I'll write you a letter tomorrow

Maybe it's because we haven't advanced in life in proximity, only with the scattershot familiarity of the virtual tubes and wires we couldn't have imagined at 19 and 20 and so on, that I'm able to re-realize the significance of our knowing each other, and how and why it set me on a trajectory to further meet who I would meet and be who I would become. 

Can't pretend that growing older never hurts

Straight to the top of my heart with a bullet today.

Come see, come see, remember me: The Top 40 of January 7, 1984

While I wish I had the time to deep-dive into items in the upper 60 like "Rappin' Rodney" (No respect! No respect!) and the months-long descent of "Total Eclipse of the Heart," this series will focus on the Top 40 as Casey K. would have smoothly enunciated between January and December of this hallowed year. 

Why this year? It's the pivotal year, it's the peak year, it's the "it" year of both my brief life until that point and in pop music. If you ask me. You didn't--but you're getting this anyway.

I would have returned to this week for the second half of 8th grade, but not yet feeling the 8th-grade-itis and seeing the horizon of a new life. That didn't happen until spring thawed out what was probably the same raw, wet, gray Kentucky winter. No, it was a return to the underlining every assignment title in red pen with a ruler, why can't I get my hair to look like Kelly Carter's when I have to wear this uniform every day kind of Catholic school experience I was going to as-yet-unknowingly-how-exactly leave behind in a few months. 

And what was playing from the Top 40 while my first teenage January plodded?

40. "In the Mood" - Robert Plant. This moody (oof) second single from his second solo album The Principle of Moments always grabbed me, even if I didn't really understand this was the same man who sang "I wanna give you every inch of my love" 15 years prior. That Phil Collins drums on this track makes it even more of the moment. Stayed at 40.

32. "Gold" - Spandau Ballet. The follow-up to the number 3 "True," released in the US in November, this elegant soarer will land only three more spots on the chart, though it gets kudos for the video, a more posh "Hungry Like the Wolf."

30. "Think of Laura" - Christopher Cross. Imagine my crushing disappointment to discover that this mournful last top ten hit of the Soft Rock Maestro wasn't written for (nor requested for, even) General Hospital's star-crossed Luke and Laura when she returns after having gone missing in their gripping late '83 storyline.

26. "Pink Houses" - John Cougar Mellencamp. One of JCM's finest compositions, in my opinion, that birthed the catchphrase of the ages (11-18, in the first half of 1984), "...and then we paint the mother paink"

21. The Curly Shuffle - Jump 'n the Saddle. Never in my life have I heard or heard of this song. Can someone explain this to me?  Okay, possible explanation: the group is from Chicago, which at least may explain why it sounds like "The Superbowl Shuffle."

16. "Church of the Poison Mind" - Culture Club. Not their biggest hit (though number 10 ultimately), but bloody rager, made so by Helen Terry's backing vocals.

14. "Major Tom" - Peter Schilling. This one's sandwiched in the middle of the German-to-English u-boat (forgive the mixed metaphors) of hits, from Falco's "Der Komissar," rerecorded by After the Fire in early '83, and the gold standard "99 Luftballoons" by Nena. It's best known as my first-one-on-the-dancefloor track always played early in New Wave Thursday nights at Neo two decades later. 4-3-2-1.

9. "Undercover of the Night" - Rolling Stones. It's political, it's violent (in the lyrics and the video), but with Robbie of Sly and Robbie on a whopping bassline and a helluva video, it's a wholly underrated Stones barnburner. Personally, I think it sounds like a Dylan story song filtered through a thousand Marlboros.

3. "Union of the Snake" - Duran Duran. This is where it all started for me. This was the first recording by DD I ever purchased, the 45 with picture sleeve. Not sure when I bought it, but this stayed on the chart a good while, ten weeks, and this was as high as it went. I'm going to say February, when days started to lengthen and when I probably couldn't get this Beyond Thunderdome precursor video out of my head, liking, at that time, all things remotely Indiana Jonesian or hammered-brass jewelry / safari wear-ian. It just sounded like...the rich, exotic world out there.

1. "Say, Say, Say" - Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson. Who doesn't love this? It's far superior to "The Girl Is Mine," and who can resist this pair as medicine showmen who are also Robin Hoods who are also vaudevillians? 

I can't go on, holding on to time

All it takes is a maudlin "love theme from" soundtrack song to shoot me back to not the feeling that it first prompted, but nostalgia for that feeling. 

Or, maybe it's feeling the gap where my longing little heart once was. What is there to long for now, except the longing back then? 

It's funny: the words that are embroidered all over this feeling, that I keep hearing, are ones introduced to me at the start of this era, in first semester freshman English (which, I discovered, you can procure on a welcome mat).

This waiting 'round's killing me

I'm standing backstage at whatever that space was called in the hulking white warehouse at the foot of I-794 and edge of the Third Ward. Waiting for my cue, which I believe was the first of the longer guitar chords, the ones that go dun duuuun, dah duuun. (I really should figure out what those are) in this one. 

And every time I hear it, I'm there again. What I was wearing, my character's name, god, even the name of the play, I'm not sure any more without thinking harder. 

But I do remember the feeling of waiting to begin something, to cross from the dimly-lit real backstage into the hot and harsh and exciting unreal. 

