Martha Lutz spent her first year after graduating from college in Hamburg on the German equivalent of a Fulbright Award, mostly studying the history of mathematics (she’d double-majored in math and German). She knew she wanted to do graduate work in math but arrived back in the States too late for the 1985-86 academic year; in August 1986, she enrolled in the master’s program on a teaching assistantship at the University of Louisville, across the river from her hometown of New Albany, IN. Martha received her degree in a ceremony held at Freedom Hall thirty-five years ago today, on May 14, 1988. In attendance were her parents, her sister, and her then-boyfriend (the picture above was taken just after she’d received her diploma). That summer she began a job at Midway College (now University), a two-year women’s college in the process of converting to a bachelor’s-granting institution, with the intention that eventually she’d return to school to get a doctorate.
During those twenty-one months, my future wife and I were charting the same course (unbeknownst to each other, of course). I was three-and-a-half hours northwest of Louisville, at the University of Illinois, and my master’s ceremony, held in a hall of the fine arts center, was just eight days after hers. In attendance were my parents and my sister (I wasn’t dating anyone at the time). I would be staying to work on a Ph.D., but a number of folks in my initial cohort were departing Urbana-Champaign, some to teach at a community college, others to take a position that required quantitative chops, and a couple or so to pursue doctoral work elsewhere. I also have a photo from the day of the ceremony, taken as I’m about to enter the apartment near downtown Urbana I shared with friends John and Jim. Note the cheesy mustache and scraggly growth on my cheeks and chin; that was the last time I made any sort of attempt at facial hair, and I’m pretty sure I got rid of it within a few days.
What to do for this slightly odd tale of two math nerds doing the same thing at the same time in different places for a couple of years who then met two-thirds of a decade later and really got a thing for one another? I’m going with the only Top 40 hit for a duo out of California. Times Two released one album and one EP before splitting in the early 90s. “Strange But True” is sitting at #23 on this countdown, two slots shy of its peak. (They tried to follow it up with a Club Nouveau-ified cover of “Cecilia,” but the public voted against it.) Be warned: the video contains a severe case of late 80s fashion.
At some point—it was before I came on the scene—Martha let go of the idea of going back to school. Inertia may have played a role. That decision clearly paid off, for both of us, in one big way.
This is the final installment of a three-parter. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2.
Three days after the Billy Joel concert, two days after the record store trip that scored Marshall Crenshaw and War, I turned 20 years old. There’s only one thing about the day that now remains with me.
It was a Monday, so I would have traipsed off to differential equations and computer architecture class at the appropriate moments. I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me that my parents drove in to take me to dinner that evening, as it’s exactly the sort of thing they would do. They were well aware that I’d been very low about the breakup for over a month and no doubt would have wanted to check on my state in person, especially since I hadn’t gone home for the weekend. I don’t remember any of the presents they gave me that year.
It’s the gift from James, likely received before we went to breakfast, that turned out to be the day’s highlight. I guess the Joel ticket I’d given him for Christmas had raised the bar for such occasions, but even so I think I was surprised or flattered (or both) to be handed a twelve-inch square package, obviously an LP. A black, textured cover, with bright green block lettering in the upper left corner. Fear of Music, by Talking Heads.
This was probably not a lucky stab in the dark on his part. Music was of course a frequent topic in our conversations, and it’s reasonable to believe I had expressed interest in learning more about the Heads. After all, “Burning Down the House” had been a Top 10 hit the previous year; this could have led me to relate how much I liked “Take Me to the River” and to recall an extremely favorable writeup of Fear of Music in Stereo Review.
It didn’t take long to throw it on the turntable. I loved it, and maybe just as importantly, James loved it too. While our individual musical explorations wouldn’t always move in the same direction, Talking Heads effectively became our band, the one group we seemed to enjoy equally. Within months I bought More Songs about Buildings and Food and Remain in Light, while James scored ’77. We saw Stop Making Sense multiple times when it was the Friday midnight showing at the Kentucky Theater those last couple of years of college.
So, how do I feel about the eleven songs on Fear of Music today?
11. “Animals” I don’t get into the groove from the first half of the song. Things pick up when Byrne starts chanting about the titular creatures setting a bad example and living on nuts and berries.
10. “Drugs” The most atmospheric piece on the album, which almost makes it feel out of place.
9. “Heaven” The “we’re going to slow things down for you couples out there” piece on the album, which almost makes it feel out of place. A bit odd that “Heaven” is the second-best known song on the album but was not released as a single.
8. “Electric Guitar” James and I came to interject snippets of Byrne’s lyrics into our daily interactions, such as “Warning sign…warning sign” and “Don’t get upset—it’s not a major disaster.” I’m disappointed now that “This is a CRIME…against the STATE” never rose to that level.
Hmm…side two just isn’t measuring up to side one.
7. “I Zimbra” That moment just as the needle dropped on side one was always exciting, assuming the leadoff track wasn’t already a hit single. This time I got a real winner, with strong hints of what was to come on the band’s next album, Remain in Light.
6. “Air” My grad school friend Greg doesn’t suffer fools all that well, particularly other drivers. I’ve heard him quip, “Some people never had experience with air,” complete with falsetto on the last word, when someone in his vicinity does something he considers (to put it nicely) lacking in good judgment.
