It’s pretty well documented that I am no fan of Christmas music, generally speaking, but there are some Christmas songs I actually like. I compiled a list of them some years ago, and I still stand by that list… but there’s one addition I’d like to make now. I confess I hadn’t thought about this song in years, but for some reason I’ve heard it a number of times this holiday season, and I’ve remembered how much I always liked it. I imagine a lot of people would dismiss it these days as a cheesy relic of the Awesome ’80s, and it is that… but it also evokes a mood that resonates for me. Ladies and gentleman, this is Band Aid:
If you don’t know (or have forgotten), Band Aid was a one-time “supergroup” of British New Wave artists brought together by Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats in 1984 to raise attention and donations for famine relief in Ethiopia. The single they cut, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” was a tremendous commercial success that inspired a similar U.S. effort (“We Are the World,” by American artists united under the name USA for Africa), as well as the landmark concert event Live Aid, which was held simultaneously on two continents and broadcast globally, making it something you might call a Big Deal.
In the years since, the song has been criticized for being patronizing and self-righteous, naive, a vehicle for Geldof’s ego, ineffective at really helping to alleviate poverty, and even just a bad song. And it may well be all of those things. But to me, it’s a reminder of a more innocent time, when it seemed like it really was possible to halt this tired old world’s slide down the crapper, and we could do it merely by getting a bunch of musicians to all work together for an afternoon. It was the classic Andy Hardy solution for any problem: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” And we kids of the ’80s believed it could work, as fervently as the young people of the ’60s believed in their sit-ins and Flower Power. When I hear this song, I hear the voices of compassion and, most of all, of optimism. And isn’t that supposed to be what the Christmas season is about?
One final note: I never could — and still can’t! — identify most of the people who participated in Band Aid. The British artists were not my artists, for the most part. But while I can name every single face and voice in the video for “We Are the World,” I don’t like that song nearly as well. Go figure.
Whatever you’re doing this Christmas Eve as darkness falls across the world, I hope you too are thinking of compassion and hope…
This week’s selection is something a little different, not least of which because I can’t actually embed the video here. You’ll have to click through to this page to see it. The song you’ll hear there is “The Last Goodbye,” written and performed by the actor Billy Boyd and which will play over the end credits of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies when it opens next month. Five Armies is, of course, the concluding chapter of Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on JRR Tolkien’s beloved The Hobbit, and Jackson’s sixth epic film set in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.
I’ll confess that I haven’t been anywhere near as captivated by the Hobbit films as I was with the earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy. I think Jackson made a tremendous mistake in trying to expand a relatively modest children’s book into a sprawling epic. The story could’ve been told in one or possibly two films at most, and probably in much more concise films (i.e., shorter ones), too. The result is that the Hobbit trilogy feels much like Bilbo Baggins described himself in The Fellowship of the Ring: stretched thin like butter scraped over too much bread. Where The Lord of the Rings trilogy carried the joy and wonder of discovering a place we somehow always knew existed but never thought we’d actually see, the Hobbit movies have a tired, been-there-done-that quality to them. Honestly, I don’t even remember the first two with any degree of clarity (I only saw them once each, as opposed to the LOTR trilogy, which I’ve watched several times), and I view the coming of the third chapter with more a sense of weary obligation than enthused anticipation.
That said, Jackson’s vision of Middle-Earth does feel like a real place to me, as real in my mind and yet as tantalizingly inaccessible as Tatooine or the bridge of the original starship Enterprise, or the hometown I grew up in that is now so changed I no longer recognize it as the place I once roamed on my red Schwinn with the banana seat. And knowing that The Battle of the Five Armies is the last time we’ll get to visit this wonderful landscape — at least as its been realized by Jackson and his people — saddens me. Billy Boyd’s song and the video that accompanies it — currently an Entertainment Weekly exclusive, hence the need to click over to that page — capitalizes on this sentiment. And it’s devastatingly bittersweet and lovely.
If you ever loved the cinematic Middle-Earth, even if you’ve grown weary of hobbits and orcs after five movies… give it a view.
