(6) CONCRETE BLONDE, “EVERYBODY KNOWS”
held off
(2) Pet Shop Boys, “Always on My Mind”
215-211
and will play in the elite 8

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dan kois on pet shop boys’ “always on my mind”

In an apocalyptically abandoned railyard, two men brood in leather and fog. One, wearing aviator sunglasses, sits on an oil drum, hands on knees, head cocked just so. The other stands in silhouette, playing a synthesizer, intimidating in military cap and collar. Smoke billows everywhere. All is red, red as a sunset, red as the inside of a heart.
In 1987 the Pet Shop Boys agreed to perform at a televised tribute concert dedicated to the music of Elvis Presley. The duo, fresh off the success of “West End Girls,” were no fans of the King—well, Chris Lowe allowed, he appreciated Elvis’ “bloated Vegas period”—but saw the opportunities manifest in appearing on television across the U.K. As chronicled by guru of cover songs and tribute albums Ray Padgett, when their manager delivered a pile of Elvis cassettes with instructions to choose a song, the Pet Shop Boys picked the first track off the first tape they heard, simply so they wouldn’t have to listen to any more.
That song was “Always on My Mind,” a B-side recorded by Elvis right around the time his marriage with Priscilla was breaking up. Much more popular than Elvis’ version was Willie Nelson’s mournful 1982 country No. 1, which replaced Elvis’ orchestral bathos with piano and pedal steel, but which still ended with Willie leading a glorious chorus of angels. The Pet Shop Boys’ acid house-inspired cover felt similarly redefining, especially contrasted with the likes of Meat Loaf singing “American Trilogy” on the television tribute’s retro diner set.

The group released the track as a single shortly afterward, and the song went to No. 1 in Britain. In the U.S., “Always on My Mind” was packaged as a CD single and shrink-wrapped alongside some copies of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 album Actually. That’s how I first encountered it, when for my 13th birthday my parents bought me a CD player and my brother bought me Actually. 
In an unguarded moment years later, my brother, five years my senior, told me he chose the Pet Shop Boys because he suspected I was gay and hoped the album might help me on that journey. I can see why he might have thought that. I was artsy, finicky, unathletic. More than that, I was sharp-tongued and witty, and took great pride in those qualities. I was obviously striving toward a kind of verbal sophistication, an urbanity, that I’m not surprised read, in our Wisconsin suburb, as queerness. I didn’t fit in, was proud not to fit in. I was a perfect target for the Pet Shop Boys’ music.
In its irreverence—indeed, its distaste—for its source material, the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind” is working in a different register than many popular cover songs. Among the tracks in this year’s March Faxness, only a handful display even a hint of archness toward their origins. Even covers that one might expect to come from a place of disdain—the Mountain Goats’ cover of synthetic ‘90s hitmakers Ace of Base, for example—reveal themselves, upon listening, as celebrations of the originals’ tunefulness.
Or perhaps in expressing that expectation, I’m revealing my own generational cynicism. In 1987, I was just developing an aestheticism that didn’t allow for appreciation of music I viewed as simplistic, whether that took the form of Elvis’ opulence or Willie’s plainspokenness—but which did approve of a pair of British dance musicians taking a song they simply didn’t like and recasting it until they did. It seemed a thrillingly clever thing to do, snobbery in its ideal form, snobbery to aspire to—for what is snobbery, I thought then, but taste, exerted without compromise?
Just listening to the Pet Shop Boys, it was clear they had taste. They weren’t dismissive about pop music—“The Pet Shop Boys genuinely love pop music, which makes them quite rare in the music business,” Neil Tennant once told an interviewer—but about the preening and posturing that’s so much a part of the rock tradition. The journalist Chris Heath’s two remarkable books about the Pet Shop Boys—Pet Shop Boys, Literally (1990) and Pet Shop Boys versus America (1993)—include the duo’s quite astonishingly candid appraisals of nearly everyone in the contemporary pop and rock firmament. (Tennant on U2: “They’re saying nothing but they’re pretending to be something. I think they’re fake.”)