5. “Paper” I used how often the songs on FoM run through my head as a first-order approximation for these rankings. “Paper” may be the shortest song on the album but it has one of its best guitar riffs, and it definitely rocks the hardest.
4. “Mind” I knew from “Take Me to the River” that Byrne was an unconventional vocalist, though from how early on and to what degree I couldn’t know fully until hearing those first two albums later in 1984. Still, I think he took it up another notch on FoM, first evident with the various ways he attacks the title word in “Mind.”
My friend Kevin, WTLX’s station manager, hosted a weekly interview show called Transy Talks each Monday evening during our sophomore year. That spring I was asked to run the control board when Kevin interviewed Dr. Humphries, the Academic Dean. I brought Fear of Music down to the studio with me and queued up side one as Kevin was getting the mic set up in the adjacent room (there was a window over the board allowing you to see into it). There’s no telling what Dr. Humphries, who knew me as well as he did any decently performing student, thought when “Mind” played.
(Aside: It’s occurred to me that I considered the Dean to be plenty old when I was a student, so I’ve looked for mention of him online. Turns out he was 59—my current age—the day of that interview.)
3. “Cities” Fantastic groove they elected to fade in, punctuated by Weymouth’s ascending bass line. Byrne’s feral growling of “find myself a city to live in” at the end sure is something to behold.
2. “Life During Wartime” It’s just two four-bar riffs interspersed and played over and over, but what a hypnotizing sound. I’ll take this as an excuse to mention again the parody I wrote based on this song about the four-week period at the end of the year we called May Term.
1. “Memories Can’t Wait” The most sublime moment on the album—if you’re familiar with the song, you know what I’m going to say—comes two-thirds of the way through “Memories Can’t Wait,” that resolution and modulation right before the line, “Everything is very quiet.” Prior to that the sound is constantly driving and swirling (I have no idea how some of it was created), while afterward…well, it’s not very quiet, but it is more conventionally structured, building back up to the satisfying conclusion. This is a strong contender for my favorite Talking Heads song; if I’d had half a brain five-plus years ago, I would have made “These memories can’t wait” this blog’s tag line (but better late than never, I suppose).
FYI: Side two of the very slab of vinyl James gave me (its cover is pictured at the top) is playing on the turntable in my basement as this is being published.
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Keeping American Top 40 charts between the ages of 12 and 18 was formative, but I’d point to getting these three albums over a little more than 36 hours in February 1984 as my origin story, when I started becoming that dude who wants to share his musical tastes and the associated stories with the world. There’s the fellow who critics loved but could never break through, the up-and-coming band who’d soon conquer the world, and the group that had already enjoyed their commercial and artistic peak but became so important to two guys on the fourth floor of Clay Hall. I guess the only thing that’s missing from the tale is a female singer-songwriter; alas, Suzanne Vega’s debut album was still a year-and-a-half away.
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James was very kind to think of me on my birthday with this present, especially given what a turkey I’d been over the previous month. I couldn’t have been—and still wouldn’t be for another few weeks—enjoyable to live with. When the time came to discuss roomie situations for the next school year, he initially hesitated to commit to continue with me. I gave him time and space to think and decide. In the meantime, another friend checked in on the possibility of rooming with him. My preference was for the status quo—maybe I was wanting to hold on to some degree of continuity in my life. One night some time later, James was ready to talk about it again. He said some very nice things about me, that I was cool to room with, that he’d like to remain roommates. We never considered an alternate arrangement after that. I’m still appreciative of the grace he showed me, deserved or otherwise.
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Postscript: My ex-girlfriend and I had another class together in the fall of our junior year, but managed to live essentially parallel lives on our small campus over the last 1.5 years, only rarely interacting. We were in the same place a very few times over the next three decades, a wedding here, a reunion there. At our 30th year reunion in 2016, she and I were part of a group that spent much of the day together; since then, we’ve reestablished a friendship, emailing and/or texting one another periodically. A nontrivial percentage of our correspondence in recent years had to do with James and his declining health. Even though I’d already heard, I really appreciate that she called me that Thursday afternoon last April to make sure I knew he had passed.
Guitarist Tom Verlaine passed away earlier today. I’m in no position to do a survey of his life and career–there are plenty of others who can and will do that task justice. Still, Verlaine’s magnum opus is definitely part of the music of my life, so I’ll take time to briefly describe how that came to be.
The August 27, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone was part of the magazine’s celebration of its twentieth anniversary, its attempt to identify the 100 Best Rock Albums of its lifetime. It’s not a shock to hear I’ve always been attracted to that sort of thing, and as you might imagine, I spent quite a few hours poring over their rankings after a copy arrived at the apartment I was sharing with John and Jim. Gratified when I saw an LP from my collection mentioned, mystified frequently when a title was unfamiliar. By this point I probably knew of the album at #38, sandwiched between Innervisions and Purple Rain, but had never heard anything off it.
(Noel Coppage’s brief, color-me-very-unimpressed blurb in Dad’s copy of the May 1977 issue of Stereo Reviewmust have passed under my eyes a decade earlier without registering.)
My interest was piqued enough at the time to file Marquee Moon under “must seek out someday” in my brain; it would be well over a decade, though, before anything of the sort happened. As it turns out, my father was responsible for getting it into my hands.
