#atozchallenge #wis F is for Fire in the Rain

Agent Orange was part of the wave of 80s punk bands out of Orange County, California, and one of the first to mix the genre up with surf rock (and also one of many punk bands all the skateboarders listened to back in the day). This was a distinctively SoCal sound, mixed bright and tight, unlike the deliberately messy sounds of Bay Area punk. They were part of the Posh Boy records roster, and made their way onto Enigma in the middle of the decade. This is probably their second-best known song (early single "Bloodstains" is their claim to fame).

I first heard this song on a compilation I picked up in the summer of 1987 called Enigma Variations 2, which was an excellent sampler of alternative bands on the Enigma label. It features tracks from Don Dixon, Game Theory, the Dead Milkmen, Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper, and more. It also contained two tracks from Wire--a band I knew of at that time but had never heard until this album. They'd just regrouped after a six-year hiatus and just released an EP and an album on the label. I figured they had to be good, as the wrapper sticker for their 1987 album The Ideal Copy had kudos from Michael Stipe, Bob Mould and a handful of other punk and alternative bands, saying how influential they'd been. If you can find a copy of this compilation somewhere, I highly suggest picking it up. There's a few duds here and there, but for the most part it's a really tight mix.

If anything, 1987 is when my real social life kicked in. Yeah, I can say that's a bit unfair to all my past friends I knew growing up and knew since my days in elementary school. Many were good friends in the time I knew them, but I admit it was time for me to move on. In the fall of 1986, I had a chance meeting with a kid name Jim who thought my review of Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Flaunt It in the school paper was not only daring (given that I figured about 1% of the student body would know who the hell the band was), but awesome, because he thought he was the only person who'd heard of them. He told me he had a few other friends who thought the same thing, and for a brief moment I thought, hey, I'm not alone in this backwards, hicksville town. Soon after I headed over to their table at lunch time and started hanging out with them. I didn't exactly give my old friends the cold shoulder, but I'll be honest, I started moving away from them pretty quickly.

My main connection with this new group of friends was definitely music. I don't believe any of us were in the school band (unlike many of my previous friends, interestingly enough), and they were all one year ahead of me and probably a hell of a lot more intelligent than I was at the time, but we bonded quickly over music, specifically the college radio stations we listened to and the songs we heard on them, and the episodes of 120 Minutes we'd watch on Sunday nights. In those early days I'd only hang with them during the lunch periods and the occasional study period, as that was the only time I could see them, but we really became a much tighter unit during the summer of 1987, when we started going on our roadtrips to Amherst and Northampton. By that fall we'd hang out all the time during and after school, talking music and sharing our collection, throwing Monty Python and Young Ones references at each other (the shows had resurfaced as part of MTV's Sunday night lineup, and our exchange student that year was a kid from the UK who quickly became part of our circle, thanks partly to a love for those shows). I knew they were all going to be graduating that coming May, but I didn't care...I was finally hanging out with people who were on my wavelength. I'd enjoy it while I could.

I know I go on about it more often than I should, but I still consider those few years some of the best times of my life.