The Quick
Mondo Deco
1976, Mercury Records
In 2005, I was a giant idiot, but I was smart enough to buy this.
In 2005, my financial situation was a smoldering wreck and my love life was even worse, but I was lucky enough at least to find The Quick’s first and only album for a cool $1.99 at Half Price Books.
In 2005, I was down-and-out and kicked-around and I knew that it was mostly my own fault, but…
Actually there is no but. When you’re feeling down-and-out is the PERFECT time to hear Mondo Deco. It’s sad and frustrated, too, while it also rocks so hard that it feels like you could point your stereo speakers at a wall and then blow a hole through it.
Short of hard drug use, joining a suicide cult or getting a neck tattoo, in 2005, I made almost every wrong decision that you could make. Looking back, I think my malfunction–or one of them, at least–was that I was much too dedicated to escaping life rather than engaging with it. I ran away from people and straight toward used record bins, which isn’t good.
The outside world can be Hell and people can be annoying, but you need to let in at least some sunlight or you’re unhealthy. You get lost in your own navel and, as a result, have little of value to say. And when you have nothing to say or contribute, it eats at you. I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture, but human beings seem to need to feel like they’re making some kind of mark on the world, whether it’s through our work (paid or unpaid) or our offspring or through winning the county hot dog eating contest. When you’ve closed off all of those avenues, that’s when things are at risk to get ugly and destructive (or self-destructive).
I wasn’t all the way there in that deep, dark place, but I was getting there when I first heard The Quick’s Mondo Deco, a cartoonish, rocket-paced finely tuned machine of melody that’s got more life in each one of its ten songs than I had going on in all twelve months of that year. It was the perfect example of the kind of secondhand vinyl bin discovery that I was turning my back on life to find. It was an album that wasn’t popular when it came out. Pretty much nobody in the present day was talking about it, either. It wasn’t a rare collectible. The CD revolution marched right past it (it finally came out on CD this year, now that CD reissues don’t mean shit beyond a trinket to be collected).
Mondo Deco was a record as hidden from the world and forgotten as I wanted to be at the time. Meanwhile, it bursts with life.
The Quick were a group who embraced their trashiness in a very punk-like way before punk was even much of a thing (this came out in April 1976, the same month as the first Ramones album). They were snotty and angry and mad at the world.
They also sound like harbingers of the incoming New Wave.
And, oh yeah, they also sound a whole lot like Sparks.
The Quick TOTALLY rip off Sparks’ mid-1970s sound, but they drag it through the world of adolescent angst. They’ve got the high-pitched singer, the glam-rock big-guitar drama, the zippy keyboards, the wicked humor and the songs that are violently dedicated to the hook.
The difference is that Sparks were older and more detached. To Sparks’ Ron and Russell Mael, everything was a joke. They were grown men who’d been around. Sarcasm was second nature and it cut deep because the Maels had everyone’s number. They knew that life is absurd.
By contrast, The Quick’s songwriter/guitarist Steven Hufsteter was preoccupied with the adolescent mind, where every love life problem is the end of the world. Hufsteter understands that, runs with it and makes a record that stands on its own. Sparks would never write a song as earnestly vulnerable as “Hi Lo” (my favorite here), nor would they ever have the sympathy for their characters that you find in this album’s “No No Girl” (about a runaway) and “My Purgatory Years” (about burn-everything teen ennui).
It starts with a Beatles song, “It Won’t Be Long”. It’s a track from the band’s early moptop days, but rendered here with a glitter-rock sigh, extra muscle in the guitar, added keyboards, and total sincerity. I even like the endearing under-confidence of starting off with a cover. The teenage brain is all about imitation, after all. This take on the song is yearning and clever and wraps tight around that Lennon melody. In my world, it’s the definitive version.
The record only keeps hitting highs from there. After the shameless swipe of the intro of Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us”, “No No Girl” is a rampaging glitter-rock tornado that tells the story of the girl who “found that bad things most often feel good… and then tried as many of them as she could”.
“Playtime” kicks your ass to the left, the dominatrix tale “Hillary” (“Hillary, is it wrong to be loved this way?”) kicks your ass to the right and “Anybody” kicks your ass straight ahead. All three are horned-up, out of their minds and on their knees. And that’s side 1.
Side 2 opens with the great “Hi Lo”, a melodic merry-go-round ride through depression and co-dependence.
After that comes another cover from the early 1960s, “Rag Doll”, originally by The Four Seasons. The Quick seize fast onto the hook and find the sneering rocker in Frankie Valli and company’s old falsetto whiner.
“Last in Line” is the album’s most shameless ringer for Sparks (and that’s really saying something here), but it’s a just a ramp-up to the killer “My Purgatory Years”, the ultimate adolescent “fuck everything” song. Our narrator proclaims that he’s “not prepared for the real world/ All I know is school and girls.” He also tells us “I used to belong to the scholastic society/ But now I’m busy with my noteriety”. I can smell zit cream and high school hallways just listening to it.
By the end of all of this uptempo vexation and thunderous dissatisfaction, the band hit on something that almost resembles about half of a profound thought. In “Don’t You Want It”, Hufstetter steps back (just a little) for a look at the bigger picture and finds that maybe always wanting something that’s beyond your grasp is life’s natural state. And maybe that’s a good thing in a way. It keeps you moving forward.
Also, the lyrics of the song make the usual coveted things sound hollow and stupid (“Is it something that you wear?/ Is it something to compare/ With what everyone else has?/ Can you buy it?”).
If you’re always going to be wanting something in life, maybe the way to not be miserable is to want better things, which are things that you can’t buy. They’re the things that you have to work for–and not in the making money sense. They’re the good things that you do for yourself and for the outside world. Whatever that is to you. Fill in the blank.