I will never forget the first time I heard Disintegration by The Cure. It was released in May 1989, right around the time that I graduated from high school. Coming off of a significant immersion into metal in the 1980s, times had been changing for me musically. Metal as we knew it was getting stale, and even in the tiny western Pennsylvania coal town of my youth where metal was king, bands like Jane’s Addiction and R.E.M. were starting to make an impact. Our only exposure to the alternative press was through MTV’s 120 Minutes and whichever mainstream music magazines occasionally covered rock bands that were doing something a little different. Exposure to anything outside of the mainstream was almost entirely through word of mouth, or through multiple generation mixtapes and dubs.
I had been a fan of The Cure for a couple years. A skater friend of my cousin in a nearby town was kind enough to let me copy the band’s epic Standing on a Beach cassette one Sunday afternoon in 1987 and I wore it out over the following couple years. News of a new Cure album finally reached me in early June of 1989 and a stroke of luck led to a couple copies at my local record and musical instrument store.
Having just graduated from high school I was working the summer at my Grandfather’s auto parts store. I usually had an hour over lunch, so one day I swung by the music store and bought a shiny new copy of The Cure’s Disintegration. I ran home and popped the cassette into my Dad’s console system in the living room, the kind with the Thruster speakers that were bigger than the end tables. “Plainsong” dribbled in with its twinkly noise intro, forcing me to turn the volume up to find out what was going on, then boom. The song exploded into the room filling every inch with a sweeping cinematic synth melody and bombastic drum beat. While sitting in awe for over a minute listening to the sweetness of the melody reconciled with the power of the performance, a definitive Robert Smith guitar solo gently drifted in on top of the repeating layers. Halfway through the five-minute track, Robert’s soft vocals entered, drowning in echo. The effects weren’t there as a complementary accent to the vocal sound, the effects were the vocal sound.
At that moment, in that time and place, what I understood rock music to be suddenly changed. The possibilities of what my mind considered cool transformed into a spectrum of sounds far wider and far deeper than I ever thought possible.
By the middle of “Pictures of You”, the second track, I was heading back to work knowing exactly what I would be doing (under headphones) as soon as the workday was finished. Disintegration would soon become a benchmark album for me and The Cure would become a benchmark band. From that day forward I became hungry to explore everything about their catalog and discover as much similar music as possible. Fortunately, I was off to college a couple months later, primed with a new found open mind and appreciation of alternative music. In the years that followed I discovered the music that would shape my tastes and influence my songwriting for the rest of my life (at least until this part of my life).
In that summer of 1989, I had suddenly slipped so far out of touch with the metal scene that it would take years, or even decades, to hear the music that many of my favorite high school bands made in the 1990s. I would later come back with a solid appreciation for much of the metal of my youth. I still consider some of the classic albums from the peak metal years of the 1980s among my favorites. But while society often cites the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in late 1991 as the end of heavy metal as we knew it, for me personally it was the day I bought Disintegration from the Music Mart in Barnesboro, PA in June 1989.