I’ve noted before that Dad was a collector of various things, music (both rock and classical) being one of his primary avenues of expression. When he latched onto CDs in the 90s, he no doubt took advice from any number of articles identifying Essential Disks Everyone Should Own (TM), which is how I expect that a copy of Marquee Moon ended up in a box underneath the bed in my folks’ townhouse basement bedroom. When I came across it on a weekend visit around 2003 or so, he gladly allowed me to take it home.
I’d guess that Dad never played it, but I didn’t waste time. My recollection is that I slipped it into the CD player in our kitchen one Sunday morning soon afterward. I was immediately captivated by the searing riffs on the opening track.
The album turned out to be a treat from start to finish and became a regular listen over the ensuing years; it’s near the top of my list of disks to recommend to friends who don’t know it. While I doubt I would have appreciated MM that much when it was released in 1977, I do regret not checking it out immediately after the RS write-up in 1987.
I’m also regretting today that I haven’t yet sought out Mr. Verlaine’s other output. That will likely take place in the coming days, but tonight it’ll be “See No Evil,” “Venus,” “Friction,” and the rest from MM. I hope he rests in peace.
The only artifact I have from all the years my father subscribed to Stereo Review is Peter Reilly’s full-page look at Billy Joel’s The Stranger in the January 1978 issue. As best as I recall, my sister and I didn’t get the album until close to the time that 52nd Street was released, but fortunately, Dad held on to his older issues for quite a while. I know now that Joel didn’t just appear out of the ether at the end of 1977; at the time I was probably impressed that someone seemingly relatively new rated such real estate in SR. He owns perhaps an outsized space in my personal musical landscape, for various reasons (you’ll learn more about that in my next post). This review could be a partial key to understanding why.
Article Rick Mitz Talks with James Taylor Easily the longest feature piece I’ve come across over the three years of this series. Mitz’s fandom comes across loud and clear as the conversation bounces from the mill that is the music business, to songwriting (“There is a songwriter’s place. There is a place you are at when you write a song, and I’m not there all the time”), to performing (“…I just sort of get into a frame of mind where I’m fated to do it. It’s sort of like Zen archery—there’s the target and I’m the arrow, and there’s the space to be covered between the two of us”), to critical reception of his work (“I listen to my critics and absolutely read my record reviews…when I read something, I take it seriously, even though I know better”), to married life (“Carly is an extraordinary person to know because she is probably as positive as anybody you will ever meet”). It’s a long and winding chat.
Our reviewers this month are Chris Albertson, Noel Coppage, Phyl Garland, Paul Kresh, Peter Reilly, Steve Simels, and Joel Vance.
Best of the Month –Ron Carter Quartet, Piccolo (CA) “The sophistication, swing, and high-caliber musicianship offered by the late, lamented Modern Jazz Quartet are to be found in the Ron Carter group, and a commensurate popularity will surely follow.” –Merle Haggard, A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today (NC) “Anyway, there’s personality and style in what he does, when he’s up to snuff as he is in this album.” –Pete Townshend/Ronnie Lane, Rough Mix (SS) “…in its best moments it is so alive, so friendly, so inventive, that the lapses hardly matter…you should grab it immediately, no matter which side of the New Wave you’re on.”
Recordings of Special Merit –The Nighthawks, Side Pocket Shot (JV) “Their songs are lean and spare, designed to allow as much room as possible for instrumental fills and passages…(t)he combo is crisp and driving as always, with the rowdy sense of fun that distinguishes them.” –Diana Ross, Baby It’s Me (PK) “This new, tamer, warmer Diana is a welcome visitor, and the whole program is distinguished, despite the lush arrangements, by a spirit at once exhilarating and pleasantly civilized.” –Sanford-Townsend Band, Smoke from a Distant Fire (JV) “Townsend’s lead vocals are forceful and exciting; he is able to sing at the top of his range without exhausting himself or the listener, and when he hits a high note there is a joie de vivre to it that brings a grin.” –Adam Wade, S/T (PG) “Obviously, this is a disco album, but of an exceptionally high quality. That all too familiar danceable beat is subtly underplayed, permitting Wade to explore the full range of his voice and style.” –Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blues (SS) “The sound of it is as California-lush as anything the Boys have come up with in the Seventies, with ethereal vocal choirs, relentlessly layered instrumentation, and snippets of melodies that suggest strange, primitive chants.”
Featured Reviews –Karla Bonoff, S/T (NC) “But nostalgia has practically nothing to do with the appeal of her music. The dramatic buildup she likes to create (she definitely prefers the chorus to the bridge, structurally, and is smart enough to avoid repeating the chorus so much that it gets blunted) is a characteristic, all right, but the way she does it seems to come from no particular time or place.” –Hodges, James, and Smith, What’s on Your Mind? (PG) “In short, this is not just another girl trio…(they) show all the signs in this first outing of real staying power.” –Billy Joel, The Stranger (PR) “…it gives the listener a unique opportunity to get into the head and feelings of a now grown-up ex-greaser though a group of songs that are at once a love letter and a farewell to youth, by turns touching, mordant, funny, gross (new sense), melodramatic, and naïve.” –Randy Newman, Little Criminals (William Anderson) “Most of his melodies are habit-forming on first hearing, and his arrangements have a lapidary quality—perfect setting, perfect fit—that permanently pre-empt the listener’s affections…(t)here are no songs here that once could call less than beautifully crafted…” –Elvis Presley, Elvis in Concert (John Morthland) Also includes reviews of Merle Haggard’s My Farewell to Elvis and Elvis’ Favorite Gospel Songs by J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet. “Had Elvis not died between the time it was recorded and the time it was released, it would attract no more special attention than any of his many other dubious albums.” –Lily Tomlin, On Stage (Lester Bangs) “Just where many comedians turn self-indulgent, Tomlin creates authentic American folklore out of her most intimate material, giving us an oral history that goes beyond comedy to touch the heart…” –Lester Young, The Lester Young Story, Volumes 1-3 (CA) The first installment of “Columbia’s long-awaited five-part chronological reissue of everything this extraordinary pacemaker recorded for that label.”
