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1985: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 23: June 8, 1985)
Duran Duran meets Bond, New Order meets Demme, Lone Justice meets Petty, and Madonna throws away a classic
After my brother and his fiancée moved out to their own apartment on Boston Avenue, we technically had a guest room. It was occasionally even used as such. But about two weeks after the room was left empty except for a full-size bed, I went to the hardware store and bought a gallon of flat latex paint in a pale aquatic green and some supplies and painted the walls on a Saturday afternoon. The next day, I moved in my bookcase, desk, stereo, and all the milk crates I’d pilfered from behind various supermarkets that held my LPs, singles, and mixtapes. (I rarely bought pre-recorded cassettes, they sounded terrible.) By Monday morning, I basically had an entire wing of our house, a bedroom and an office on either end of a short hallway with a bathroom in between. My brother groused a bit about this, until I reminded him that after our sister had moved out after college, we’d had the entire second floor of our house in Longmont to ourselves.
I spent most of the summer of 1985 (and the rest of the time I lived in that house) in that room, listening to music, reading, writing, and running lines for plays I was in. Although my desk was against one wall, next to…