I didn’t know as much as I would have liked when I first walked through the college radio station doors all those years ago, such I really clung to those few factoids that I did have at my disposal. Or at least I thought I knew these things. There was a band out of Cleveland (though, at the time, I didn’t know that was where they were from) called Death of Samantha, and I was completely certain that their name referred to the untimely end of Samantha Smith. She was a young girl from Maine who engaged in unlikely personal correspondence with Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov, eventually visiting the nation that stood as our chief Cold War adversary (President Ronald Reagan, in an act of foolhardy posturing, had referred to the U.S.S.R. as an “evil empire” mere months before Smith’s overseas trip). Smith’s tenure as “America’s Youngest Ambassador” was short-lived as she died in a plane crash in 1985.

Though I didn’t know Death of Samantha’s full discography, it appears that their debut single was released the following year, so someone made the leap of logic that the Samantha in the band’s name corresponded to this fairly famous figure. It must have been passed around a bit; I don’t think I came up with it on my own (although, buffed up as I was with the arrogance of youth, that’s entirely possible). The problem with that supposition is that the band played their first gigs under that name a full year before the plane crash that claimed Smith’s life. I suppose the other problem with the supposition is that it was flat-out wrong.

Death of Samantha took their name from a relatively obscure Yoko Ono song (as opposed to all the runaway smash hit Yoko Ono songs), which was in keeping with the avant-garde they initial pursued, largely inspired by fellow Clevelanders Pere Ubu. These connections all make perfect sense now, but they were entirely lost on me back then. To give myself a little credit, by the time I found my way to Death of Samantha, they had already dropped a lot of the pretense of musical abstraction. Where the Women Wear the Glory and the Mean Wear the Pants was the album I had at my ready disposal in the radio station library, and it is filled with somewhat gloomy, fairly straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll music.

Still, I shot my mouth off without really knowing what I was talking about, a skill at which I was fairly adept at the age of eighteen. At least I was right about one thing: I thought their music sounded really good. I stand by that appraisal.

Death of Samantha, “Good Friday”

(Disclaimer: It looks to me like the Death of Samantha album in question, and perhaps their entire catalog, is out of print. That’s the understanding I bring to distributing this track for free on my little corner of the Internet, but, of course, I have been wrong before. Regardless of the accuracy of my conclusion, I will gladly remove the song if such an action in requested by an individual or organization that has due authority to make such a request.)