Should I Strange or Should I Go?

Today is the 10th anniversary of the premiere of the first series of Stranger Things. By that I mean the real Stranger Things - the only Stranger Things - not the clownish cartoons that wore the name and trappings of it like a skinsuit.

But first, a sad sync for you: I'd just wrapped up my late 80s playlist project and the man who made it all possible - the Dick Clark of the alt.rock nation - Dave Kendall passes away. 

I can't even count the number of great bands and records I discovered on 120 Minutes, or how much that show meant at a time when most radio stations wouldn't play any new rock.

If you're an early Xer, you can pay tribute to Mr. Kendall by diving into my 80s alt.rock playlists. I'm sure there are some tunes you haven't thought about in ages, bangers that will melt the years away for you. 

Click here for the full skinny.

Also, this Friday will see the premiere party for my new video, "Why They Destroyed Stranger Things." 

Premieres are just another perk of joining the Secret Sun Institute, so click here for your free membership.

Now, one thing that has always struck me about the first, real Stranger Things is how central The Clash are to the storyline. Specifically, "Should I Stay or Should I Go" one of the few rockin' tunes from the classic lineup's dickless, filler-ridden swan-song, Combat Rock.

An album which I loathe more than ever now, in case you were wondering.

All the more so after Sony actually queefed out a flimsy 40th anniversary edition of Combat Rock in 2022, loading the already filler-dominated set with even more bottom-scraping filler. 

How flimsy and slapdash was it? So much so that the double LP version of the release had a fully blank side.

None but the most uncritical Clash fanboys regarded the clash-in as anything but cynical Clashsploitation. Then again, Sony finally speed-corrected the "Should I Stay" music video (after 40 years), so thank God for small favors.

Be that as it may, the whole business with Will Byers being a sickly, artistically-inclined and fantasy-prone twelve year-old with an emotionally-unstable single mother when he discovered The Clash certainly got my attention. Especially with the whole business about interdimensional intruders and such.

Even if the association was badly sullied in Season Five with this sicko scene.  

That may not mean anything to you, but I should remind those of you who don't know that my first book was on The Clash, collecting writings from my old Clash website. 

That in turn led to a gig at the UK monthly Classic Rock, which in turn led to a book deal for Our Gods Wear Spandex. Thank you, Clash.

The Clash have beeb a long-running OCD thing for me, burning up an enormous amount of my time, money and energy. But there's a reason for that. And it's a reason that ties directly to our Stranger Things discussion..

You see, I was a lot like Will Byers at his age, and kinda like Jonathan Byers at his age. Though not nearly as alienated as the latter, because I was lucky enough to fall in with a large crowd of people who shared my interests in alt.rock (The Clash, particularly) and comics. That made a huge difference. 

I was also a lot better looking, truth be told. Note Clash photo.

But that scene with Will sitting at the kitchen table drawing scenes of wizards shooting green fireballs? That could have been me at any point up until the middle of 1979. 

In fact, I can remember spending hours drawing out this whole fantasy world of wizards and the rest of it, complete with maps and diagrams of weapons and the whole hand-me-down Tolkien thing. My grandparents had just taken me to see Bakshi's Lord of the Rings adaption, and I was on an absolute tear. 

I called my fantasy world "Rhye", based on the Queen song. However, Queen was not a band it was OK to like in Braintree.

But I actually started to become disenchanted with Queen after the underwhelming Jazz album, and their general move away from the hard rock and fantasy-oriented lyricism of their early albums. As you know, I'm big on the whole "stay in your lane" concept.

Indeed, most of the bands I loved in sixth grade were starting to suck (Love Beach, anyone?) or go soft by eighth-grade, so starting around 1978 I spent a lot of time listening to "New Wave Radio", a DJ-less music feed at the end of the FM dial. For some reason they played a lot of Tom Petty.

From Clash City Showdown

A strange confluence of events then entered my life at the same time as The Clash: my (divorced) mother was teaching at a public school and befriended a Wiccan art teacher, my first exposure to this lifestyle. 

I was starting to get high, and I was about to get kicked out of a private school my mother's boyfriend was paying for me to attend, for behavior issues. 

A semi-feral bookworm: I was a mess of contradictions.    

Then I got sick. Really, really sick.  

Some kind of bacterial infection. I was running 105/106º fevers for more than a week, couldn't move from the couch and I'm not exactly sure how I didn't die. 

Maybe I did die, and this is all a dream. Like Jacob's Ladder, only longer.

And during this illness, my own living room became a doorway to another dimension. 

And I had a...visitor.

Now, I was painfully thin, which was like chum in the water for bullies, who seemed to grow like barnacles in Braintree. To make matters worse, I broke my arm that summer. The day Skylab fell, to be precise. I wrote "I broke my arm the day Skylab fell" on the equipment locker at the park where the accident happened.

So after my cast came off I made a decision to put the comic books and the fantasy stuff away (which didn't last long, but still), hit the weights, and make The Clash my new avatars. A few months later I'd have a genuine out-of-body experience at a Clash concert at The Orpheum Theatre (literally, "the Temple of Orpheus"). 

I was 13, mind you. 

So looking back that encounter in my living room looks more and more like a portent, a signal everything was about to change. 

Ironically, The Clash soon became Queen

So watching the whole Clash thing mixed in with a living room turned into an interdimensional doorway on Stranger Things? 

That was... interesting.

And wouldn't you just know it? David "Hopper" Harbour was formerly married to Clash singer Joe Strummer's goddaughter, Lily Allen.

In 2009, Lily Allen also recorded a duet with The Clash's Mick Jones of one of Combat Rock's few decent cuts, "Straight to Hell."

Mick Jones himself, looking a bit worse for wear, sang his own karaoke version of "Should I Stay or Should I Go" in the 2003 Michael Winterbottom sci-fi potboiler, Code 46, yet another of Samantha Morton's countless mother-trauma narratives. 

There are all sorts of higher significances at work here, of which the Elect are read in on. But for our purposes here, make note that Code 46 itself hinges on mind control and features an unlikely romance between two stars known for MKULTRA/mind control-themed classics.

First of all is Tim Robbins (another Hollywood Clash devotee) in the film I've obsessed over like a lunatic for some 30+ years, Jacob's Ladder.  

Then there's our Samantha in the Spielberg Sibylfest, Minority Report.   

There's actually a shit-ton of Minority Report backstory in Stranger Things, the significance of which I didn't truly grasp until I donned my scuba gear. 

But one day schoolchildren will know it all by heart, mark my words.

Until that glorious day comes, do check out my playlist of the magical music of the original Stranger Things month. 

You will not be disappointed.

Click here.