I never got around to actually writing it down, but for a long time I maintained a mental list of musical acts I wanted to see live. Most of these were bands or performers that I missed during their heyday in my teens, or older “living legend” types who rarely toured, or at least rarely (if ever) came to Utah. Now, thanks to all the nostalgia touring and comebacks in recent years, I’ve been able to cross off Clapton, B.B. King, Journey, Def Leppard, Pat Benatar, Chris Isaak, Bon Jovi, and KISS — essentially my top-priority “A-listers.” That leaves the fantasy list, i.e., the ones who are semi-retired, unlikely to ever come to Utah, or really expensive/difficult to get in to see: Springsteen, Tina Turner, The Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson, Bob Seger. There are also some acts that I’ve seen before that I’d like to see again, if they’re in the area: Loverboy, Bryan Adams, Night Ranger, ZZ Top. And there’s my main man Rick Springfield, of course — Anne and I have a standing date to see him whenever he’s nearby.
And then there’s the B-list, the acts that I like well enough but have never really been must-see “holy grails” for me. Billy Idol is one of those. I liked some of his music back in the day — “Rebel Yell,” “Hot in the City,” and “Dancing with Myself” all come to mind — but honestly I was always put off by his persona. My musical tastes as a teen and twentysomething were far more informed by my libido than by feelings of alienation or disaffection with the Establishment, so the punk scene held little appeal for me. And even though I always realized Billy’s solo work was pretty far removed from his punk roots, the leather-and-chains and the sneer and the raised fist were all too close to a subculture I just didn’t want any part of for me to really embrace him.
Well, funny things happen as you get older. At some point, I got over restricting my tastes according to rigid categories of what is and is not “my scene.” I picked up a Billy Idol Greatest Hits CD and discovered that I recognized and liked a lot more of his work than I had realized. And Billy himself mellowed. I’ve been downright charmed by his recent television appearances to plug his new memoir, Dancing with Myself. He comes across very much like Rick Springfield, actually, as somebody who survived a lot of really bad decisions and is grateful for it, who passed through all the bullshit that comes with celebrity and lived to tell the tale, who acquired some wisdom along the way and also learned to laugh at himself a bit. Hell, he even learned to smile. And when he does his trademark sneer now, it always seems to end in a self-deprecating chuckle that says, “Can you believe I’m still doing this?” In short, he’s turned into someone who seems like he’d be pretty damn cool to hang out with for a while. Only a couple weeks ago, I told Anne that if he happened to come to our Nevada-border outpost town of Wendover — to the casino venue where all the old ’80s acts play these days — it might be kind of fun to see him.
Well, as it so happens, I learned yesterday that he’ll be playing Salt Lake in just over a month as part of the X96 Nightmare Before Christmas holiday show (X96 is a local radio station, for my out-of-state readers). And I have to say, I’m actually pretty darn stoked about seeing him. I ordered the tickets within an hour of getting the announcement. It’s a general-admission show in a small, warehouse-style venue, so it really ought to be something — up close and personal, and probably pretty reminiscent of his early punk years. It’ll be different from the arena-style shows I’m used to, for certain. And we don’t even have to drive out to Nevada!
To celebrate this head-spinning turn of events that once would’ve seemed so unlikely — me, going to a Billy Idol concert! — here’s one of my favorite songs of his, a catchy tune called “Cradle of Love” from his 1990 album Charmed Life. It was his last top-40 single in the United States — it made it all the way to number two on the Billboard chart — and the video is… well, it’s pretty sexy, in my humble opinion. I guess my musical tastes are still driven, at least in part, by my libido:
Just as an aside, I wonder if anyone has ever totaled up how many videos involve sexy women (or girls, in this case) walking all over some hapless schmoe who doesn’t know what hit him? That was the motif for just about every one of ZZ Top’s MTV clips, for instance. Inquiring minds want to know!
The gravel-voiced singer-songwriter Kim Carnes is best known for her monster number-one hit from 1981, “Bette Davis Eyes” (the biggest song of that year and, to my mind, one of the few genuinely timeless classics from that decade), as well as, to a lesser extent, her duet with Kenny Rogers from the year before, “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.” But in honor of tonight being All Hallow’s Eve, I thought I’d share another song of hers that I’ve always quite liked, a little exercise in paranoia and afraid-of-the-dark anxiety (that also has a really catchy synth line) called “Crazy in the Night.” The first single from her 1985 album Barking at Airplanes, the song reached number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, but was sadly the last time Kim would ever break the top 40.
