The Psychedelic Furs – Forever Now

So even though I was already aware of The Psychedelic Furs as a concept, having seen that first record hanging around at Desert Shore, it wasn’t until “Forever Now” was released in 1982 and hit in a big way on MTV that I really heard their songs, so this was their first album that I bought.

As usual, when a band switches producers (and loses key members) and suddenly becomes a success, they’re called a sellout. This is a much more pop album than either of their previous efforts. In fact, once I dug into the prior two albums, I came to really prefer their rougher edges (and those buried sax lines) that had been polished on this one. But that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of “Forever Now”. Perhaps less edgy, it still carried a sense of frustration with the times, especially in “President Gas” (“Open up your eyes just to check that you’re asleep again”), and “Love My Way” was, in my memory, an MTV staple. Neither it nor the album did spectacularly well on the charts, but the charts aren’t a good indicator of what was in the consciousness of northeastern college students in 1982, I’d say, because the Furs were huge to us.

This was our final year of college (most of our household was on some version of the five-year plan). I think we were all more than a little burned out; I know I was. It was not a pleasant year. But when we added cable television to our financial burdens, at least we had another form of entertainment besides our records. Hooked up to a gigantic black and white console TV passed on from my parents (who finally gave in to the color revolution after I had left the house in 1978, but they were far from the only laggards on that front – I personally didn’t own a color television until the mid-1990s, when we inherited one). The addition of television came with a sudden addiction to “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Twilight Zone,” to MTV and the then brand-new “Late Night With David Letterman,” which was the most bonkers version of a late night talk show we’d ever seen or imagined, and fit in perfectly with the college lifestyle because when weren’t we still up at 12:30? (Apologies to any roommates who were trying to sleep.)

My roommate Danny and I had pivoted from our previous impassioned love of everything ‘60s, particularly everything British Invasion, into an embrace of New Wave, as he came back from far-flung summers and semesters away with new musical experiences that, believe me, Syracuse radio was not providing us. And then came MTV, when it was nothing but music videos, and very heavily new wave music videos. Suddenly there was a source to tell us about new music, and we rode that MTV wave hard. Soft Cell became our number one MTV-related obsession, rivaling our love of The Beatles as our identifying mark. Then there were Thomas Dolby, Human League, Stray Cats, A Flock of Seagulls, Squeeze, and more – and Psychedelic Furs. While all that stuff seemed to be lumped under the catch-all of New Wave, it was really a huge spectrum of styles being promoted and played all at the same time, and the music world seemed wide open.

“Love My Way” came out, and truly, it didn’t sound like anything else to me. That odd nasally rasp of Richard Butler’s voice carried a punk bleat over a melodic, hypnotic little marimba line. The rest of the album was even a touch darker in subject matter, just a bit angry, and really really good. Did I know at the time that two of my heroes, Flo & Eddie, did important backing vocals on “Love My Way”, as well as several other songs? I did not. I did know that Todd Rundgren produced this (instead of Steve Lillywhite, their previous producer), but I was never a big Rundgren fan so that wouldn’t have carried any particular weight. He didn’t ruin it.

As I mentioned in the last entries, our excitement over this album caused me to immediately go back to their first two offerings, which I loved even more. But this was the album that seemed to be playing everywhere. We were very fortunate that in the spring of 1983, the Psychedelic Furs performed a free concert in Syracuse’s Walnut Park, and we were blown away by how good they were live. (And yes, we were annoyed by the thousands who were there just because it was a free show in the park and didn’t care who was on stage, but we were way into it.) Of all the free concerts that had been put on in our five years at Syracuse, this was the first time there was a band we actually cared about, so that felt pretty cool, and like we were part of something going on in the culture. That didn’t happen too often. It was a bright spot in a spring that otherwise felt like things were coming to an odd end, and very soon.

Just a few weeks after that show, college would be over, some of us would have actually graduated (and this one of us, it turns out, would have been given very bad information). We were done with school, had to survive another summer in the same apartment and then figure out where and how Lee and I were going to live our lives together. It turned out beautifully, in fact.

“So swallow all your tears, my love
And put on your new face
You can never win or lose
If you don’t run the race”