Other Albums Reviewed –The Babys, Broken Heart (JV) “…the producer and the engineer knew their business when it came to miking the instruments and getting good separation. Unfortunately, their efforts were wasted.” –Harry Chapin, Dance Band on the Titanic (PR) “Harry Chapin is in his usual form here…which is to say that the only thing more pompous and portentous than his songs is his performance of them.” –Chicago, Chicago XI (PR) “Anything of any real interest that this group was doing surely faded at about III or IV, but their public, easily the most loyal since Edgar Cayce’s, continues to buy their albums in astonishing quantities. Listening to XI was—surprise, surprise—very much like listening to X and IX and VIII and so on. And on.” –Country Joe and the Fish, Reunion (NC) “Though the album works best as nostalgia despite itself, it does suggest the band could stay together if they want to and give the present and the future, as well as the past, a going-over.” –Doobie Brothers, Livin’ on the Fault Line (NC) “The group still seems to ride mainly on crossing watered-down soul with that amorphous Southern California non-style of rock, and if their lyrics are emptier than usual here, blame it on the times.” –Firefall, Luna Sea (SS) “If you’d enjoy an album that has nothing to recommend it except that it supports critical theorizing, this should be just your cup of tea.” –Jermaine Jackson, Feel the Fire (PG) “His decision to leave the Jackson family group was on target. Jermaine had outgrown the group musically…he comes across as a high-energy performer who infuses his songs with an infectious, boyish fervor that never supplants his emphasis on solid singing.” –Carole King, Simple Things (PR) “There was a time, and that quite recently, when introspection and soul searching were appropriate. But this kind of precious, totally self-involved tender loving care of one’s own teeny-tiny emotional world has gotten to be a bore.” –Richard Pryor, Greatest Hits (JV) “But on these tracks, apparently all recorded live, Pryor seems brutal and abrasive, so it is difficult to tell whether he is using his substantial comedic gifts to soothe his rage or using his rage to feed his gifts.” –Rush, A Farewell to Kings (JV) “I would have enjoyed this album more if Rush had been a little more specific about what they intended to say; as it is, their point remains, if not a closely guarded secret, certainly one that is well chaperoned.” –The Staples, Family Tree (PR) “The Staples…have delivered another very good session here, particularly the title song, which has an extra measure of that warm gutsiness that is so identifiable in all of their work.” –Steely Dan, Aja (JV) “The seven selections in Aja are not so much pop songs as they are mood pieces taking a more or less jazz direction…(t)he project is musically successfully, then, but I still miss Steely Dan’s songs.” –Dwight Twilley Band, Twilley Don’t Mind (JV) “But to anyone who was around when the Liverpudlians held happy sway, Twilley’s music will sound like an old story twice told.”
It was a sleepy, warm Saturday night in the Kentucky counties immediately south of Cincinnati. Friends and family from across the area gathered at the church on the southern corner (yes, the roads run SW-NE and NW-SE right there) of Graves Ave. and Home St. in Erlanger to bear witness to a third-grade teacher living in Fairborn, OH, and the minister at Bromley Christian Church (situated just a few miles north of the evening’s festivities) becoming united in holy matrimony.
The two had met a little over a year earlier, when her father, the minister’s physician, decided to visit the church in Bromley one Sunday morning with his wife and middle daughter. They took the minister out to lunch afterward, and sufficient sparks flew between the two younger folks that they soon arranged a date. Things became serious quickly enough, and before you knew it, Caroline Houston and Richard Harris, who were to become my parents, were making plans for a wedding, one which occurred sixty years ago tonight.
Someone–though I doubt it, maybe my grandmother Harris?–added watercolor to one of the invitations and gave it to Mom and Dad. I remember this sitting on an end table during my youth. The service started plenty late in the day, 7:30pm.
I fortuitously stumbled across my parents’ wedding album this past weekend. If you’re willing to stick around, I’ll share a few moments from the event. The picture at the top is obviously from after the ceremony; Martha and I have a photo analogous to it in our album.
Mom’s two sisters were already married. That’s younger sister Nancy next to her, serving as matron of honor. The two flower girls are my cousins Carol (on the right) and Diane, the third and fourth daughters of older sister Sue. In between is Mom’s best friend from high school and college (and fellow elementary school teacher), Betty Jane Webb.
The sanctuary in the original Erlanger Christian Church was unsurprisingly not air-conditioned (it was demolished in 1976, the replacement building erected adjacent to it). I’m digging the white tux jackets. My grandfather was four weeks away from turning sixty.
