September 1986, LaPlata Beach, University of Maryland College Park
I decided to go to college 1,000 miles away from where I went to high school, to a large school where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t know much about the people from there. When I started at the University of Maryland I went as a blank slate, and as someone who was rather shy in high school, I didn’t have the easiest of time meeting people at first.
I delved into music, listening to bands I never heard about because music didn’t filter down to Miami like it did to the DC area. I was into punk music, but didn’t know much about Minor Threat. I was into rap music but wasn’t too aware of Eric B and Rakim (of course 1986 the year of Raising Hell and Licensed to Ill, but that’s a story for another time). It’s was through this exploration of music I found the BoDeans.
A band from Wisconsin who gave all their band members the last name BoDean (a la Ramones), they were somewhere between rock and folk with a tinge of country — nowadays they would be called Americana. LaPlata Beach, the large field next to LaPlata Hall (an all-women’s dorm in 1986), was holding its annual back-to-school party, and the BoDeans were headliners (playing with Washington-area punk psych-rock stalwarts the Slickee Boys). I went to the UM record store and bought the BoDeans debut album.
There are lots of great albums from 1986 (Lifes Rich Pageant, The Queen is Dead, Skylarking, London 0, Hull 4) and Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams has to be included in the mix. Named after a Stones’ lyric, the album was different from what you heard on the radio even though their songs could easily be played on the radio. There were two lead singers (Kurt Neumann and Sam Llanas) which each brought their own vocal dynamic — where Neumann was smoother and even, Llanas was higher pitched, always on the edge of cracking. The songs had great hooks and were clean with a little bit of roughness, the influence of producer T-Bone Burnett.
“Fadeaway” was the breakout song — a familiar refrain, interesting lyrics — but there’s not a bad song in the bunch. “Lookin’ for Me Somewhere” is about as good a country song as you will ever find, even though it’s not really a country song (which is why I like it). I listened to this album constantly, and came into this show knowing everything about a new band few knew about.
I showed up as the Slickee Boys were taking the stage, and while I enthralled in their stage antics, I wasn’t much for the music. I think the term punk gets added to bands which are essentially psychedelic to make them more relevant. To me, the difference between a punk-psychedelic song and a psychedelic song is eight minutes of playing time — at least punk-psychedelic songs end in a reasonable amount of time.
The BoDeans came out, with Guy Hoffman and Bob Griffin joining Neumann and Llanas, and rocked it, sounding louder than the album ever does. And that’s probably what you want to do when playing a large field on a college campus, bring your guitars and try to make the most of the fact that you’re playing a large field on a college campus. A year later the BoDeans would open for U2 on the Joshua Tree tour, so it would work out for them.
The band played the entire album — it’s all they had — but were fortunate to have such good material to work with. I thought this band would be huge going forward, and while it had some hits, it never became a band filling stadiums.
But I’m still happy to have seen them at the start.
