…or at least to the Speedies, who were in the New York Times this past Sunday, so maybe now it’s superfluous for me to write about them. Or maybe it means that I have to finish what I started writing about them before the laptop (have I mentioned I hate laptop keyboards? Let me mention it again) ate the entry. (Note to self: hit “save and continue” constantly. After I lost half a day’s work today—good work, the first bit of work at my new job that I was actually proud of, and was even planning to blog about—because Visio decided to crash right after I saved the file and then wouldn’t recover it, my mantra is going to be “Hit save every five seconds” for the rest of my life. But I digress.)

The Times article, like my lost post, focuses on the sudden revival of the song “Let Me Take Your Photograph” via a remixed version that’s being featured in an HP commercial. The article uses Gregory Crewdson, former Speedie and now famous photographer and Yale professor, as its focal point, which seems appropriate to me because in a way, he was my focal point for the band too. Back in my freshman year of college, I moved in with the two frontpeople of a semi-local band, Tina Peel (some of whom later went on to become the much better known Fuzztones); the female half of the couple, Deb O’Nair (real name Carol Krautheim), was a friend of a friend, and the apartment was on a great block in the East Village—this was 1979, and the East Village was barely starting to gentrify, but even then, this was a great block—and my share of the rent was $117/month. So it didn’t seem to matter that after four years of a really longass commute from my family’s apartment on the Upper West Side to my high school in the East Village, I was subjecting myself to almost the exact same commute in reverse, only a few stops longer, from the apartment in the East Village to college up in Morningside Heights, in upper Manhattan. (And adding a ten-minute-on-a-good-day walk to the subway to the mix, since we lived between Avenues A and B and the most logical subway stop to go to was way over on Eighth Street/Astor Place and Broadway. But I digress.) And for a while, till my roommates became totally insufferable, it was a great setup, because I was Miss Punk Rock then anyway, and it didn’t matter that I missed most of my 9 a.m. biology classes that first semester (a small problem since I was a bio major at the time) because I was staying out every night at Club 57 or my beloved Tier 3 or Hurrah or wherever, and even on nights when I stayed in, my roommates had to walk through my bedroom when they came in at 4 a.m. and open the squeaky door to their bedroom because it was a railroad flat. It didn’t matter; I was living exactly the life I’d wanted to lead for years.

Tina Peel’s manager was also one of the partners (owners? managers? I can’t remember anymore) of the great Upper West Side club Hurrah, so we were there all the time even when Tina Peel weren’t playing (that is, when I wasn’t hanging out with my high school friends at Tier 3, a club so brilliant that I can’t even describe it adequately), and partly because of my own connections (I wrote for New York Rocker, and I knew some people who knew some people, that was how it went then) and partly because of my roommates, I got to meet all sorts of bands, both touring ones (hanging out with Madness at Irving Plaza remains one of my fondest memories, though not quite as fond as my memory of hanging out with the Gang of Four on their very first US dates…but that’s really a story for another day) and local ones, including the Speedies.

Back then, the NYC teen punk scene had some really silly rivalries, none of which anyone took very seriously, but there they were. I was spending a lot of time with some little girls (I’m not being condescending there; in addition to being four years younger than me, they really were little–the tallest was 5’0″, I think) who didn’t actually go to my high school, or at least didn’t go there for long, but were vaguely affiliated with it—it was kind of a small scene, and everyone knew someone who went to my high school. I knew them through a guy named Allan Hart, who was one of maybe six or seven punks in my high school when I was still there. Anyway, these little girls and their crowd, the fringe of which I sometimes lurked on, were Stimulators fans. The Stimulators were a hardcore punk band, known mostly for their extraordinarily young (and rather talented) drummer, Harley Flanagan, who I think was about 12 at this time. He was what gave them their notoriety, but they were a good band regardless, and always fun to see live. (And in a weird confluence of eras of my musical life, they gave Soul Asylum their original name: the Stims’ slogan was “Loud Fast Rules,” and the Soul Asylum boys had no idea who the Stimulators were, but they saw the slogan on a photo of the back of someone’s jacket and liked it, in kind of a semi-ironic way, enough to call their band that before changing the name to Soul Asylum. But yet again, I digress.)

Anyway, if you liked the Stimulators, you weren’t supposed to like the much poppier and sweeter-sounding and “nicer” Speedies. There are those who were there then who will now deny that those rivalries existed, but trust me, they did; when I started becoming friends with the Speedies as people, I always had to make sure none of my Stims-fan friends saw me. To complicate matters further, the Speedies had a different sort of rivalry with a semi-local (half from NYC, half from the Westchester suburbs of Larchmont and Mamaroneck) band called the Student Teachers. I loved the Stims and got into them because I wanted to be in with that in crowd, but I purely adored the Student Teachers, who were smartypants but melodic, depressive but catchy, and totally irresistible. (Their guitar player, Philip Shelley, went on to go to Columbia at the same time that I did, and we were friends; he and a later-legendary guy named Ned Hayden, who didn’t go to Columbia (he went to Clark) but spent so much time there that he might as well have, wrote some truly amazing songs together.) Gosh I loved the Teachers. And if you were a Teachers fan, you were really supposed to hate the Speedies.