Throughout the books, which chronicle, respectively, the group’s very first tour ever (of Japan and England) and their first tour of America, Lowe and Tennant constantly enact a game which Heath calls “Let’s Play at Being Tragic Rock ‘n’ Roll Stars.” (Lowe pretends to chug a bottle of whiskey at a duty-free shop, that kind of thing.) “The point of it,” Heath writes, “is of course to emphasize how far removed they really are from all that.” Onstage, the pair abjure all rock-concert cliches, and each is ruthless with the other if he observes the slightest hint of what they view as pandering: a fist raised in the air, a mid-song “whoo!” “Don’t look triumphant,” Lowe warned Tennant just before the group’s very first TV appearance on Top of the Pops, even as “West End Girls” ascended to No. 1.
But of course despite their careful self-presentation the two love being pop stars, love making music, and love when people love their songs. This leads, in the Heath books, to delightful moments like Lowe, onstage in a stadium before thousands of fans in Hong Kong, standing completely still on stage during every song and then, the moment the lights go down, dancing furiously in place—because, he says, “it’s so exciting.”
Something in me connected in 1987 both to this skill and enthusiasm for a particular kind of artwork, the pop song, and this disdain for pompous spectacle. I was a budding fan of what was then called college rock, with little knowledge of dance music, but “Always on My Mind” struck a chord in its understated majesty. “Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died,” Tennant sings, in his reedy tenor, his voice placid underneath a driving beat. “Give me one more chance to keep you satisfied.” The Pet Shop Boys’ song turned pleas into declarations and in doing so rendered them more relatable to me.
To many listeners, I know, Tennant’s delivery transforms the meaning of the song, changing the narrator from a man who’s overcome by sorrow to one who’s offhandedly acknowledging his own shortcomings as a partner, and who doesn’t much care. That’s an interpretation endorsed by the Pet Shop Boys themselves: Tennant has described the song’s narrator as “a selfish and self-obsessed man, who is possibly incapable of love.”
Yet teenage me didn’t hear it that way, and I still don’t. It feels too simple to read Elvis’ moaning as representing authentic sorrow and Tennant’s understated singing as representing unconcern. As a person who’s always struggled to express emotion, someone who has only recently learned not to distrust naked displays of feeling, I still find the former insincere, and the latter a true representation of a person with a limited palette going as far as he can.
Just a few years after I first heard “Always on My Mind,” my first real girlfriend broke up with me. I have a vivid memory of telling a friend of hers what had happened. We were in the high school band room just before rehearsal began, and I explained with a rueful smile that we were no longer together. “You’re smiling about it!” the friend said accusingly. “What’s wrong with you?” She read as callous the thing my body did to keep my face from crumpling, to keep me from expressing an emotion I could only view as embarrassing. I think of this moment when I read Tennant describing what he was trying to accomplish with his vocals. “I thought I sounded very sincere and my voice was dripping with emotion,” he said, “until people started congratulating me on being so deadpan”—accidentally describing not only his singing, but the experience of being a sensitive but stunted young man in the Midwest in the 1980s.
I understood, innately, that I could in liking the Pet Shop Boys’ music set myself apart from other music fans. The group, at the time, felt the same way. In Heath’s books one reason they judge other bands so harshly is because they hold themselves to such a high standard, and believe their fans—their unique, special fans—do the same. They’re constantly comparing their own achievements with those of other groups, and are constantly disgusted at what the result says about the taste of the public. “I don’t mind us not being successful,” Lowe says at one point; “it’s other people’s success I don’t like.”
But of course liking a band doesn’t actually have to mean anything. I wasn’t that unique, or that sophisticated. (For starters, the first CD I bought with my own money was Weird Al’s Even Worse, which shared with the Pet Shop Boys a kind of pleasure in taking the piss out of rock ‘n’ roll, but was hardly emblematic of the urbanity Actually represented.) It didn’t take long for my aspirational taste to harden into the kind of know-nothing snobbery that leads one to disregard whole genres of music without listening to them or even thinking seriously about them.
The Pet Shop Boys realized how ordinary their fans were on their first tour of England, years into their pop careers. It’s the tragic plot, really, of Heath’s first book. He writes:

Before this tour they had enjoyed three and a half years of imagining what Pet Shop Boys fans were like, without ever having to match their ideas up with reality. They knew one thing: whatever Pet Shop Boys fans were, they weren’t the same as other fans.…But it wasn’t like that. The London audience was…just the normal Wembley Arena crowd for a group like the Pet Shop Boys who straddle several markets. The faces may be different when Simply Red play but the overall crowd would look much the same.