I'm waiting to get there again, but, damn, it's a long wait, and it's filled with doing a lot of other shit that is grayscale, unending, requires brain parts that are already exhausted, too full of nitpicky details. 

I'm not even sure I want to go back there, but I do know I can't stay here. As the wise man said, You don't have to go home but...

Fooled by now, we mystify the past

Some might think (or just the animal in my head does) that every opportunity to make something outta this blog and its/my online, er, presence, was missed, from the first blog revolution to being deemed "comedy cognoscenti" by all the Twits to doing I-don't-know-what-the-hell on TickTock or whatever, has been missed.

Right. Well, there isn't an audience for soft-rock treatises and record player reminisces, with a side of trips to back to Turfland Mall and Landsdowne pool

But this is the way I am trying to tell you (you, or just the animal in my head) that I am am alive, I am living. I know all the moments these songs vibrated the chain of tiny bones in my ears. I remember them all. I remember this one (Clybourn Avenue, rain), this one (San Diego County), here (outside of North/Clybourn Red line), and here (moving and moving on). 

It all happened. It all happens, every time. 

Here is when my bike ride to the lake would time out exactly for me to fly down the hill at the northern end of Lincoln Memorial with this song on the tape player. The water-sky line, the sun, the wind, the speed, the water on the rocks, cars climbing toward Kenwood Avenue, all of it, mine and mine forever. 

We make it harder than it has to be

Wow, this isn't as old as I thought it was. Certainly this was heard in the backseat of the car, flying down a country road--but no, that was this one, similarly a delicious R&B groove. No, this was heard when I was in fifth grade, and things were getting harder. I flunked a science test during the third or fourth week of school because, up to that point, I hadn't needed to study, do homework, think about school once I was home with Nancy Drew and Barbie and Mork and Mindy and the Bosom Buddies. What the hell? I dimly remember a big red number below 70 scrawled at the top of the test by Mr. Enoch, who we inexplicably gave a ridiculous and very late 20th century small-minded nickname involving moles (predating Austin Powers by two decades). The feel-good fourth grade was over. Nothing but homework and headaches while I strained to see the blackboard all year and then, finally, in May of fifth grade, glasses. 

Maybe this gave me short-term nostalgia for a few years earlier, when life was easier. 

...but I say I gotta try

Today in Soft Rock Saved Me: 

Change is the only thing, though it hasn't been in quite some time. The contours of daily life got crushed like spaghetti going into a boiling pot, softened, and became a meal you had to eat every night for a year-plus. 

Now I'm given a plate of lasagne every few days, and I'm not sure whether it's going to hold up or slide all over my plate. 

I can't set the structure and choose my pasta, but, boy, I gotta try to find a way to enjoy it. 

 

Maybe it's true what they say about it

Maybe we can't make the ends meet
Maybe we'll all have to do without it
Maybe this world's just incomplete

Still we all look for the truth in our lives
Searching from different sides
So hard living in a desperate world
But we all do the best that we can

Some people see a change
Some will remain the same
But all of them live their lives under the gun
Some see the road as clear
Some say the end is here
They say it's a hopeless fight, well I say I gotta try

Maybe there's too much to think about it
Maybe there ain't nothin' left to say
But if our time's really runnin' out
Then this is no time to run away

'Cause we're destined to look for the truth in this life
Blinded by tearful eyes
If it's no use tryin' in a desperate world
Then tell me why was I born

Some people see a change
Some will remain the same
But all of them live their lives under the gun
Some see the road as clear
Some say the end is here
They say it's a hopeless fight, but I say I gotta try

Lonely-living too lonely
Is it too late
To turn it all around

Some people see a change
Some will remain the same
But all of them live their lives under the gun
Some see the road as clear
Some say the end is here
They say it's a hopeless fight, but I say I gotta try

Someone's tryin'
Someone's cryin' out
While we live under the gun
Someone's livin'
Someone's givin' up

What's wrong with that?

I'm reading Macca's 2016 biography right now, pushing to finish it (not too hard a task) before a long trip, so, of course, I'm kind of tipping on the edge of a rabbit hole with this video. The audio in the song must be the single cut, and it must have been speeded up, because he sound positively squeaky compared to the Wings at the Speed of Sound remaster from 2013 (or 14?) version that I keep coming back to.

But the sweet pleading in the Wings video is as familiar as the sun--streaming through a backseat window, angling lower as the highway rolls by. Oh, indeed, this is one of those as indelible as the vinyl seat seemed to be on your bare legs below your shorts in the car back then, summer of 76, watching the world go by and thinking that it must hold as many good things as the tinny melodies wafting back suggested. Now, what I am pondering as I need to seek the early evening summer sun, is how Linda became a musician through fortune and sheer force of will. And how, exactly, do you keep becoming something when it's all on you, and fortune seems far?

 

It could happen to us any day

This is one from the backseat of the car. It's also one that I will never tire of, that I stop everything and hop on for the whole ride, no matter if it's from the tinny Toyota radio or coming out of a sleek device. Is it the bass line, the loping stride of it, Carrack's buttery voice, that puts my head against the seat back, gaze out the window at nothing and everything. It wasn't the words; I wouldn't have understood the knifepoint of the lyrics. I do know now what I wouldn't understand back then: you'll have scenes breaking up over and over and over again.