Hazy Shade of Winter

You are locked into the station that still treats a guitar riff like a headline. This is THE ZOO, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock stream at thezoorocks.com, and the record on the turntable is The Bangles tearing into "Hazy Shade of Winter," the track they cut for the 1987 film Less Than Zero and parked on its original motion picture soundtrack. Paul Simon wrote it. Simon and Garfunkel cut it first. The Bangles made it sound like a chase scene.

Simon and Garfunkel issued "A Hazy Shade of Winter" as a single in 1966, backed with "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her." It climbed to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and later landed on the 1968 album Bookends. The lyric is restless, a writer watching the calendar close in, manuscripts piled up, the seasons shifting under his feet. The arrangement is folk-rock with a stomp, but it still leaves room to breathe. Two decades later a Los Angeles band that had been playing the song in clubs since the early days of the lineup decided the breathing room could go.

The Bangles came out of the Paisley Underground, that early-eighties Los Angeles scene that treated the Byrds, the Beatles, and garage bands as living cousins rather than museum pieces. Susanna Hoffs, Vicki Peterson, and Debbi Peterson started as The Bangs. A name clash forced the change to The Bangles. Annette Zilinskas held down bass on the first recordings; Michael Steele, late of the Runaways, stepped in and stayed through the hit years. Columbia signed them. The 1984 debut, All Over the Place, produced by David Kahne, gave the station "Hero Takes a Fall" and a cover of Katrina and the Waves' "Going Down to Liverpool," the clip that famously dropped Leonard Nimoy into the frame. Critics heard the harmonies. Radio was still catching up.

Different Light, in 1986, changed the math. Prince, writing as Christopher, handed them "Manic Monday," which stopped at number 2. "Walk Like an Egyptian" went to number 1 and stayed there. "If She Knew What She Wants" kept the jangle in the Top 40. The band was suddenly everywhere, and the arguments about who got to sing, who got to write, and how much say they had in the studio were already heating up. Kahne's production on Different Light had left them feeling boxed out of their own records. That grievance matters when you get to this soundtrack cut.

Hoffs has told the story more than once. She caught the Simon and Garfunkel single on an oldies station, heard the riff and the stacked voices, and carried it straight into rehearsal. Vicki Peterson already knew it. They learned it on the spot and kept it in the set for years, a club weapon long before any film called. When the producers of Less Than Zero came looking for music, the band was between tours and had no time to write something new. Hoffs offered the cover they already owned. The movie, drawn from Bret Easton Ellis's novel, starred Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey Jr., and James Spader, a cold Los Angeles of money, coke, and empty houses. A young Brad Pitt shows up as an extra, a partygoer, for a reported thirty-eight dollars. The song did not need the plot. The plot needed the song.

Rick Rubin produced the Less Than Zero soundtrack for Def Jam, which is why a Bangles single carries a Def Jam catalog number, a small riot in the fine print. After the Kahne years the band pushed for control, and they got an additional producer credit alongside Rubin. Steve Bartek of Oingo Boingo played acoustic guitar, credited in the soundtrack notes. They shortened the title, dropped the "A," cut Paul Simon's bridge roughly in half, and, under label pressure, removed the verse with the line about drinking vodka and lime. All four voices sit up front, which was rare for them; most Bangles singles handed the lead to one singer. The tempo is meaner. The guitars are drier. Debbi Peterson's drums push the thing like a getaway car. Vicki Peterson later met Paul Simon and apologized for the trimmed bridge. She has said he was gracious about it.

The single arrived in November 1987. It peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, held out of the top slot by Tiffany's "Could've Been," and reached number 11 in Britain, where it charted into the spring of 1988 on Def Jam. Among Bangles singles only "Walk Like an Egyptian" and "Eternal Flame" did better at home. The soundtrack itself, out in early November 1987, also carried Aerosmith's take on "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu," Roy Orbison singing Glenn Danzig's "Life Fades Away," Poison, Joan Jett, and the hip-hop cuts from Public Enemy and LL Cool J that made the album feel like two radio formats arguing in the same sleeve. The Bangles track was the one that crossed over hardest. Jim Shea directed the clip, his first music video: the band in a studio walled with television screens, images from the film flickering behind the harmonies.

Everything followed in 1988, with "In Your Room" and the number 1 ballad "Eternal Flame." The same tensions that had been under the floorboards since Different Light finally split the band in 1989. They came back together at the Hollywood Bowl in 1999 for a George Martin tribute, singing Beatles songs, and that reunion pointed toward Doll Revolution in 2003. Michael Steele did not stay for the long reunion. Sweetheart of the Sun arrived in 2011. Vicki Peterson, Debbi Peterson, and Susanna Hoffs have kept the name on the road since. Vicki married John Cowsill of the Cowsills; the Peterson sisters remain the rhythmic spine. An authorized biography, Eternal Flame, finally put their version of the eighties on paper.

Drop the needle on "Hazy Shade of Winter" and you hear the argument the band was having with its own success. It is not the paisley debut and it is not the ballad that closed the decade. It is four singers who came up in Los Angeles clubs, who knew the Simon and Garfunkel record by heart, deciding that a folk-rock standard could hit as hard as anything on the request line. The riff still starts like a warning. The harmonies still lock. For the rest of the Bangles story, the records, and the road, the official home is thebangles.com, with the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Longtime listeners keep the conversation going at the fan board Return Post. The Zoo stays right here.