“I always imagined people who like us were really quite subversive,” Lowe says, despairing. “The audience is very normal, a lot of them.”

Dan Kois is a writer at Slate and the author of Facing Future (33 1/3, 2009); The World Only Spins Forward (Bloomsbury, 2018, with Isaac Butler); and How to Be a Family (Little, Brown, 2019). His first novel, Vintage Contemporaries, will be published by Harper in 2023.

SRH (SERIOUSLY REVOLUTIONARY HANDBILL!): KARLEIGH FRISBIE BROGAN ON CONCRETE BLONDE’S COVER OF LEONARD COHEN’S “EVERYBODY KNOWS” 

Erica and I pretend-smoked beneath the UA 5 theater’s marquee. It was a warm night, typical for September, but I wore the noisy, stiff leather jacket anyway. It was glossy black and smelled faintly of cigs and Exclamation—left behind at my dad’s apartment by one of his dates. It made me feel badass, like I was the Samantha Mathis character. The “eat-me beat-me lady.” Erica called it my Michael Jackson jacket, which annoyed me because it was way more goth than King of Pop. We wore the matching dog tag necklaces we got at Contempo, almost-black lipstick, and lots of crushed velvet and stretchy lace. We were fourteen-almost-fifteen, new best friends in a new decade. The year before: Germans cheered atop a graffitied wall, Dana Carvey became president, ducks and sea otters got smothered in oil, and I crouched with my family under the kitchen table as our house rattled and swayed in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
The movie we were about to see was Allan Moyle’s 1990 teen drama, Pump Up the Volume. It would be my second time, Erica’s fourth. We were totally obsessed, went to see it tons that fall, even followed it to the cheapo theater one town over. Erica snuck a bulky tape recorder that required a week’s allowance-worth of D batteries in under her coat and recorded the entire thing so we could listen to it as we fell asleep at night, memorizing Hard Harry’s pervy catchphrases. Also on cassette: the soundtrack I took with me everywhere. I bought it at Wherehouse Records with the ten-dollar bill I got in a trick-or-treat card from Grams. The nubs on its case were already busted off, its magnetic tape stretched thin from so much play. Though its cover art was budget—featuring a grainy still of Christian Slater’s Mark Hunter in purple monochrome—its content was invaluable, an abridged primer on cool. But thirty-some-odd years later I realize it wasn’t the Pixies or Sonic Youth tracks, wasn’t Bad Brains doing MC5, the early Soundgarden, or the solo Peter Murphy, nor was it the Eazy-E g-funk protégés Above the Law sampling James Brown by way of Vicki Anderson’s Black feminist anthem “The Message from the Soul Sisters.” No. It was Concrete Blonde’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” that altered me.
The first time I heard it, I was confused. Pissed, even. I’d expected the version I knew from the film—the preset drum-machine beat, the creepy synthesized strings, the seemingly out-of-place Spanish guitar and, mostly, Cohen’s startling voice, so deep and sure, chilled with a smiling cynicism. This one had a different tune, tempo, and singer. Instead of giving me goosebumps it gave me anxiety.
At the time, I was only sort-of familiar with Concrete Blonde. Their hit, “Joey,” was gateway, broke me from bubblegum. It was Johnette Napolitano’s husky rasp, her matte black hair, bangs that voided her eyes and made her mouth big. It was that she didn’t have her own drugstore perfume, didn’t perform in front of Miller’s Outpost. The video played at least twice a day after school, and I watched, rapt. For all the song’s impact, however, it had been the only one of theirs I knew. Maybe I was a few grades too young. They were the kind of band that kids my age with older sisters were into. The same girls who listened to Sinéad O’Connor and R.E.M. when I was still Debbie Gibson and Tiffany all the way.
Concrete Blonde’s sound was a little Anne Rice-novel goth, a little LA sleaze rock, a little Brigade-era Heart. The production value was clean and commercial, even on their decidedly more punk tracks. It was precisely because of their blend of pop accessibility and underground cachet that they were commissioned to cover Cohen’s song for Pump Up the Volume. Moyle wanted the original but New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye thought it too gloomy and old-man. In the end, both got their way: The Cohen original plays in diegesis throughout the film, Hard Harry’s theme song with which he opens his nightly broadcast; the chorus of Concrete Blonde’s cover is used at the film’s climax—a mere 26 seconds toward the end of the film. It’s a variation on a theme, the octave-up belt from a big-lunged contralto as the hero and his love interest drive off, clumsily, into the night.