I’ve got no particular memories or associations with this one, I just like it. Happy Halloween, everyone!
Since I missed posting the customary video at the start of the weekend, how about we rev up the work week with this just-released official video for the mighty Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll”?
In the immortal words of Rocket Raccoon, “Oh, yeah.”
Truthfully, I’m not the world’s biggest Zep fan — my affection for them is more on a “greatest hits” level, which is a bit of a misnomer since Zeppelin never actually had a charting single, at least not in the U.S., until the 1997 re-release of “Whole Lotta Love” — but some songs are simply timeless classics, and “Rock and Roll” is one of them. It doesn’t sound like a relic from 1972. It simply sounds like itself, like an entire genre encapsulated in three minutes and 42 seconds. And it makes me want to put the top down and drive way too fast, and that’s a feeling I never grow tired of..
Technically, the song in the video above is not the same one teenager rockers have been blasting from their car stereos for 42 years, though. This is an alternate mix — the guitars have been de-emphasized in favor of the drums — from the new Deluxe Edition of Zeppelin’s landmark fourth album (variously known as Zoso or Led Zeppelin IV), featuring remastered content, studio outtakes, and “additional companion audio,” whatever that may be. Either way, it’s good stuff.
And now that my heart is pumping, what should I do with my day?
This week’s FEV isn’t a music video in the usual sense; rather, it’s a clip from today’s episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show in whichthe legendary rocker Bob Seger performs his classic hit “Night Moves.”
I had the Night Moves album on cassette when I was a teenager, and I have vibrant memories of listening to it on my old Walkman as I slouched in the back of my French classroom before the bell rang (I was a good kid and didn’t listen during class, but the interval in between classes? That was my time, Mr. Hand!) And even though there’s not a bum track on that album, this song, the title track, was always my favorite, the reason I’d bought the tape in the first place.
First and foremost, I’ve always responded somehow to the basic sonic quality of it: the acoustic guitar, the melody, the pause toward the end and the slow pickup that builds to a crescendo. Something about that sound just activates my nervous system in a pleasant way, I guess. And the lyrics have always spoken to me in personal ways, too. Back in high school, the bit about working on mysteries without any clues in the backseat of an old Chevy held a certain — how shall I say this? — aspirational appeal. Later on, I came to understand the melancholy heart of the tune. And now, as the years have piled on top of each other, the verse about waking in the middle of the night and the dramatic pause that follows have acquired an almost shocking degree of truth.
As for this particular performance, well, Seger’s getting old… and that lends the song even more poignancy than it already possessed. It’s no longer the song of a thirtysomething grappling with the specter of approaching middle age, but the reflection of a man who’s well into his own autumn. Give it a listen… and stay through the end to hear Ellen’s fond remembrance of the time Seger did something decent for her. He’s a good guy, old Bob… well, aside from his confounding refusal to ever come to Salt Lake when he’s on tour. What the hell, Bob?
In case you’ve forgotten (or never knew), Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. was an incredible powerhouse of an album. Not only did it mark a change toward a more commercial sound for The Boss, it generated a mind-boggling seven top-10 singles (out of 12 total tracks on the album) and kept Springsteen’s name on the Billboard Hot 100 for nearly two years, from May 1984 to March of 1986. It remains Bruce’s best-selling album, even though he’s one of the more prolific artists out there (he’s released 11 other records in the decades since Born in the U.S.A., up to and including this year’s High Hopes), and it is one of my personal favorites by any artist.
This week’s selection for Friday Evening Videos is a song called “I’m on Fire,” which was the fourth single from Born in the U.S.A. It was kind of an odd candidate for a single, in my opinion, but perhaps its quiet wistfulness was calculated to be a palate cleanser following the upbeat pop sound of “Dancing in the Dark,” the urgency of “Cover Me,” and the outraged social commentary of the album’s title track.
I don’t have any particular anecdote or memory connected to this song; it’s simply one I have always liked, especially in the wee hours when I’m the only one awake in the house and something deep inside me is crying out for something that I often can’t even name. Surely I’m wasn’t the only angsty young man back in the Awesome ’80s who thought the line about a knife, edgy and dull, cutting a six-inch valley through the middle of someone’s soul, was written specifically about him. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found my relationship to the song has changed, but if anything, that relationship has only grown deeper and richer. It speaks to me now of a much wider range of things I feel angsty about… and that damn knife cuts more deeply than ever during those long, dark hours between midnight and dawn.
