My Jheri Curl Story
My jheri curl story is that I have a jheri curl story. In 1979 I had a shoulder length California curl. It was like a jheri curl but not wet. I rode a motorcycle. But that's only the half. The rest of the story is that I had a Prince hairstyle in college.
In the early 80s, when I was a sophomore in college, I had a high top fade. It was taller than the one worn by sprinter Carl Lewis, but it was not quite as extreme as the one Kid had. Fresh from a dalliance with the fashion of preppy, I went directly to the Larry Blackmon school of fashion. But that wasn't enough. So I curled it.
Now you sorta know the style of the 80s. You know about the big huge jheri curls. Full Force were the kings of curl, the problem was that they wanted to be bad boys. It worked. The muscle shirts, the two-tone were cool, but when they tried to fake like they were cool, it simply didn't work. Me, I was a bit too sophisticated and quite frankly liked more of what Morris Day was all about. Except Morris was too tame and Prince was too wild. So I generated a middle and the closest thing to it was Jesse Johnson's look. So if you can imagine I high top fade with a curl, but a buzz cut on the side, that was my look in the fall of 1984.
That look lasted about 2 months, then I pledged Alpha and got all conservative. No photographic evidence of my 80s hair exists. None.
