American Top 40 PastBlast, 8/28/82: Asia, “Only Time Will Tell”

When I was much younger, I made a few attempts at maintaining a diary, none of which ultimately took hold for all that long. The first began in the summer of 1975, at the tender age of 11–quite a bit of that focused on the status of my baseball card collection, with only a little devoted to what was going on inside me at the time. Two later efforts had a better mix of reporting on current events and looking inward (or at least I think so). One of those occurred at the midpoint of my junior year in college; I wrote about that a couple of years ago. The other had taken place (mostly) in August and September of 1982, just before and immediately after I’d flown the nest to begin life at Transy on 9/4. Those weeks are almost certainly the most closely chronicled of my life, though that hardly means they make for compelling reading. Nonetheless, you get a brief synopsis of some of what I elected to record for posterity at the end of that August.

–We had returned from a family vacation to Myrtle Beach on Sunday, the 22nd, and my sister started her senior year of high school just two days later. I visited my school (at least) twice between 8/24 and 8/31;

–I mentioned going shopping for stuff to take with me to college on four occasions, including the desk pad/calendar I wrote about last fall;

–“Making the rounds” to see high school friends one last time was a common refrain, and several close ones receive specific mention (and visits);

–I went golfing with Dad a couple of times–he was still scoring better than I was. A couple of bowling outings with my good friend Tony happened, too;

–What about my AT40 habit? Well, that got a shout-out, on 8/24. I wasn’t taking as much time to listen to the show at this point, relying on Recordland’s posting of the Hot 100 instead:

Funny thing is, I didn’t record those predictions on the 8/21 chart.

–A recurring theme is dithering over what to do about the girl I was kinda sorta dating at the time. We’d met at FBLA Leadership Camp the previous summer, and after a few weeks of calling her after school started back, I’d let things drop (she lived just a couple of counties over from me, which fortunately meant the calls were local). We’d reconnected at the Regional and State FBLA Conferences in the spring, and at the latter, I’d been there to offer some comfort after she lost the election for State Treasurer–she was a year behind me in school. The phone calls resumed, and we’d gone on a date or two over the summer.

But I was about to embark on a new adventure, and she would still be in high school sixty-plus miles away… At first I considered driving to see her over the last weekend of August to “talk it over,” then it got pushed back to the middle of the week, and finally…nothing happened. At one point I did consider how she might be feeling about things, how my apparent lack of interest in seeing her before I left might be playing.

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The first encounter with the term “supergroup” I can recall came in the spring of 1982, when Asia blasted on the scene. Even if I wasn’t that into prog rock growing up, I certainly knew about King Crimson, Yes, and ELP (yeah, the Buggles, too). I’m virtually certain my sister had purchased Asia while “Heat of the Moment” was riding high on the charts, though I don’t remember it getting played much while I was around. By this final weekend before the start of my next phase, second single “Only Time Will Tell” had advanced to #24. It would be at its peak of #17 on my final chart in early October.

—

She and I exchanged a couple of letters after I got to college. In the last one I sent, probably in mid-to-late October, I made not-so-casual mention of my new female friend. The whole thing was clearly far from my finest moment. She was never anything but nice to me, and even if that hadn’t been the case, she was undeserving of shabby treatment. I guess I can only hope that she wasn’t as bitter as John Wetton.