One quick thought on the video: like the song, it’s simple and no-frills, and it, too, has long been a favorite of mine, largely because of the car Bruce is driving. That’s a 1956 Ford Thunderbird, if you don’t know your vintage steel. My dad has a red ’57, which he bought when I was in middle school. It was the first of our “collector fleet,” and is the only one I still feel nervous about driving…
She was a high-school boy’s dream and my mother’s worst nightmare, a five-foot-three gymnast who styled herself after the “Like a Virgin”-era Madonna. I can’t remember how or when we first met — in fact, I really only remember a handful of moments I shared with her — but there was chemistry between us.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of other things between us, too, and somehow that blistering-hot love affair that I always felt certain was about to take off… didn’t. Oh, we tried to get together. But one or the other of us was always dating someone, or just recovering from breaking up with someone, or the timing was otherwise off somehow. And there were other things as well that I really should keep to myself. Let’s just leave it with we tried. Oh brother, did we try! We flirted and we enjoyed the crackle in the air when the other was around, and occasionally when that electric buzzing got to be too much to ignore, we grabbed each other and ducked into a dark corner to see how breathless we could make each other before the next bell rang, and we really didn’t care if we were supposedly going with someone else. And then one day she caught up to me in the middle of a class period, when the halls were empty and we both should’ve been someplace else, and she delivered the news that she was moving away… the final obstacle that we would never be able to overcome. We kissed and necked a little, and as I remember it, we even cried a bit for the love that we’d never quite found together. And then she was gone.
It felt like we’d had a relationship, and it felt like we were breaking up. But in fact, we’d only managed to go on one actual date. I took her to see 38 Special when they played Salt Lake’s old Salt Palace Arena during the band’s 1986 Strength in Numbers tour. There was a lot of pot being smoked in the arena that night, and even though neither of us imbibed directly, I remember feeling giddy all during the show, and for hours afterward, even after I got home and was alone in my room with my ringing ears. I’ve always blamed the secondhand, but maybe it was really the feeling of being young and alive. Maybe it was the feeling of being with her.
Funny how a melody or even just a simple guitar chord can bring back so much of something you experienced for a brief time 30 years in the past. The big hit from Strength in Numbers was a song called “Like No Other Night,” but I always preferred the album’s second single, “Somebody Like You,” with its relentlessly catchy, upbeat throughline. It came up on my iPod today while I was out of the office for my afternoon walk. The early-autumn sunshine was warm and mellow on my face, and I felt my speed picking up to the song’s beat and my hands unconsciously beginning to strum an invisible guitar. And then I started lip-synching the lyrics that I recall singing along with the band when they played the song in 1986. I remember singing it for the girl in the Madonna-style lace gloves and bangles as she swayed at my side. And I remember singing it to her again after the show, in the leather-upholstered privacy of my monstrous old 1970 T-Bird as we waited for the parking lot to clear out.
I couldn’t find a traditional music video for the song, and I’m wondering if perhaps there wasn’t one made. But the one I did find is probably a better choice anyway, because it gives a flavor of the performance I saw that night so long ago and still remember so fondly:
My Loyal Readers know it doesn’t take much to get me feeling nostalgic, but I’ve been especially prone to that particular mood lately for reasons I don’t have time to go into right now. So for this week’s video selection, I thought I’d pull out a song that, perhaps more than any other I know, evokes what it’s like to be me when the memories come calling.
I don’t have any particular anecdotes related to this one, or really much to say about it at all, other than I liked it when it first charted way back in 1985 — I thought the guitar riff was cool — and as I’ve gotten older, the lyrics have only resonated more and more with every passing year. The video is a bit on the silly side… but then Bryan Adams never seemed terribly comfortable with the video thing anyhow. I dig his leather vest, at least.
Ladies and gentlemen, from the excellent album Reckless (which didn’t have a single lame track on it and iscelebrating its 30th anniversary this year!), I give you “Summer of ’69”:
Three decades into the past, Sherman, to the year 1984… my sophomore year of high school. There, that’s me, now… the kid by the Coke machine who’s trying to look far more self-assured than he ever actually felt. At least the baby fat is finally starting to come off, thank God, so I no longer look like such a marshmallow.