The happy couple, now husband and wife.
My paternal grandfather had passed away the previous November–my mother never got to meet him. You can tell that it’s already (mostly, at least) night in these outdoor photos. Initial research indicates that Kentucky may not have been observing Daylight Savings in 1962, in which case sunset would occur a little after 8:00.
The reception was held at my maternal grandparents’ house in Union, several miles to the south and west of Erlanger. It was a grand old stone house, well over a century old even then. My cousins and I have so many happy childhood memories being out at “the farm.”
That’s a pretty impish look on Dad’s face, but it’s looking like he suppressed any impulse to misbehave with the cake.
View of the front of the house (not the side we usually entered–the driveway wound around from U.S. 42 on the back). Mom is visiting with guests, while Dad seems to be chatting with two of the groomsmen.
I love the kinetic energy in this one, an artifact of photographic technology of the time; you sure can sense their happiness as they jog toward the car. The honeymoon took them to Niagara Falls (my wife and I found two commemorative painted plates of the falls among their belongings when sorting through things after they both had passed).
Mom and Dad made it to anniversary #51. I imagine both would acknowledge it wasn’t the happiest marriage ever. As the years passed, though, each came to depend on the other, to be grateful for the other, in their own way.
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The last good photo of my parents together was taken in 2009, when the Erlanger Christian Church member directory was undergoing one of its periodic updates. I’m sure I received a framed copy that Christmas. It resides on a shelf in our basement.
Notes and scenes from the end of the first year of college:
1) My May Term class was a lit topics course, Studies in Short Fiction. The professor was Dr. Holmes, the same fellow I’d had back in the fall for my composition course. He’d come to Transy in the early 60s, having been Ivy-trained at Cornell and Columbia. Maybe he had a bit of the patrician in his demeanor but on the whole was eager to engage with students. His comments on papers were generous though occasionally hard to decipher. (He seemed plenty old to me at the time, but I’m able to determine I’m now the age he was then. Yikes.) We read stories in an anthology and also imbibed from Joyce’s Dubliners and a Chekhov collection. As much as I enjoyed writing, looking back at my work I can tell I definitely needed the feedback. I’m glad I took the class–I still have a deep appreciation and affection for the short story format.
2) Having just one class for two hours a day gave one plenty of free time (they didn’t call it “Play Term” for nothing). I’d been maintaining some sort of distance running program, as I participated in a rain-soaked 10K race in mid-May, my second and final effort at that distance. Top 40 radio ruled in James’s and my dorm room, I suspect largely at my behest. (I’ve been trying to bring to mind what James was taking that May–thinking it was a history course, since he was a minor. Would that I could consult him.) For two weeks in May, I taped a ranking of my favorite songs to the door of our room (the outside, of course, so others could bear witness to my excellent taste). The second was that for 5/21, our last weekend before finals.
That spring of 1983 remains one of my favorite periods for pop music, and I’m still very much okay with all ten of these tunes.
3) Voting in the Kentucky primary would occur on 5/24, the same day as my final exam. 1983 was a gubernatorial election year (only KY, LA, and MS choose governors the year before a presidential election). Back in the day the Democratic nominee was highly likely to prevail in November, and that year featured a fierce, three-way competition among Martha Layne Collins (then Lt. Governor), Harvey Sloane (mayor of Louisville) and Grady Stumbo (a physician from the eastern part of the commonwealth). All three would score more than 30% of the primary vote, with Collins eking out a victory over Sloane by a little more than 4500 votes. (She would win in November over Republican nominee and future Baseball Hall of Famer/U.S. Senator Jim Bunning by a little more than 10 percentage points.)
The ads on television must have been incessant that spring, since I’d been inspired also to put this on our door, maybe right below my top 10 list:
About that write-in line…my college and grad school friends can attest that my father wasn’t shy in the least about disclosing his political loyalties to anyone and everyone. The young woman I was dating at the time apparently felt obliged to offer him up as an option.
4) The last entry in the diary I’d started the previous August came on 5/20; this was the first time I’d written in it in four months. It acknowledges the upcoming time apart between my girlfriend and me, notes that my sister’s HS graduation would also be on 5/24, and discusses my high school friend Frank’s relatively-new-yet-very-serious dating relationship (I’ve been asked to be best man at the as-of-then unscheduled wedding). While I wrap up with “maybe I’ll be becoming more acquainted with this book in the near future,” I’d never put pen to it again.
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My favorite at the time was #5 in America, in the second of a four-week run at that position. Despite its nod toward novelty, “She Blinded Me with Science” seemed to be a pretty big hit all around me–I’ve noted before how a hall-mate was fond of blasting it at high volume after classes were over for the day. While I wouldn’t see the video for months (I lived in an MTV desert), the 45 quickly found a spot in my collection.
While it wasn’t perfect, on a personal level that spring turned out to be the high point of the year. The next several months would be quite bumpy, and it was entirely of my own doing.
