed with The Ramones in the way only teenagers can become obsessed with bands–I had the requisite Joey collage on my bedroom wall–she started listening, and became a massive fan, too.  It was great.  I could share my obsession with somebody who completely understood, and would talk about the band with me for hours, and tolerate my Joey yearnings, and patiently watch “Rock & Roll High School” with me on repeat since I rented it almost every week from the video store (RIP Rogers Video), listen to the same albums again and again in my company, and she also happened to be my closest pal.  

We would hash out what our favourite songs and albums were, and I could list our choices and dialogue here, but that’s not the point of this story.  Suffice it to say that, after a lot of difficulty and wading through so much excellent material, we agreed this was likely their best and most accessible song, but I singled out this track as their best, while she was partial to this one.  

Of course, we were both right.

So when I heard The Ramones were coming to Vancouver on their Mondo Bizarro tour in 1992, you can only imagine how I felt: I felt as though God were delivering Joey Ramone to me on a gold-plated record, right when I was smack-dab in the middle of my pubescent infatuation with his six-foot-five frame.  It seemed like destiny.  The only problem was, they were playing The Commodore Ballroom in October, which is the best venue in Vancouver, and which was licensed…meaning you had to be nineteen years old to enter.

I was sixteen with a very noticeable baby face padded with baby fat.  If, at my current age of forty-eight I look about thirty-nine (or so I’ve been told), at sixteen years old I looked seven.  This wasn’t going to work.  But there was also no way I wasn’t going to go.  THERE WAS NO WAY I WASN’T GOING TO GO.

Allison and I finagled tickets the way you did back then, which was to sit and patiently call Ticketmaster over and over again until the busy signal gave way to a steady ring, then you gave your credit card number (thanks, mum!).  I had already been to many, many metal shows at Pacific Coliseum, which were all-ages, but this was a new galaxy to me.  A venue I couldn’t enter?  And my favourite band was playing there?  With my future husband not knowing he was about to be swept off his feet by a suburban adolescent who didn’t even have her driver’s license?

…come to think of it, that unseemly scenario sounds just about perfect for many rock stars, and has been for decades.

Allison was nineteen years old.  She had been held back in school for a year in Winnipeg, then got kicked out for a year, which is how we became classmates. Her birthday was in May, while mine is in December.  She had legal I.D. proving her age, while all I had was a bank card. There were some imbalances at play here that were not going to work out in my favour, and I was getting nervous.  There had to be a way.  There just had to.

“What am I gonna do?” I whined to her about thirty times every day.  “How am I gonna get in?”

“We’ll figure it out.  There’s time. I think I can do something.” It was early September, I believe.  The show was in a month.  

Then, one day, she gave me the information I needed to hear.

“You’re going,” she told me triumphantly one afternoon.  “And you can thank Tyson’s friend Kick!”  Tyson was her boyfriend, whom I thought was a complete schmuck and weasel, but whatever.  He wasn’t my boyfriend.  Joey was. 

“Kick?”

“He has his own place on Hastings and Cambie and makes fake I.D.s,” she explained.  “He’s got a bunch of businesses.  We’re getting you a fake I.D., and you’re going to the show.”

Well, obviously.  Now, why this idea didn’t occur to me immediately makes me sound as though I might have been a student in the Special Ed class in high school, but you have to understand something: at sixteen I may have hung around with a merry band of punks and gone to nutty parties and dressed the way we kids did and such, but I was fairly naive, and I was a good girl, and I got good grades, and I was straight-edge.  Unlike a lot of my friends and peers, I didn’t ever do drugs or drink.  I didn’t get high until I was seventeen, and I didn’t even seriously start drinking until I was 24 (and look how well that turned out).  So scams like fake I.D.s didn’t really feature in my world.

“YESSSSSSSSSS!”  I squealed in that teenage-idiot way.  I loved The Ramones, I loved their music, and I was going to see Joey Ramone in the leather-clad, hunched-over, torn-denim flesh!

Not long after this, Allison, Tyson (great), and I went downtown to Kick’s studio to get the fake identification made.  All I had needed to do was bring a passport photo that he would resize and re-image so I wouldn’t look so juvenile, and twenty dollars for his fee.  

We went up to Kick’s studio, which was straight across from Victory Square in the same building the old Spartacus Books was once a tenant.  He was in his twenties, had long dark hair with a matching beard, and seemed like a decent chap.  I later learned he was also in this goofy, totally overlooked local band called Vertical After that perhaps nine people know about, myself being one of them.  

“Okay, let’s put this together!” he said.  I honestly can’t remember much of what happened next, apart from the three of us hanging out while Kick did what he had to do in order to get me in to see my band.  Sat around and smoked, probably.  Everyone smoked back then.  Everyone.  It was three-fifty a pack, the smoking age was sixteen, and you could do it everywhere except hospitals and airports by that point.  But who cared about those?  So long as you could sit in the 24-hour coffee shop Bino’s for hours, puffing away and getting constant refills on your horrible brew, that’s all that mattered.  Oh, and the food court in the mall: smoking there was important, too.

“Here you go,” said Kick, handing over my new fake I.D.

I took it from him, and something seemed awfully wrong about it.

I hadn’t seen a single fake I.D. in my life at that point, but even I knew this was janky in a very real way.  It was the size of, well, the only thing I can compare it to now is the size of a smartphone.  My photo took up at least one-third of it, and I still looked like I played on the kitchen floor with blocks.  The font was, I believe, what we would now call courier.  Y’know, the typewriter font.  The entire laminated mess was stark white and may have even had a red border.  God, I wish I had kept this thing!

“Uh, thanks, Kick,” I said, handing over my twenty-dollar bill.  Well, it was better than nothing.  I was going to see The Ramones, Allison was nineteen with proper identification, and worst-case scenario, I would just sort of slide behind her and flash this massive rectangle to the door person so quickly they wouldn’t know what they were looking at.  Right?

Right!

To be continued, because this goes on for a bit and all of these links have me beat!  

(Oh yeah…follow me on Facebook if you want. I’m Nadz Vera and you know what I look like. Also reach me at nadya@nadzvera.com)