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It Came From the '90s: For D’arcy (Sail on Silver Girl)


This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade.

Search any dorm room across campus, circa 1995, and you'd likely find a copy of Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits. Many copies would've been acquired through BMG's or Columbia House's music clubs ("12 Hot Hits for a Cool Penny"). "Cecilia" was always a hallway jam favorite, especially in the girls' dorms, but "Bridge over Troubled Water" was deep, man.


Sail on silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine
Oh, if you need a friend
I'm sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled water

I will ease your mind

That image of "Silver Girl" was particularly evocative to me—of what, I wasn't quite sure, but it was all so lovely and damaged in its own twee way. Who was this Silver Girl? Was I sailing right behind her? I think I was. Maybe we could help ease each other's minds.


Then the video for Smashing Pumpkins' "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" premiered that fall, and there she was: the Silver Girl. Bass guitar slung low, a white-silver mini dress hugging her hips, with azure hair cut into a bob and white-stockinged legs a mile long that led down to chunky-heeled, silver ankle boots. Coal-black eyeliner around somber eyes, dark lipstick layered atop a fixed pout. This glam-punk-alterna-girl, this fallen angel, trading in her wings for an almighty bass. Some of us had a type back then, what can I say.

D'arcy Wretzky, bassist for the Pumpkins, was Silver Girl. She even seemed vaguely troubled, shy and uneasy with the spotlight, maybe in need of a bridge over her troubled water. Being in a band with Billy Corgan certainly couldn't have been easy. She needed a friend, someone who'd help her to shine. At least this was how I saw her in the video. I have a feeling this was a vision only I saw. Because, maybe I needed to see it.

The song, and the album it was on, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, were majestic and epic, perfect expressions of our (Gen X) sincerity, myopia, distrust, angst, cynicism, our desire to be loved and our need to be alone, everything and nothing, all of it. Search any dorm room that year and you'd likely find a copy of that album as well. It was the band's music that spoke to me—few bands meant as much to me as the Pumpkins did then—but D'arcy, that dark angel coated in sparkling silver, spoke to me too, if only briefly.


I was projecting something onto her, that's clear now. We do it all the time to each other, and to people we don't even know but who live inside the music, the literature, and the films we obsess over. D'arcy's resemblance to the Silver Girl I'd seen in my mind seemed to spark some recognition in me, some weird confirmation of something. It may have been as simple as believing that what my mind could conjure—an image of a character based on a few lines from an old folk-rock hit—could then manifest into reality, in the form of D'arcy Wretzky in that video, in that outfit, and with that Pumpkins song as the background noise for it all.

Or, maybe I was just a sucker for a cute girl slinging around a big bass. Considering what I remember about myself from 1995, that's probably a little closer to the truth.

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  1. Susan LeightonNovember 29, 2017 at 1:03 PM

    I was a Smashing Pumpkins fans. Looking at D'arcy, I was reminded of how I looked in the 90s. I had the wardrobe & the hair but not the blue streaks. Yes, those were the days. Great retro, Mike!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Words Seem Out of PlaceNovember 29, 2017 at 1:12 PM

      Very cool! Those were fun times, and a lot of the styles were awesome. Not all, of course. The excessively baggy men's and women's clothing makes me cringe now, but the glam influence from the '70s that seeped into everything was marvelous. D'arcy had a killer look during the band's height of popularity, that's for sure. Here's another example:

      https://pjensi.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/d-arcy-wretzky.jpg?w=326

      Delete
  2. Paul SNovember 30, 2017 at 2:40 AM

    I miss the 90s, although somehow The Smashing Pumpkins escaped my attention, back in the maelstrom of my youth. I love the fact your Silver Girl was brought to life in the form of D'arcy. Having watched the video of "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" I'm sure I would have remembered if I had seen it before.
    I enjoyed your article, although it's left me feeling kind of blue. Sometimes I wish I could build a time machine and go back to spend time with my own Silver Girls!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Words Seem Out of PlaceNovember 30, 2017 at 6:41 AM

      Thanks, Paul. I miss the '90s too, thus this series. They've been great writing exercises too, for the most part, especially this one on the Silver Girl. BTW, thanks for upper casing that in your comment because it prompted me to go back and upper case--which I'd done in my first draft, then in a fit of authorial self-doubt, converted down to lower case. I think it has more impact capitalized. Sorry the piece made you blue, but I felt a bit blue while writing it and that melancholic tone is certainly in the final piece. The spark of the idea was to keep it simple and to try and figure out what was going through my head back then, and this certainly led to a wistful feel to it all.

      If only we could travel back, just to say hey and to tell them what they meant to us. If only.

      Delete

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