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Thirty-four years later, on an unseasonably cool and rainy day toward the end of April 2017, I met up with college friend Pat in Lexington to participate in the local March for Science. James was there as well, with his wife Amy and their two children; most of us carried homemade signs (mine read “Science Makes Our Children’s Future Brighter”). I’d guess that several hundred people gathered next to the county courthouse that afternoon to first walk southeast on Short St. and then northwest on Main St. Afterward, we gathered in a nearby covered space where we could learn about local organizations whose goals likely aligned with those of attendees and grab a warm drink. They had music playing in the background, and it was perhaps no real surprise when at one point Thomas Dolby came over the speakers.
I fear that in the years since we’ve learned that too many folks are blinded to, not with, the stuff.
Just like last August, the powers-that-be at Premiere have scheduled shows from 1986 and 1982 for rebroadcast on consecutive weekends. Then, preparations to decamp for grad school and college were on my mind; now, I’m thinking back on those final weeks of college and high school. This past weekend I rummaged through my brain and a bin of college memorabilia to pull out artifacts from my senior spring, a couple of which are tangible. Here are three short tales.
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I. Transy observes a 4-4-1 calendar, with the spring term ending right around this time of year. One of the classes I took my final spring was a general education course called something akin to Music Theory for the Liberal Arts Student, to fulfill a distribution requirement. My recollection is that it was interesting enough, though given past experiences with piano lessons and band, perhaps I would have enjoyed a similar course designed for majors more? Anyway, the professor was in her first year on campus, her specialty in composition.
Fast forward almost six years. I’m at the interview in NW Indiana I mentioned in last week’s post, talking with one of the members of the search committee. He pulls out a picture with three people in it, asking if I recognize them. I do know two–they’re faculty in English and art at my undergraduate institution. The third turns out to be that music theory instructor, to whom my interviewer is now married–he tells me that when he mentioned that Transylvania was on an applicant’s resume, she was able to verify I’d once been her student (gradebooks are forever). I suspect he’s been waiting for this moment for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve kind of blown it. (In retrospect, I half-wonder if the connection didn’t play at least a minor role in securing an on-campus interview. My faux pas had nothing to do with failing to merit an offer, though.)
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II. At the end of my junior year I was elected president of our campus’s leadership honorary, Omicron Delta Kappa. In March 1986, I flew down to Baton Rouge to represent Transy at ODK’s national conference. Two items of mild note from the trip: 1) one piece of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was being held at LSU at the same time as the conference, and one morning I shared a hotel elevator with then-Georgia Tech coach Bobby Cremins; 2) I also got to briefly meet Frank Rose, a bigwig in the ODK leadership structure. Rose had assumed the presidency of Transy in the early 50s, about halfway through my father’s time there, despite being only about a decade older than Dad. He left Transy after several years to become president at the University of Alabama. Desegregation occurred during his tenure in Tuscaloosa; he also hired Paul “Bear” Bryant away from the University of Kentucky’s football team. Dad knew Dr. Rose, of course, and regarded him with esteem, so he was glad I was able to introduce myself.
Transy’s circle (that’s what ODK calls their chapters) was the Lampas Circle, Lampas being the name of TU’s leadership honorary prior to pursuing national affiliation. Early in the school year, we’d been approached by the national office about inviting Lampas members from the past to become formal ODK members. I somewhat naively went along with this effort, and in March we sent out letters to appropriate alums to join us for an induction service on the first Sunday in May. Perhaps not too surprisingly, only a few folks (one of whom was my father) accepted–I assume most just ignored it. One invitee, an alum from the late 60s, did take the time to respond in memorable fashion, cc-ing the college President along the way.
Looking back, she was hardly wrong to see the invitation as a money grab. And I’d obviously been sloppy in not clearly identifying myself in the letter. While I think in part I simply had the misfortune of being a convenient target for venting, I actively chose to hold on to this letter as a reminder to stay humble and not get too wrapped up in self-importance.
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III. The “1” in the 4-4-1 calendar is a four-week period known as May Term. Students take just one class, frequently a non-standard offering. My last May Term class was a topics course in Archaeology. Ostensibly taught by the college’s anthropology prof, it was in reality directed by an archaeology Ph.D. candidate from UK; I imagine we were helping him with his doctoral research. We first learned a little about field techniques, and then got to put them into practice on a real dig. Our site was farmland south and east of Lexington, just outside the small burg of Athens (for the non-locals, it’s pronounced AY-thens; if you think that’s funny, wait until you hear how we say the name of the town due west of Lexington known as Versailles). Evidence of past Native American settlement had been found in some of the farm’s fields, and our task was to discover what we could over a two-plus week period. We started by laying out plots via elementary surveying and then tucking in, taking off a layer at a time, moving on once we’d found what we could. One of the course requirements was to keep a journal of daily activity–while we had to hand them over at the end of the term, you know that I made photocopies before I did so. Here are two of the entries.
Chris T. was the UK grad student; Chris B., then a sophomore, later got his Ph.D. in anthropology and now teaches at our alma mater. That plot turned out to be plenty fruitful the next day.The weather didn’t always cooperate, but we did find some pretty interesting stuff–a later entry notes some bone awls we’d dug up. MFA = Mitchell Fine Arts, a Transy classroom building.
The final journal entry was from 5/19, just six days before my graduation ceremony. I don’t know how it all turned out, whether there was subsequent work on the site, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed the class, though.
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Good times, they come and they go. I had a wonderful college experience, but by April 1986 it was just about time to move on to the next stage. Staying at Transy probably wouldn’t have been the same, been as fun.