That’s what she called me once, on the bus coming home from middle school, an eon or so earlier… her “little marshmallow.” In my naivete, I had thought it was cute back then, a term of endearment, but more and more in the autumn of 1984, I’m realizing that it wasn’t meant as benignly as I’d taken it. Marshmallow… soft and white. Yeah, that was me. Or at least it had been. But now things are changing. I am changing. And one of these days, soon, I’m going to figure out how to make her notice me. How to make her like me. I mean like-like me, not just, you know…
Yeah. Good luck with that, kid.
I had just turned fifteen in the fall of 1984, the beginning of my sophomore year, and if I wasn’t the youngest person in my class, I was definitely near the low end of the spectrum. And I had a terrible crush on an older woman. She was a junior, a girl from the neighborhood that I’d known since the seventh grade. But despite our history and our proximity, we may as well have been living on different planets. She had her driver’s license and a car. She went on dates. She had boyfriends. And I was just some lame pudgy kid she’d once teased on the school bus on the way home. But I had my hopes. After all, I’d seen all those movies. I knew how this was all supposed to go: My efforts to impress her would seem to go nowhere, but in the end I would finally win her over after some other guy had treated her like shit, and we’d have this great uplifting moment when she asks me to forgive her and I’d tell her there’s nothing to forgive, and we’d kiss and fade to black… (Pretty in Pink hadn’t come out yet to contradict my romantic fantasies; to this day, I still think Molly Ringwald totally picked the wrong guy. Infuriating damn movie.)
Anyhow, not only could I imagine that triumphant final scene in all its cinematic detail, I even had the perfect song in mind to play over the closing credits (so to speak): “I Can’t Hold Back” by Survivor.
Originally formed in 1978, the band Survivor finally scored a tremendous breakthrough hit in 1982 with “Eye of the Tiger,” the theme song from the film Rocky III (although the version we’re all familiar with from constant radio play — still! — is actually somewhat different from the one used in the movie). The following year, however, the band’s lead singer Dave Bickler was forced to leave the group because of health issues. He was replaced with a gentleman named Jimi Jamison, who would deliver three more top-ten hits for Survivor throughout the rest of the decade.
“I Can’t Hold Back” wasn’t one of them — it peaked at only number 13 on the Billboard Top 100 — but it remains my favorite Survivor song, in no small part because of Jamison’s performance. His voice is remarkable in the world of rock vocalists for the way it so smoothly conveys such a range of emotion — longing, uncertainty, passion, and in the end, confidence and joy — in short, everything I was feeling from moment to moment during my sophomore year of high school. In addition, the song’s lyrics feature some surprisingly poetic turns of phrase, and even though the synths give it a far more poppy sound than the bombastic “Eye of the Tiger,” it’s still unquestionably a rock song. (The reprise of the line “Turn the pages of desire” followed by the guitar snarl and drum punctuation at about 2:41 — the moment in the video when Jimi starts making out with the starlet on the train — never fails to make me want to pump my fist in the air.)
I had the song on 45 rpm record, and I recall playing it over and over in my room late at night all through my sophomore year of high school, as I gazed out my window at the night sky and longed and dreamed. I still love this song, even 30 years later. So naturally it was the first thing that came to mind when I heard a couple weeks ago that Jimi Jamison had died of a heart attack at the age of 63. In recent years, he’d been performing off and on with Survivor as well as pursuing solo projects, and there had been some talk of the band touring with both Jamison and Dave Bickler alternating lead on their respective hits. There was even some rumbling about a new album. I regret that those things won’t happen now, and that I never got to hear him sing live.
As for that girl that I had such a case on, the junior who’d once called me her marshmallow… I didn’t even get as far with her as Ducky got with Andie. I did find the courage to ask her for a slow dance at one overcrowded, sweaty, midwinter stomp, but that was the extent of it. I eventually got the message and stopped embarrassing myself… and her as well, probably. I’ve bumped into her a couple times in the years since. And I don’t intend to sound unkind, because I know that it’s me that’s changed and not her so much… but I no longer see what the big damn attraction was in the first place…
