30 years of Faith

                                                 
                                           "Faith" -- George Michael

I saw a Facebook item about the 30th anniversary of George Michael's Faith album. I wish I would've read it. Can't find it now.

When George Michael died last year, my mind drifted back to what a groundbreaking accomplishment Faith was. It was artistry. True pop craftsmanship. I wouldn't call it a sense of Heaven or sublime pop infinity. That's a definition I reserve for works like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque, but Faith moved me.

I was primarily a hard rock and metal fan (even though I'd mostly been metaled out by the time I turned 16). Around the same time Michael's album came out, I was listening to Metallica's Master of Puppets. The first sign that this was a great album was the funky, in-your-face "I Want Your Sex." I knew the title was indicative of all the hell my mother said society was sliding into (even though she had a youthful record collection that entailed the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."

But although it was outside my essence, I liked the song.

My friend Alana remembers me working at Western Sizzlin' steakhouse where I stacked a bunch of plates off tables and pushed a cart around. I was naive, green, but an older guy at the restaurant -- Brett, a 21-year-old attending Emporia State University -- was a man of the world. He explained to me how "I Want Your Sex" was an "anti-Aids song." The lyrics, "sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it's one-on-one" celebrated monogamy. It was socially interesting in an era when the President's response to the AIDS crisis was no response -- ignoring. After all, it was a gay men's disease and who cared about them.

George Michael

This was year's before Michael would come out rather infamously, getting busted for soliciting gay sex at a public restroom only a few blocks from his house. He'd abandoned the effeminate Big Hair look he'd had as part of the pop duo, Wham. ("I thought he looked like a fag." Yes, I actually made this unpalatable quote and said that ugly word to a friend 30 years ago. I've sinned in my life.) In the video for the song, "Faith," he'd adopted an early Brando-Elvisish retro look -- the leather jacket and boots and all -- that looked surprisingly contemporary and new again.

The song lived up to its title with a cathedral organ, followed by an up-tempo Bo Didley signature chugga-chugga guitar sound, acoustic, neo-rockabilly and pleasantly pop. It was catchy. Around 10 years later, I would love Limp Bizkit's rocking cover of the song. That version had a sense of humor about it.

The superior pop vibe of Faith came across most acutely in songs like "One More Time" and "Father Figure" -- my favorite cuts from the album. I hadn't had any sex or love affairs yet so I didn't know what the hell it was all about, but I sensed from these songs that there were things dark and psychologically troubling in the universe of love.

I worked with another guy, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Lighthouse, at Grossmont Community College in nearby Beaulah, Kan. Along with being a waiter, he moonlighted as a dee jay and he told me the kids went crazy at middle school dances when he played "Father Figure." I wondered why and was compelled to speculate. It was obvious even to my young mind the song was about psychological projection and dysfunctional love. A father figure? The high-tech pop-soul-gospel-harmony of the song. What was it that drew in these kids?

The album wasn't cock-oriented hard rock, but I could more freely admit I liked it after reading a Rolling Stone profile of Guns n' Roses that Axl Rose listened to George Michael. But he also listened to things like Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime, an album Rose described as "the best screenplay I've ever heard." The one album that affected me more than Faith 30 years ago -- a favorite to this day -- was GnR's classic debut Appetite for Destruction. The pop crossover of the jangly, rough "Sweet Child O' Mine" largely signaled the enveloping of a musical landscape I would explore, if not as a musician, than as a writer.

In 1987, Michael Jackson recorded his Bad album, which I've always believed exceeded Thriller. Prince recorded his most critically acclaimed work, Sign o' the Times. A year later, my mind would be opened more by such albums as the Cowboy Junkies The Trinity Sessions, Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust and the Sugarcubes' Life's Too Good.

But largely, the '80s were a suck decade. Bland. Insipid. Uninspired. Mirroring the empty materialism perpetuated in the decade. At least in the confined Top 40. Disasters like Foreigner, Loverboy, Nightranger, Warrant were tragic jokes. Synthesizers and plastic-pop pretensions were vapid and lacking anything resembling punch. I consider The Smiths to be the antidote to such wasted pop contrivances.

Alex Chilton

But it was all going to open up for me. In 1987, I also discovered Minneapolis, Minnesota's The Replacement's Pleased to Meet Me album -- its cut, "Alex Chilton" getting play on the local AOR (album oriented rock) station. This would lead me down the rabbit hole of Hootenanny and Let it Be -- introducing me to Memphis cult figure Chilton and his ground breaking early 70s band, Big Star, just as the Stones would turn me on to black music -- everything from Marvin Gaye to Solomon Burke to Howlin' Wolf to Muddy Waters, back to Robert Johnson -- as George Michael's "Kissing a Fool," with its retro pre-rock pop sound would turn me on to Sinatra, Dean Martin and that whole cocktail era.

Thirty years later I'm still opening doors -- in music, film, television, literature. Still going down rabbit holes. (Have you read John Updike's 1960 novel Rabbit, Run?)

Before I sign off, let's look at some other groundbreaking music from the '87-89 period.

                                "Smooth Criminal" -- Michael Jackson

                                 
                                              "Teenage Riot" -- Sonic Youth