A couple of months ago (I think—time flies when you’re having fun, and when you’re not), another magazine, one that doesn’t routinely make its writers coax, cajole, plead, and threaten to get money they’ve been owed for months and months and months, urged me to profile Sighin’ Cy Curnin. Thus did the missus and I come to attend the Fixx’s performance at the Universal Amphitheatre. Afterwards, at the plush Sheraton

Something-or-Other, there was a great big lavish party of the sort record companies don’t throw enough of anymore, one with a well-stocked, open bar and a nearly obscenely lavish buffet, including a veritable mountain of delicately chilled fresh jumbo shrimps.

While countless thousands of Ethiopians were busy starving to death, in other words, greasy MCA promotion men

in acetate baseball jackets and greasier disc jockeys with only one large nostril put out their cigarettes in plates of barelynibbled hors d’oeuvres. Sighin’ Cy, meanwhile, presumably impressed MTV’s interviewers with how socially conscious he is.

But ethics and morality are Dave Marsh’s beat, and not this column’s. This column’s is fashion, so I’ll note that the missus looked fairly amazing, if you’ll permit me to say so (and it doesn’t look as though you’ve much of a choice) in her skintight black vinyl catsuit from the same

London boutique that outfitted the dancers in Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” video—the self-same skintight black vinyl catsuit she wore to such notable effect in Eleganza’s “Daughters of Darkness” survey of about a year ago. As it was chilly, she wore over it a black sequin jacket she made herself at the height of the glitter craze of the early ’70s. Good taste is timeless.

Remind me some day to tell you about the scandalous feathered number she made to attend a performance by my former close personal friend Iggy Pop at the Whisky a-Go-Go in those days—an outfit so spectacular that the support group stopped dead in mid-song when she sauntered in on the arm of The Kiddo. (I was still living with Big Patti at the time, of course, but let’s don’t reopen old wounds.)

But back to late 1984, and the big Fixx fete. Much as I was impressed by the buffet and open bar, what really made me yearn to kiss the hands of whoever had planned the whole shebang was what I mistook for the comic relief. Back in the ’70s, no record company party was thought complete without such sexual deviates as San Francisco’s celebrated bearded transvestites, the Cockettes. But MCA had seemed to opt for something even funnier—a mob of hilariously shaghaired, huge-feeted blonds who looked as though they’d just been bussed over from February, 1973.

Imagine my astonishment and dispair on discovering that MCA hadn’t hired them to provide comic relief at all, but to record albums for them, under the group name Giuffria!

It’s one thing to wear the black sequin jacket one made one’s self at the height of the glitter craze of early ’70s on a nippy evening 12 years later. It’s quite another to have worn nothing but the same hairdo for ages and ages and ages.

Giuffria’s keyboard player namesake apparently used to be in Angel, one of the funniest groups of the late ’70s. Having apparently been real, real impressed by Freddie Mercury and his friends, they’d spent a fortune on white satin outfits exactly like those Queen was wearing at the time, and professional make-up for lead guitarist Punky Meadows (may God cause the cassette on which I’ve stockpiled synthesizer sequences for my own forthcoming album, Masturpiece—write for details—to vanish if I’m making this up), but couldn’t bring themselves to spring for the $50 worth of electrolysis the lead singer, who had only one extremely long unsightly eyebrow, which extended from temple to temple, so desperately needed.

Judging from their first video, Giuffria intend on making stablemates Night Ranger look like Talking Heads in terms of distinctiveness of vision. Their haircuts turn out to be more with-it, that is, than their music, an utterly predictable parade of AOR cliches. Only by not wearing elephant bellbottoms do they show any sign of realizing that it’s the mid-’80s, and not ’70s. (The singer, predictably having failed to notice that only the very slenderest, longest-gammed, and smallest-tootsied women look good in stretchpants with high heels, instead wears stretch jeans that of course make his legs look too short for his trunk.)

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When groups like Giuffria (and Autograph, with their nauseatingly simpering lead singer) get signed and pushed, rather than giggled out of town, it can only mean one thing and one thing only—that we need another revolution like the one the Ramones, Blondie, and the Sex Pistols led a decade ago, and desperately.

But let’s get back to Punky Meadows. I once overheard the booker at the Starwood, a Hollywood club where boxboys with bare midriffs and shag haircuts used to go to meet shag-haired coffee shop waitresses from the more benighted beach cities south of Los Angeles, describe him as “a male Raquel Welch.” How’s that for a joke without a punchline?

Remind me one day to tell you about SlyStone-Meets-The-Who Union Jack jacket with yard-long red fringe on the sleeves I had made for myself in 1970, when I was America’s second best-loved rock critic, hadn’t yet been reduced to writing for magazines that routinely make its writers coax, cajole, plead, and threaten to get money they’ve been owed for months and months and months, and thus had more money than I knew how to spend. Remind me to tell you how, one night in the selfsame Whisky a-Go-Go evoked earlier, Jimi Hendrix himself gaped enviously at said garment and mumbled, “Nice jacket, man.”

But back to the Fixx party. Your Top Rock Critics used to get invited to three a week just like it back in the good old days of rock criticism. There probably hasn’t been a comparable epidemic of corporate masochism in the history of American business.

I usually dressed in those days as though I’d be making a guest appearance with Roxy Music or Faces later in the evening (and wore my hair, for the record, in a big fluffy shag). Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw (in his celebrated velvet-collared coat from the same tailor who’d made the Beatles’), and a few others cut dashing figures too, but what my hero, Tom Wolfe, Kcis called Radical Chic was in full flower in those days, and many of our colleagues consequently seemed to pride themselves on their slovenly dress, appalling personal habits, and general boorishness.

It was considered superb form in those days to show up in clothing you might have rolled a wino for, immediately get very drunk on the host record company’s liquor, loudly derogate the party’s guest of honor, and then the record company’s entire talent roster, and finally regurgitate a bellyful of the record company’s canapes all over the wife of the record company’s Vice President, West Coast Sales.

Were those the days, or what?