It wasn’t actually that hard to hate the Speedies, because despite having a good ear for melody (mostly courtesy of their bass player, John Carlucci) and some great guitar playing (thanks to Eric Hoffer and Greg—he was Greg then—Crewdson), they were incredibly annoying due to the insufferable mannerisms of their singer, John Marino. I can’t really imagine what it was like to be gay in high school in that era, and I know a lot of John’s campiness was defensive, but that still didn’t make him a good or even tolerable singer. The fact that he sang in a fake British accent half the time didn’t help; Joey Ramone could get away with that, but only Joey. (When I first heard the remix of “Let Me Take Your Photograph” in the HP ad, I thought it was not a remix but a cover, because John Marino redid the vocal, I guess, and he toned the Brit accent and the mannerisms way down.)

So I didn’t have any trouble maintaining allegiance to the Stims and the Teachers…except that John Carlucci was really good friends with my roommates from Tina Peel, Deb and Rudi. He still lived with his parents in Queens back then, so he stayed at our apartment a lot when he didn’t want to make the trek back to Queens, and even when the two bands weren’t sharing a bill, he’d often come over just to hang out. I had a sort of vague, half-hearted crush on him; he was incredibly cute, so I knew he was way out of my league (even back then, when I had a great body and lots of style), but he was so adorable that it seemed almost silly not to have at least a little crush on him. He was also a sweetie, not the brightest guy on the planet, but good-hearted and lots of fun to be around. And through him, and through Tina Peel and the Speedies playing an increasing number of shows together, I got to know the rest of the band (except for John Marino—he never seemed to register my existence, which was fine with me). I honestly don’t remember Alan, the drummer, very well at all, except that he was a nice guy. I remember that Eric was a sweetie, and even then, his academic brilliance was obvious; when I read that he had gone on to work at Apple (and Sun Microsystems, I think) and was one of the developers of QuickTime, I wasn’t even faintly surprised. Eric was quiet and a little shy and tended to huddle quietly in the corner with his girlfriend, whom he’d been with forever, but I still considered him kind of a friend.

But it was Greg who was really my pal. Greg had a girlfriend too in those days, and I don’t think we were ever interested in each other romantically even on a theoretical basis; at any rate, there was a sort of tacit agreement between us that we were friends and nothing more. But we were sure good friends; he was one of those people you sometimes meet and instantly feel like you’ve known forever. All those memories are kind of hazy now, but I remember that as soon as I walked into the backstage area of whatever club they were all playing, he and I would gravitate toward each other and just talk and talk and talk. “Soulmate” would be way, way too strong a word, because we didn’t spend that much time together and it wasn’t that intense, but he was someone who I just clicked with, in that magical way that doesn’t happen all that often.

None of it lasted all that long. Roommate Rudi (real name: Glenn Dalpis) was truly hideous to live with—he was 26 then, the same age as my oldest brother, and he had the maturity level of a particularly immature 12-year-old—and ultimately, I fell out with them and moved back home for a while. After that, I didn’t go to Speedies gigs much, and eventually I stopped going at all. I’d still see John Carlucci (who was always friendly to me) from time to time at shows, but somehow I rarely ran into the other guys. I moved farther uptown, closer to school, made friends there and started paying more attention to Britpunk than to the local scene, and so Eric and Greg, my favorite Speedies, just sort of slipped out of my world and eventually out of my memory; it wasn’t until a number of years later, when I started to see Greg (who was by then Gregory) written up in the Village Voice or even The New Yorker, that my fond memories came back to me. I was overjoyed for him that he’d become a success, and I went to see some of his exhibits and was very impressed, but not surprised; he wasn’t quite the conspicuous genius that Eric was, but he was smart as hell himself, and gifted, and I was always glad to see him do so well. I’d be truly surprised if he remembered me at all anymore, but I remember him, with great fondness and good feeling.

But now they’re back, those Speedies, on my TV screen on a regular basis (they played the hell out of the HP ad during the US Open). Not that long ago, I finally managed to find an MP3 of a really wretched quality live recording of my favorite Student Teachers song, “Christmas Weather” (I had the single, bought it when it came out, but it’s long since disappeared, on a site that Teachers’ lead singer and frontguy David Scharff set up, and that was a thrill too. A better musical thrill, I might add—the Teachers are still a better band. Old rivalries die hard, I guess. And those old memories, vaguer and vaguer all the time now, are all good ones, so even though every single one of the Speedies seems to have done just fine (better than fine, really) in their post-punk-teen life, I hope they’re making some big money off that ad. In my heart, if not necessarily in my ears, they deserve every penny.