21 Years After My Band's "Hit" Song I Receive an Unexpected and Very Touching Fan Letter

In 1981, during my freshman year of college at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, I lived in Donner House, and for a school with a well-known school of architecture is was (and still is) an unattractive building with cement block walls and clad in aluminum. I lived in Donner A-Level East, or DALE, as it we called it. Across from my room lived Mike the drug dealer and in the room next to me lived Dan who had a two foot tall stack of pornography in box beside his bed. But also that year living in DALE were John and Adolph, also freshmen, who became good friends of mine.

John, Adolph and I decided to form a band. John was a decent drummer (and played in real bands later), I had mediocre keyboard skills, and Adolph had non-existent musical skills. I would say we averaged below mediocre with our musical abilities. We certainly could never perform live. Our whole goal was to write one song and record it. Being the 80's our choice of musical genre was New Wave. We called our band Point Mutations, which Adolph came up with after reading about point mutations in his biology textbook.

With John drumming, Adolph played the Casio VL-1 and I played my Casio MT-40:







One weekend we found an empty room in Margaret Morrison Hall and using a cassette recorder and a mixer that I built from a kit from PAiA Electronics, we recorded our one song, "My Baby was a Teenage Mercenary." It is a simple song. It is not a very good song. It's basically three notes played over and over with drums and somewhat juvenile and amusing lyrics.

And here is all of 2 minutes and 33 seconds of it:



As I said, it wasn't a very good song, nor performed very well. In fact, while recording it (which was hours of repeatedly playing it until we got it right) someone walked in the room, shut the window, made some disparaging comment that I don't recall, and left the room. One thing that's missing from the recording is our cheers as we finally managed to record the song in its entirety without screwing up.

I have zero recollection on how we came up with the title and lyrics, but with its New Waviness and mentions of Ronald Reagan, El Salvador, Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands, it certainly is a product of the 80s.

We did not record the vocals live. John happened to be a DJ at CMU's campus radio station WRCT, so we had access to the audio equipment in the studio, where John and Adolph added the vocals. (John has told me we recorded the vocals for our second song in the WRCT studio. For "Teenage Mercenary" we used the cassette recorder on his Realistic stereo.)

And John being a DJ at the station, put a tape cartridge of the song in the DJ booth. At first it would only get airplay during John's weekly show or when one of us would call the station and request it. But within a few weeks we'd be listening to WRCT and we'd hear our song without any of us requesting it. We were a hit - at least in the few square miles that could receive WRCT's minuscule 10 watt signal.

Now for the weird (and touching) part.

In 1993 I posted a message on the usenet newsgroup alt.angst which mentioned Point Mutations. Then, 10 years later in 2003 (and 21 years after recording the song), I get this email:

Hi Doug,

One day I typed the name of one of my favorite songs into Google, and got a

single match, containing this:

Our band, the Point Mutations had a three note New Wave hit

song on the CMU radio station called "My Baby Was a Teenage

Mercenary". The lyrics were incredibly stupid.

Yes the lyrics were incredibly stupid, but maybe that's why I liked it so

much - enough to have remembered the song 20 years later.

I'd love to hear it again. Do you still have a recording?

And who was that chick singing?

-Steve

This was one of my few jaw-dropping experiences in my life. "Teenage Mercenary" is a favorite song of someone? It is essentially a novelty song, a creation of three 18-year-olds just trying to have fun during a very brief moment in our lives. On rare occasions I would dig it up out of my dusty collection of cassettes from college to amuse friends.

The answer to Steve's question, "And who was that chick singing?" was non-chick John singing in a high voice. The lyrics tell a story (if you can even say that), and we added "My baby" because we thought it made it funnier. In all the ridiculousness of lyrics we somehow managed to miss that the point of view in the song is someone singing about a boyfriend. In seems utterly obtuse of us that we didn't even consider it.

After making an MP3 of the song available, Steve followed up:

Doug,

It was a pleasure to listen to these classics. Thanks for helping to make

this happen! Please send my thanks along to John. The world has regained a

lost treasure!

Yes, I always assumed that a girl sang, on account of the lyrics. So once I

formed a mental picture of the storyline, I never questioned it. Strangely

enough, that mental picture eventually developed an extension, where I

would find said girl and benevolently offer my services as 'boyfriend' on

account of her wayward and absent beau. But after listening just now, I

realize it was a guy.

I think this was one of the first things I ever heard on WRCT, which my

high-school friends and I would listen to using a special antenna cut to

the exact frequency, with reflectors and directors (on account of it being

a 10 Watt station and we were 35 miles outside of town), while we played

poker and/or drinking games.

I felt like this was MY war protest song, because, having just registered

for the draft in the Ronnie Ray-Gun years, the Vietnam-era stuff did not

apply and there (at that time) was not much out about this sort of thing,

apart from what The Clash wrote, and a few others. So maybe the lyrics

weren't so stupid after all.

Thanks again!

-Steve

All I could say to that is, "Wow." Completely inadvertently with our silly song, we managed to create a protest anthem and a song with meaning for Steve (in the same league as the Clash!). Twenty-one years afterwards, this was as unexpected as can be, and satisfying as well.

Before writing this post, I hadn't read this email in ten years (I knew there was a good reason to keep my old email around) and I'm finding it tears me up a little. How often does one do something that moves and leaves a meaningful lasting impression for someone?

There are two things I take from this:

• How a piece of art (and "Teenage Mercenary" is barely art) is interpreted is completely out of the hands of the creators. Things can have meaning beyond their creators' intentions.
• What you create, no matter how small or inconsequential you think it is, can be important, meaningful, and affect others in ways you can't possibly imagine, and if you're lucky, you'll find out about it.

(A future post will be about Point Mutations second, and only other song.)