Welcome fellow Foot Full of Fisters. We are going to take a special detour today. Travel with me to a magical time. A time when TaB flowed freely from the taps like sweat off a fat greasy bald gas station attendant. A time when the bangs of tender teen girls raised high in youthful rebellion against the painful oppression of stifling middleclass urban yuppy parents . A time when pants would be pegged tight to our ankles in open defiance of those bell bottom thingies our lame parents were sporting in the seventies. A time when fluorescent greens, pinks and yellows would drown out the ugly muted vomit colors of the previous decade. A time when the first Apple Macintosh would be unleashed upon the unsuspecting masses. It was 1984.
Like most major cosmic events it took a magical and momentous alignment of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, meteors and probably the exact right population of rare Tonkin Snubnosed monkeys indigenous to northern Vietnam to make this day special. It’s as though the great gods of Rock and Roll saw fit to allow the very birth of awesomeness. Oh how they must of smiled upon that day.
As the rumor goes, the chance meeting of Hartwig Schierbaum, Bermhard Gößling and Frank Sorgatz was engraved into the stone tablets of rockdom. Apparently, eye witnesses report that Hartwig tripped, Bermhard slipped and Frank fell… a colossal and cataclysmic crash of permed long hair and obscenely tight leather pants. It was a birth… like a 143 hour 20 minute labor of a 14 pound six ounce baby……….. it was worth the struggle. For Alphaville was born.
Like when that space shuttle blew up, or when the twin towers fell… we all knew where we were in 1984 when Alphaville dropped their debut album upon us. We knew the world would never be the same. We knew we could never go back to the way things were before. They had changed things for good.
Storming its way out of that debut album like Godzilla tearing through Tokyo was the worlds most awesome and ass-kicking single ever, Forever Young. Hyper horny young men everywhere praised Alphaville as they high-fived one another at the school dances… apparently due to this new song there was a huge uptick in acne ridden boys claiming they had ‘scored’. This historic song is reportedly single handedly responsible for the dramatic spike in teen pregnancies in 1984-87. Some experts claiming that it resulted in somewhere between 68-73% of the teen pregnancies in that time period. Eeesh.
It is said that Alphaville would produce eight more albums up until 2003. But none of that matters. The atomic rock-bomb that was Forever Young had been dropped. And in the crater of its goodness is where we would all reside for a long long time. Basking in its seemingly never ending glow. Reports say that after the release of Forever Young, the original three members (ha ha… I just said member… but there’s no time for that now!) dropped their synthesizers and electric drums and walked off, never to be seen nor heard from again—having left us all a piece of their souls.
Still, the story may not end there. Sources say there is a rare legend amongst the Bantu tribe of central Africa about a remote group deep in the wetlands that worship a trio of the great white gods of adolescent fertility… sound familiar anyone!?!?
Go on and enjoy it… just one more time (and see if you can’t get to second base with your spouse!):
What I wouldn't have given to be one of the young kids in that video! A personal Alphaville concert.
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