In this version, guitars shimmer, emitting the fading warmth of a sunset—a desert sunset, specifically, the kind that yields to windy, bitter, starlit cold. Though the beat is slower—exactly the pace of walking across campus to fifth-period French, head down, hair in eyes—Napolitano burns through the verses more quickly, as if to avoid sitting with their implications. Unlike the detached, disheartened, and droll vocals of Cohen, Napolitano’s are impassioned and mournful. There’s just the slightest hint of tremble in her voice—from exhaustion, it seems. Or fear. Or maybe the vice with which to cope.  
The lyrics were written by Cohen and his back-up singer-cum-artistic collaborator, Sharon Robinson. The message: everything’s fucked. The song’s a dark and defeatist commentary on the status quo, referencing class struggle, racism, corruption, infidelity, and plague. “The poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes,” is how it goes.
At 15, I didn’t get all the innuendos. I frequently misheard them, collapsing their meanings. It’s dice that are loaded, not days—though mine most certainly were, with homework and chores and the preps giving me dirty looks. I knew the song was bleak, but I couldn’t yet map it onto the safe, suburban, wall-to-wall carpeted world I was familiar with. Teachers sucked and so did parents (except for Erica’s). Cops were pigs who’d put me in jail for the pinch of schwag in my backpack. Politicians wore powdered wigs and had wooden teeth. That’s really all I knew.
The song, either version, worked perfectly with the movie’s plot. Super quick: it’s about a quiet teenage loner, the aforementioned Mark Hunter, who, by night, adopts the alter-ego of Happy Harry Hard-on (a.k.a. Hard Harry)—a disgruntled, sardonic insurrectionist, a horny, onanist Ann Landers, and a deejay of very cool music—and airs a pirate radio station from the basement of his parents’ home. His message, like the song itself, is that everything’s fucked. “Everything’s polluted,” he says, ripping off the polite-maniacal delivery of Jack Nicholson, “the environment, the government, the schools, you name it.” His censure of authority, establishment, guidance counselors, even his dad are general and sweeping—bumper sticker imperatives that foment unrest and excitement in every puby adolescent in his fictional Arizona burb, uniting jocks and stoners and punks and princesses alike. Teens revolt, school admin and city-council-meeting moms quake in their footwear, feds get involved, corruption is exposed, sexy scene, chase scene, call to action, end.
The movie’s driving concern is freedom of speech. Happy Harry Hard-on’s shorthand for the First Amendment is “talk hard,” and his devotees spray paint it all over campus. At the end of the film, right after Hard Harry is hauled away by police and just before the credits roll, we hear a sound collage of young voices announcing their call letters and dial designations into the ether. It’s the promise of a polyvocal, youth-driven future.
I didn’t look too hard at the character of Mark/ Harry back then. I thought he was hot with his widow’s peak, his bowling shirt, and his cigarette. His oh-so-deep-sounding monologue that ribboned through the film’s hour and forty-five. I failed to see his (possibly unintended) hypocrisies. Unable to connect with people in real life, Mark dons a persona and uses technology to reach out to a worshipping audience. But, just like his penchant to compulsively jack off (also just an act), his radio show is, to him anyway, masturbatory. He has convinced himself that he’s only screaming into the void, eschewing the vulnerability and accountability that come with actual human relationships. When he sees evidence that swaths of people have been impacted by his words, he’s made uncomfortable. At one point, after he implores his listeners to “go crazy,” and they, indeed, do, he regrets his words, acting as if he never meant them. “This is out of control,” he says, cowering behind a pillar. “This whole thing is making me ill.”
It’s ironic—or genius—that Mark/Harry, though furious with the status quo and successful in upsetting it to some degree, when confronted with his influence, wishes, if only momentarily, to maintain said status quo. To be yet another verse in his beloved song. He had underestimated the power of his voice, the disruption and unfamiliarity it was capable of ushering in, this voice that no longer needed him at all. 
His cat-got tongue, his swimmy tum, not evidence of poseurdom but of, by my read, fear. It’s possible he knew his identity would soon be revealed and, socially awkward shadow dweller that he was, was afraid to be seen. I’m reminded of a 1977 Audre Lorde essay: She explains our reasons for staying silent when we need to speak out are varied—fearing everything from pillory to glory. “But most of all, I think,” she says, “we fear the visibility.”
