Mod Gone Wrong: My Yearbook's "MODern Misconceptions"

The other day, we were going through all our old photos and I decided to pull out my old high school freshman yearbook from 1988-1989. In that yearbook, I found this article:

Click to Mod-size it.

Oh yes, I remember reading this for the first time back then. By the time I read this, my knowledge of Mod stuff was still in its infancy and susceptible to misinformation. However, I immediately called B.S. on it.

We had just gotten these yearbooks and I was in a friend's room while we were getting ready to visit the senior graduation ceremony that evening. While my friends were listening to a Charlie Sexton cassette tape and going on and on about how cute he was, I was engrossed in this short article and pointing out the errors.

First off, what was up with the dude in ripped jeans and a Cosby Show sweater?? If this was 'mod,' then my classmates walking around in mullets and spiky hair must have been 'punk' by that logic!

I realized what was going on, though, once I read the article itself. It was lumping together all types of 'alternative' (I don't remember using that term back then) cliques. Punks, new-wavers, goths, skaters, etc. were the 'mods' referenced in the article. See, there were NO actual mods at my high school by the time I got there! Not one. Trust me, I was searching them out. The closest I saw was a guy who walked around in a trenchcoat with a Who patch on his arm, but that was it. Even as a 14-year-old, I knew there was more to being a Mod than that. (Sadly, my not-yet-wife went to my same high school when she was a freshman but moved away that same year. Had she remained, she would have been the only Mod there by the time I arrived. And she would have completely ignored me in my Smiths and Cure t-shirts!)

I interrupted my friends' Charlie Sexton gush-a-thon to point out how wrong this article was! "That's not what Mod is!" was all I kept going on about. Here it was, the mis-represented idea of 'Mod' going out to my fellow classmates. The thing is, a year or two earlier, I would have thought the same thing had my dad not set me straight. By the time I was getting into this whole Mod thing, 'mod' to the general public meant anything 'weird' or anti-trendy. Heck, that's what I thought at first, too!

After reading the article, I was even more driven to set the record straight... as I sat in that room, listening to Charlie Sexton, while my friends were styling and hairspraying my hair to look more like Robert Smith's.