A Wink And a Nod - How a long lost record connected me with my past

by editor Michele Catalano

I got this album in the mail today. It was approximately five dollars, including shipping.

You’ve never heard this album.

You’ve never heard of the band.

Yet this album has catapulted up the rankings of my “most treasured albums.”

Long Island, summer of ‘83. I was obsessed with three things: New Order’s “Temptation,” the Atlanta Braves, and Ed D., probably in that order. I met Ed through our mutual friend, Kevin, and immediately developed a platonic crush on him. Ed was infinitely cool: tall, muscular, good-looking, and a self-described percussionist. If I said drummer, he corrected me. Percussionist.

We were standing outside some club in Freeport after closing it down. We saw a couple of local bands, then coerced the DJ to play “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” while I did some sort of interpretive dance. After they finally kicked us out, Ed announced that his band, Wink, had finished making their record. We all congratulated him and assured him that each of us would buy a copy.

I was starstruck. Someone I knew had made a record (which had happened only once before, with a band called the Dead Virgins). That was incredibly cool. That Ed—gorgeous, talented, affable Ed—was part of this band that made this album was amazing to me. I was convinced that Wink was going to make it big. They were going to be rock stars. And I could say I knew them.

I spent a good portion of the summer waiting for them to break out, waiting to hear a Wink song on the radio. Surely synth new wave from Long Island was what everyone wanted to hear. Or not.

The summer raged on, hot and sticky. We engaged in a lot of club-hopping, but we also spent a lot of time hanging out at our friend Christie’s house, listening to Talking Heads and The Police. We each had our own copy of the Wink album. I don’t think any of us really played it. The record was more of an artifact, a novelty. Hey, my friends made an album, how cool. Life went on, summer turned to fall, and suddenly Ed disappeared.

It wasn’t intentional. It just happened. He was spending more time with his bandmates, he was playing in clubs, he was different. Ed was two years older than us, but that suddenly seemed like an insurmountable age gap. Ed was concerned with adult things, such as making money and trying to jumpstart a career; I was concerned with baseball and listening to “Temptation” as often as possible. I had an idyllic life at the time, and that didn’t fit in with Ed’s newly found focus and determination to make something of himself. He started hanging out with people his age, people who played instruments instead of records.

Wink never took off. I remember seeing the record in a DJ booth in a club, but I’m pretty sure that was a comp copy. I never saw it in a record store, and I never listened to it after that first time. But the cover sat in a place of honor on my wall unit, facing out for all the world to see. I knew a guy who made a record, and that held some cred in those days. That the record was middling didn’t matter. He did it! For a few months, Ed was, in my eyes, a rock star.

I didn’t think about Ed for years and, in fact, for a while forgot his name. I referred to him as “Kevin’s friend in the band.” For a long time, I didn’t even remember the name Wink. But it all came back earlier this month, when I wrote about Kevin and the Talking Heads and the summer of ‘83. I overtaxed my brain doing it, but I finally latched onto Ed’s name and then the band’s name. I decided to look him up, which led me to discogs, which led me to a forty-year-old copy of Wink’s only album, available for $4.98 plus shipping.

I never clicked a purchase button so fast.

I couldn’t believe my luck. You have to understand, I did not want this album to listen to it. I wanted to have it, hold it, feel it, smell it (oh, that musty record store smell). I wanted to examine it and read the song titles (“When the Music Writes Itself” and “She Won’t Say No” among them), the thank-yous (they thank Kevin) on the back cover.

I have not yet listened to the record. I’ve studied it and examined it and cried over it. I’ve connected with it on a physical level, and mentally. This album is a bridge to my past. In my hands, it became sort of a talisman. I started remembering things that happened that summer. I remembered how Ed always smelled like the beach. I remembered how he would carry around his drumsticks and beat on anything that made a noise. I remembered that one night standing outside a club, singing “Temptation” into the summer air, when Ed announced the album to us. I thought everything was going to change then, and maybe it did, but not in the way I imagined it would.

Wink is my coming-of-age story. It marks the era in which I went from being a slacking stoner to a relatively sober adult. I realized then, as we drifted into a gulf too wide to fill, that making the record was Ed’s way of separating himself from us. When he told us that night that he had finished making the record, it was a watershed moment. He went, seemingly overnight, from being Ed, friend and fellow fuckaround, to Ed, the serious musician. Wink went from being “my friend’s dumb band” to a real band. We couldn’t compete with that.

I’m happy to reconnect with that part of my past. 1983 was, in many ways, the best year of my life. Having this artifact from one of the most pivotal moments of my life means the world to me. I have held onto it like a good-luck charm. I have pulled the record out and sniffed the inside of the jacket, hoping it would smell like the beach. I have reminisced and felt a warmth that I needed very much in my life. I have reached out and touched my history. You cannot ask for much more from a 40-year-old record.

Someday I might even listen to it.

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