Sade is singing about romance in “Never as Good as the First Time” (debuting at #37 on 4/19/86, heading toward a peak of #20), not four years in college, but work with me here–there are plenty of things in this world that simply aren’t as enjoyable if extended beyond their shelf life. Savor the moments, treasure them, recall them fondly, but maybe think twice before you attempt to re-create them.
By mid-April 1992, my job search for a college math position was languishing. An interview in February at a regional school in northwest Indiana had bombed (looking back it’s easy to see that now; then, I had to be told by the chair of the search committee just how far down I was on their ranked list of interviewed candidates). Around this time, a small school in Illinois to which I’d applied did send me a letter, essentially offering me a job sight unseen. That, along with the accompanying minuscule salary, set off enough red flags to cause me to quickly decline. I was beginning to countenance the possibility of staying at UIUC another year, leading me to put off scheduling the defense of my dissertation.
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Probably the most memorable event of the spring was a trip to Maryland that Greg, Karl, and I took over a long Easter weekend to see Greg’s wife Katie. Like this year, Easter fell pretty late in 1992, on April 19. All three of us had research assistantships without teaching duties that spring, so we left early on Thursday morning in my 1986 Camry, easily the most reliable of the vehicles at our disposal.
It’s about 700 miles between Urbana, IL, and the Maryland suburbs northeast of DC, so despite switching off drivers, it was a pretty long day. We all crashed at Katie’s apartment–being poor grad students, Karl and I slept on couches or in sleeping bags on the living room floor. It was nice to meet Chrissie and Lisa, Katie’s roommates (and also first-year math grad students at UMD), after learning some about them over the previous months via Greg and Katie’s phone conversations.
It was a pretty laid-back time. I don’t recall going into DC to do any sightseeing–I imagine overall we stayed within a decent radius of the apartment, though I’m sure a visit to a record store or two was high on the list of things to do. I tuned into the alternative station WHFS when I could, as I had done three months earlier when in Baltimore for the math conference where I’d had some initial interviews.
The guys did drive up to Baltimore ‘s Inner Harbor on Friday evening to see the fourth-ever game at Oriole Park at Camden Yards–we sat in the right field bleachers.
The O’s won 8-0, the fourth consecutive time one of the teams had failed to score in the new park. Rick Sutcliffe started for Baltimore, pitching the last of his career 18 complete-game shutouts; the offensive hero was first baseman Randy Milligan, who had two jacks and 6 RBI. The main thing I recall from the evening, though, is the razzing from the fans (one of whom might have been Greg) that Rob Deer, playing RF for the Tigers, endured throughout.
On the way home on Easter, we made the mistake of assuming that a straight line was the quickest way between two points, and lost a few hours on the back roads of northern West Virginia and southern Ohio. I don’t know now whether it was planned in advance, but we veered a little south to Florence to spend Sunday night with my parents and sister (who happened to be home at the time), arriving back in IL on Monday afternoon. A long trip for a short visit, but well worth it.
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As for what was on the Modern Rock Tracks chart (and likely WHFS’s playlist) at the time, well, let’s take a gander…
30. Cowboy Junkies, “Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park” This still-active Canadian outfit, best known for their cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” never could quite break through. At one point I owned Black Eyed Man but I’m not finding it in my collection now.
28. Tori Amos, “Silent All These Years” My favorite song of the year, from my favorite album of the year. I’d picked up Little Earthquakes by this time, and Greg and I had already connected Amos to her past life as Y Kant Tori Read.
WHFS was also playing her version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (which is included on the soon-to-be-released “Crucify” EP) while we were visiting.
27. Peter Case, “Dream About You” I like Case’s third solo album, Six-Pack of Love, quite a bit–I believe I bought it on that trip. While I get the criticism about Mitchell Froom’s (over-)production, “Dream About You” is still a pop delight.
20. E, “Hello Cruel World” I was last-week-years-old, doing research for my radio show featuring many of the songs on this chart, when I learned that E (Mark Oliver Everett) went on to found the band Eels (“Novacaine for the Soul”) later in the decade. This catchy number deserved more attention.
18. Lush, “For Love” If Lush is on the countdown, you can be sure I’m going to note it and embed a video. “For Love” was their second and last MRT Top 10 song. It’ll be another four years before they appear here again (how “Hypocrite,” from Split, didn’t score remains a mystery to me).
17. Nirvana, “Come As You Are” Currently, the owner of the second-longest run on the chart (13 weeks)–the endurance champ is still to come.
10. Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Under the Bridge” I’m not a big RHCP fan by any means, but I’ve always really, really liked “Under the Bridge.” Can’t help but note, though, that seemingly every song of theirs I’ve heard on the radio since bears at least some resemblance to it.
9. Concrete Blonde, “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man“ Johnette and company had peaked in various ways with their previous release Bloodletting; I wasn’t as impressed with this first single from Walking in London.
7. James, “Born of Frustration” Seven came out on the heels of the re-recorded “Sit Down” from the previous year. “Born of Frustration” was its second single, but the only one to make a dent in the U.S.
5. The Sugarcubes, “Hit” It’s been a long time since I’d heard “Hit,” but after taking a listen preparing this post, I can unequivocally say it’s the ‘Cubes best song–I’d completely forgotten how good it is. Stick Around for Joy was their swan song, though–in just over a year, we’d be treated to Björk’s first solo project, Debut.
