Strip Tees No. 7: "Altered Images"
Striking Caledonia gold in California and discovering a new favorite band by thrifting their vintage merch
Strip Tees is a recurring series in which I write
about t-shirts I like
I love LA.
I made that quite clear in a previous post, written fresh off my boomeranging back to the City of Angles.
That is NOT a typo; everybody’s got an angle here — and YES, I’m reusing that joke!
Here I am a year later, six months into my third stab at living la vida LA following two abortive attempts at coupling up and settling down in New York. I’ve made a rule for myself this time: THERE’S NO MOVING BACK. Not for a girl, not for a job, not even for a sick mother (sorry, Mom). I’ve returned to Los Angeles for one reason and one reason only: to host and produce Savvy. It’s the same reason Johnny Carson took The Tonight Show from 30 Rock to Burbank. New York, we love you, but LA objectively offers a more relaxed lifestyle, greater accessibility to guest stars, a more production-friendly time zone, better burritos, and a finer selection of donuts.
If I needed another reason, it would be LA’s vastly superior thrifting opportunities. I’ll never forget my first California gold strike a decade or so ago at the old Valley Value Center in Van Nuys (now a Red, White and Blue), where I hit a motherlode of mostly deadstock 70s and 80s band and tourist tees tagged at either $0.95 or $1.95 (highlighted by an Allman Brothers Win, Lose or Draw promo joint).
The prices have gone up sharply since then, and the competition has grown far fiercer, but thrift stores are like Heraclitus’ river: no man ever steps into the same one twice. The fun and mystique of thrifting is rooted in the serendipity of dipping into the water without knowing what you’ll find — and how it might change you.
While running errands in Burbank this afternoon — which included stops at the post office to ship two dollar bills with 6-7/6-7 in their serial numbers that I sold on eBay (for $6.76) and the bank for fresh batch of bills — my eagle eyes spotted a sidewalk sale in front of an abandoned optical boutique on Magnolia Blvd. I started the day with a stop at a nearby estate sale, where I picked up an 80s New York City souvenir program ($1), a few intriguing books (4 for $2), and a “Mother of the Bride” t-shirt ($3) from someone’s dearly departed grandma who seemed to love, with equal vigor, the Holy Bible and Barbara Bush. But those modest returns had not fully scratched my thrift itch, so I was particularly thankful to feast on these two outdoor racks loaded end-to-end with graphic tees.
It didn’t take long into my rifling to be met with dual disappointments: the tees were mostly modern, and all sun-bleached at the shoulders. Note to vendors: PUT A TARP OVER YOUR OUTDOOR TEES, PLEASE. You’re ruining fine shirts for all of us!
A more impatient me might have given up right there and then, but not this me, not this day. I resumed rifling, pausing only a couple of times to linger over some 90s numbers whose themes I ultimately deemed too uninteresting to buy, and I was nearly all the way through the racks when a single-stitch stopped me in my tracks. Then the tag nearly bowled me over: Blue Screen Stars. Blue. A blue Screen Stars tag means early 80s — an exceedingly rare epoch to encounter in the wild. I pulled it out for a closer examination… and I was stumped.
Now I consider myself a fairly well-cultured individual. I’d say my historical knowledge of the popular lively arts and referential capacity for the names of musical artists and their lyrics is, in a slickly placed demonstration: Ha, sicker than your average.1 But I had no recall for what I was looking at. I could recognize neither the central artwork or the hand of the artist, nor the phrase sandwiching it in stylish cursive: altered images.
Of course my attitude has always been: if I don’t know about it, it isn’t worth knowing about. But that blue tag… it was calling to me. There had to be something there, something about that art and that phrase that would be recognizable and valuable to someone.
TRIGGER WARNING: this paragraph includes an appreciation for artificial intelligence. At my wit’s end, I whipped out Google Lens, snapped a pic, and within seconds, I had not only solved the mystery of the shirt, I had unlocked a magical mystery tour that would send me down unexplored alleys of post-punk and new wave.
According to the Googs, I was holding in my hands an original promo tee for “A Day’s Wait” — the second single released by a Scottish band called Altered Images in 1981. The art was by a Scottish artist named David Band, who died in 2011. This wasn’t just a ‘vintage shirt.’ This was a 45 year-old artifact of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. I gladly paid the $15 asking price.
Back in the car I fired up a Spotify search and put the band on blast. From the first marimbal notes of “Happy Birthday,” I was oddly hooked. What a weird way to start a song. And what a weird thing, to write a song called “Happy Birthday,” especially in the fresh wake of Stevie Wonder’s own hit with the same name. But then the drums and guitars kicked in and I was like, “Ohhh, okay this actually kinda fucks.”
Have you heard of this band??? Have you heard any of their six top-40 hit singles or three top-30 albums in the early 80s? Granted, those were hits in their native UK; they only charted once in the US, with “I Could Be Happy” reaching number 45 on Billboard’s Dance charts in 1982.
After breaking up in 1983, lead singer Clare Grogan reformed the lineup and released a new album in 2022. Today they’re actively touring — both on nostalgia bills grouped with their contemporaries like Human League and Haircut 100, as well as headlining for up-and-comers GIFTHORSE — and are enjoying 126,082 monthly listeners on Spotify, which is a couple hundred thousand fewer than Television and fifty thousand more than Lena Lovich. See? I know both of those!
As improbably as this band had eluded me all these years, so too had their shirt found its way to a rack on a sidewalk in the San Fernando Valley, more than four decades and 5,000 miles from where it originated. I was clearly meant to find it, and thusly compelled to tell you about it. Give Clare & Co. a spin, and tell ‘em Rogo sent ya!