It feels pretty good to be a jaded teenager. My friend Joachim and I were laughing the other night about being 18 and suffering this summertime city heat, hazy air and sticky clothes, always wanting to go to movies just to be in the air conditioning for a couple of hours. It was always really important to point out how we didn't even care what movie it was, that the point was to just get out of the heat. Showing up to the theater and just seeing whatever was next. Joe's Apartment. Cable Guy. Eraser. Sitting in the back and making sarcastic comments about everything around us.
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But in retrospect I feel a little bad about the whole thing, about laughing at every act of heroics, about shaking my head in disbelief through the silliness of Hollywood romance. Not bad like guilty, bad like it's a shame that our generation was never dazzled by the movies. We never admired anyone, we never fell in love; not like our parents did. And if we did put photos of movie stars on our walls, they were from a different generation, Jean Seberg or Kim Novak, like we recognized the glamour but also knew it didn't exist today.
Around this same summer I was at my friend Robin's house talking about Lois Maffeo. If I had to guess I would bet that we were both wearing corduroy pants, and we were both amped up about how sweet Lois is, or more appropriately how bittersweet she is. The song "Wet Eyes", how could it be so sad and so pretty? So few chords on an acoustic guitar and her warm, low voice, the part where she talks about dying "100 times nightly/but I did it politely" and when I wasn't busy being too jaded to feel anything that was exactly how I felt. Robin asked if I had ever heard the Marine Girls. I hadn't, and when he came back from his room carrying two plain-looking LPs with these awkward-looking girls on them it was immediate, this was my new favorite.
I couldn't believe that there was a precursor to the empty, homemade, lovesick music that I was obsessed with, that there were bands in the early 80s that felt satisfied with a couple of looping notes on the guitar and two gleeful, sort-of harmonized voices dancing around them with handclaps and "la-la-la's". The group was made of of two sisters-Jane and Alice Fox, and their schoolmate Tracey Thorn. It was perfect. I found a CD that had both of their LPs, and then really flipped out when I found Tracey Thorn's solo LP, "A Distant Shore", recorded just after the Marine Girls ended. The cover has a drawing of a girl sitting in a beach chair, her chin resting in her hands, her gaze focused so far away from anything in her surroundings. The songs sound identical to the drawing; wistful, calm, spare. At the record store I found out that she went on to be in the band Everything But the Girl, who were apparently much more famous and important to the history of music. I didn't like them, but in a collection of their records sold to a shop in D.C. my friend Amy found a Tracey Thorn 7" from 1983 with two songs we'd never heard.
The song "Goodbye Joe" is sung with such ache and melancholy, the word "goodbye" repeated over and over, that it could only be a love song. But it's a love song to a movie star, for sitting in the dark and being overwhelmed by how "he looks so good in technicolor." At each chorus, another little guitar part enters, this sweet slowdance of notes swelling alongside her rising voice, the richness of her devotion growing at every turn. It's sung with such sincerity there could be no question that Thorn was writing from her own experience, from sitting in the back row herself and daydreaming kisses.
But it turns out the song was written by The Monochrome Set, who released their own version a year earlier. I like the Monochrome Set, they had a nice, well-educated take on the early-80s Rough Trade sound. The singer was some sort of royalty, so, you know, if Mark E. Smith was a prince, how the Fall would sound. Their version is good, it's clearly one of the most heartfelt moments of their career, but it can't compare with her single. I know I'm informed by the fact that I heard Thorn's first, but I can't shake the feeling that hers is the authentic, theirs is the tribute. It's not a thing that happens very often, covers surpassing originals, and it adds even more weight to this magical song.
I always wanted more people to know about The Marine Girls and especially Tracey Thorn's solo career, waited to see her covered by Elliott Smith live, or name-checked by Belle & Sebastian, or (more absurdly) to read Chan Marshall describe how Thorn's version of "Goodbye Joe" inspired her to make the Cat Power Covers Record. "A Distant Shore" has been reissued from time to time, occasionally on vinyl, but "Goodbye Joe" has just disappeared, too sadly similar to the daydreamy allure of the movies it obsesses over.
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