4. Sarah McLachlan, “Into the Fire” The song that informed us that McLachlan was well on her way. The stuff on Vox is nice enough, but “Into the Fire” was a major step forward. Likely my favorite of hers.
3. David Byrne, “She’s Mad” From his second post-Heads solo album Uh-Oh. The video has lots of special effects that were revolutionary at the time but sure feel dated now. I do like the line, “If sex is a weapon, who’s winning the war?”
2. U2, “One” The previous week’s #1, in its fifteenth of twenty-three weeks in MRT-land. Sure, Bono’s lyrics got more and more precious over time, but I’m giving him a pass on this tune.
1. The Cure, “High” Wish was about a week away from its release. “High” isn’t the album’s most enduring track–we’ll be featuring that one in June–but it definitely satisfied Cure fans’ appetites after almost three years without new material.
As 1979 came to a close, the staff at American Top 40 assembled two special year-end shows. On 12/29/79, Casey told us all about the Top 50 of 1979, while on 1/5/80, he counted down the Top 50 Songs of the 1970s. I certainly understand the desire, maybe even the need, to survey the greatest hits of the decade, but I imagine I would have enjoyed hearing a whole Top 100 for 1979 to match what had been presented the previous three years..
Wishes sometimes come true. Last weekend Premiere Networks broadcast a fabricated show of songs #100-#51 from the year the disco backlash began. It was created by Ken Martin, programming director at WTOJ in Watertown, NY, who painstakingly pieced together bits of Kasem’s patter. Much of the time, he used stories Casey had told at some point during the chart year to introduce a tune; in other cases, Martin made him say things he had never actually verbalized (such as “the #98 song of 1979”). It was thoroughly enjoyable to listen in this past New Year’s Day.
But I didn’t stop there, intuiting an opportunity to make one more chart. Perhaps inspired by the Topps Heritage collections (which these days feature current players on cardboard in the style of the cards I collected in the 1970s), I wrote up last weekend’s show as if it really had been broadcast at the end of 1979. Fortunately, I was able to locate a small cache of unused, five-ring wide-ruled loose leaf paper–slightly yellowed, even–in my office to match what I’d used originally (just get in touch if you find yourself in need of supplies that might have been in vogue at some point over the past thirty years).
1979 was the year of cursive writing in making my charts, so I went back to refresh myself on 15-year-old WRH’s handwriting. Not surprisingly, it’s changed over the years–my style is more a hybrid cursive/print these days–but before long I could come close to making capital F, S, and T and lower-case r (plus 2, 4, and 5) like I used to. It’s far from a perfect match, but I’m pleased enough. Without further ado, two sheets of paper, drawn up forty-two years apart:
I looked back through the year’s charts to duplicate the slightly idiosyncratic capitalization rules I followed then. My assumption, not wholly correct, was that the chart year went from 11/4/78 to 10/27/79; I did not use the frozen chart of 12/30/78 for calculating stats or chart points when forming predictions. Alas, either the work used to generate predictions is buried somewhere separate from all of my other chart stuff or it got tossed out years ago. Whatever I did looks pretty solid, and makes me want to reverse-engineer and determine what I had predicted for #51-100 back then–no doubt it was very similar to the process I’d used for 1978 year-end predictions. That may be a summer project…
As I mentioned last week, I applied a formula to calculate points earned by songs that hit AT40 over the 1981 chart year, and then used it come up with predictions for what Casey would count down on the weekends of 1/26/81 and 1/2/82. It was analogous to what I’d done for my own charts: here it was (41 – n) points, where n was the song’s position, plus 10 extra points for each week on the show, with bonuses for multiple weeks at #1 (so a week at #30 got 11 + 10 = 21, a week at #8 got 33 + 10 = 43, etc.). Here’s a sample of the painstaking labor involved:
The end result came out thusly:
Ah, but what did I use as the chart year? I’d remembered that back in 1976, Casey had said they used first week of November to last week of October, so I assumed that five years on that was still the case. This list is based on a 11/1/80-10/31/81 chart year. How did I do? Here’s the full countdown–the three numbers next to each song are: 1) # of weeks on the chart during my theorized chart year; 2) peak position in said chart year; 3) my prediction.
I think you can make a strong case that the 10-points-per-week-on-AT40 was a decent proxy for what the folks creating this list actually did, awarding (101-n) points for every week on the Hot 100 (along with bonuses for weeks at #1). There are several clumps of songs (#96-#90, #82-#78, #76-#71, for instance) that were grouped together in my predictions, albeit I had placed each group several positions higher on the countdown. My big failure was in not realizing that they were going to extend the chart year well into November of 1981, either two or three weeks (two weeks would get “Hard to Say” and “I’ve Done Everything for You” in about the right spots, but even three more weeks isn’t enough to explain the big misses on “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You,” “Start Me Up,” “Arthur’s Theme,” and especially “Private Eyes”). It appears they also bestowed credit for some weeks in October of 1980, based on my low-balling of “Dreaming,” “Whip It,” “The Wanderer,” and “Lady,” among others. Alas, I just wasn’t going to get it right, but the effort was certainly fun.
The Music of My Life 