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"If that's what we listen to..."




When we were in high school in the late-80s, the only friends I had were the nerd girls, many of whom were in the orchestra. In order to differentiate themselves from the popular kids, the nerd girls tried to find genres of popular music outside the norm. At our school, one such genre was heavy metal. So while you might have liked thrash (here in the Bay Area, thrash was king), you met the girl somewhere in the middle. True, because many of our girls were classically trained, they understood the neoclassical metal shredders, which were somewhat popular then. But we all agreed on glam metal, and if you set aside biases, power ballads brought you closer, or finished the deal, with one of the nerd girls.

After school on Fridays, my friends and I liked to stay on campus, and play sports. But after Halloween, Standard Time meant that it got dark earlier. So one time, a couple girls accompanied me across the City. We went to a small store called Maybrun's, on Van Ness near Bush. They carried, among others, Mordaunt-Short and Paradigm. I already had electronics, so I wanted speakers.

We have no idea why the salesmen assessed us, and proceeded to play some awful faux-jazz lounge chick singer. The girls politely asked for rock, and at least the staff had Tom Petty and Steve Winwood. But one of the girls demurred, "No, something heavier."

Awkward silence. A salesman asked what she had in mind, and she named bands like Iron Maiden, Stryper, and Testament. The salesman didn't know how to react. The girl whispered to Stephanie, "If that's what we listen to, why wouldn't we want to" hear it on the store's equipment?

The salesman didn't appear to like it, when Stephanie rummaged through her LeSportsac, past some tampons, and pulled out the Scorpions' Savage Amusement cassette [some of us, but not these two girls, had seen the Scorpions at the Cow Palace in October 1988]. She popped it into a Kenwood tape deck. More awkward silence followed, when she had to fast forward to "Believe In Love," the last song on side two. It was kind of a toss-up, between two bookshelf Mordant-Short and Paradigm speakers.

Hahaha, for her physics final, Stephanie [at UC Davis, she did some kind of animal science, and still, I believe, works for the USDA] was daydreaming too much about us going out to play team sports, and couldn't even spell "Coulomb." But even back in 1988, a high school non-audiophile like Stephanie knew that, if you were to buy a speaker, you'd use it in your own home, with your own genres of music. So when auditioning prospective products, you damn well better use the music you like and know well.

-Lummy The Loch Monster



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