When I watched the movie those fall nights long ago, amidst the smell of fake butter and real leather I, too, wanted to rise up and vandalize school property, blow up my kitchen, kick over a garbage can, talk hard. I was fed up! With what, I’m not entirely sure. But it wasn’t hormones. Or a fad. How I hated those explain-aways. I was a teenager who, like all teenagers, was experiencing the cold-water shock of having my boat, the one I had been in since birth, the one I trusted to keep me safe, tip over again and again. This was called learning. I was not yet at the place where the grown-ups were, back inside it, afraid to rock it, as the expression goes. I had integrated the woes of the world osmotically, inherited their memories genetically, could not articulate what they were exactly, but felt them banging inside of me. This was before I was taught to forget my anger, before I learned to sit still in my boat. Itchy and optimistic, Erica and I decided to start an underground paper. We named it SRH, our high school’s monogram and a nod to HHH—Hubert Humphrey High, the fictional school that loaned Happy Harry Hard-on his initials. I won’t disclose what we made SRH stand for because it’s way too cringey. I’ll admit we consulted a thesaurus.
Our paper was a tabloid-sized sheet, double-sided, handwritten, printed at Kinko’s with the money I had collected for cheer squad candy bar sales. Screw cheer. The paper criticized society, pointed out injustices, mocked the popular kids, gossiped about teachers, and dog-whistled references to cool music and drugs. We hoped to witness students passing around our anonymous broadside, mouths agape. To hear warnings over the morning bulletin that its authors, if found, would face suspension, expulsion even. To start some kind of revolution. I remember arriving on campus before zero period to distribute the paper. We left copies on desks, shoved them into locker vents, piled them atop The Santa Rosan. Then waited. In Mr. Hegerhorst’s geometry class, kids brushed them onto the floor with nary a glance. After school, a few blew around in the quad, covered in footprints. A stack of them looked up at me from a garbage can. It wasn’t until the next day I finally saw someone reading it. A quiet loner whose name I didn’t know. A Mark Hunter. I smiled. Just one person was all I needed to see.
Truth was, that no one gave two figs about our paper only supported the song’s sentiment. See? I thought then. Shit’s fucked. And the song isn’t just saying that shit’s fucked. It’s saying that shit’s fucked despite how it appears or what we tell ourselves. What looks fair is rigged. What seems stable is precarious. What claims to be progress is, often, just maintenance. Emancipation, Brown v. Board, the civil rights act—but still, as the song goes: “Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows.”
I’d pop my tape into my turquoise boombox, scrub it back to the beginning, and plop onto my top-bunk bed in the room I shared with two sisters, a damp room with pink walls covered in heavy-metal posters and black mold. That first crack of the snare and glimmer of the guitar became the sound of my ache. I let Johnette’s voice superimpose my own, let it speak for me in ways I didn’t yet have the courage to. The Cohen version would never have worked for me. Both songs may have been saying the same exact thing but their emotional content differed. One was nihilistic, closed off, and Kelvin-cold, the other doleful yet resilient and expansive. One made me denounce God and the other made yearn for him. One made me want to give up while the other made me want to give.
I recently watched a live recording of Johnette performing “Everybody Knows” for MTV’s 120 Minutes in 1997. She’s accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. Floats in a long, pale dress. Her eyes switch from spooked to somber and back again. Her voice is somehow both wispy and rich, tough and frail. She’s old by music industry standards—just turned forty—but still displays the bruises of youth. Still moans like it’s her first hurt.
And here I am now, almost seven years older than she is in the recording. I, too, feel new in many ways. I am learning that silence is complicity. Is violence. Is not a virtue. Not golden. I am learning that I can learn from young people, from whence their rebellion and activism meets. I am learning not to sit still in my boat no matter how tired I am. No matter how nice or how crappy my boat is. It seems we’re at a time when things couldn’t possibly be more fucked. I won’t even list examples of the fuckery because it just makes me, and you, even more tired. Because everybody knows already.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a writer from Sonoma County, California who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Huffington Post, Entropy, Nailed, Lana Turner, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Kithe and the wine person at your favorite store. Find her writing at karleighfrisbiebrogan.com and on Twitter @FrisbieKarleigh.