CHANGE

My oldest sister is 9 years older than me. When I was a teenager, growing up in a small Midwestern town (where I could hear the mooing cows across the pasture), she had just graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy League school on the East Coast. When she decided to take a year off after college, my parents seized up in fury and fear. But to the young girl surreptitiously listening in on the phone conversation, a year off in New York City was an adventure of a lifetime. She was a goddess to me.

Once or twice a year she would drive down from New York, bringing her vintage clothes and her vinyl records for a week. She was the urban rebel that I wanted to be. The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Dylan, Joplin, the music of Motown. But one record I just couldn’t get enough of. I played it over and over again. I memorized the words that were written on the record sleeve. Perhaps it was the new wave cover, red and yellow, with the crazy pony-tailed rocker in the middle of it. When Friday Night Videos came on in the 80s, my brother and I would stay up late and watch, at all costs. The song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” played for months. I didn’t recognize the singer. But I should have. How can you NOT recognize Cyndi Lauper.

But her early band, Blue Angel, swept me off my feet. Made me feel like I wasn’t struggling through my teenage years, worrying about whether or not I’d make captain of the cheerleading squad or if Alex REALLY liked me.

I wish I could find more of Blue Angel’s songs online— but here’s one of them. All hail to the New Wave queen: Cyndi Lauper.

From Wikipedia:

Blue Angel was the band that featured Cyndi Lauper before her rise to fame as a solo singer. The lineup also included John Turi on keyboard instrument and saxophone, Arthur “Rockin’ A” Neilson (guitar), Lee Brovitz (bass guitar) and Johnny Morelli (drums). The sound engineer’s name is Patrick P. Norton. Lauper and Turi wrote the bulk of their material, and the group also covered pop standards, such as Mann/Weil’s “I’m Gonna Be Strong” (which Lauper covered again in a 1994 album). Blue Angel was briefly popular on the New York club scene, playing a kind of retro-rockabilly that was then hip (see X, some early The B-52’s and The Cramps), but was far more accessible and romantic than many practitioners of the period.

Their only album, the self-titled Blue Angel, was released in 1980 to critical acclaim and moderate sales. It featured a sparse punk rock and New Wave-styled cover in primary red and floating band member photos.