Saturday Single No. 160

Originally posted November 21, 2009

Two weeks ago, before my tabletop baseball break, I looked at the LPs I’d acquired in November from 1964 through 1989. Today, we’ll pick up the tale of Novembers from there. (For those who are interested, Rob won the Strat-O-Matic tournament for the fourth year in a row, this time with the 1922 Giants, who swept two games in the finals from my 1948 Indians.)

November of 1990 found me teaching journalism in Columbia, Missouri, which I enjoyed. I knew the city from having lived there a few years earlier, but for some reason, I wasn’t haunting the used record stores too much. I did get LPs by Karla Bonoff, Danny O’Keefe and Jud Strunk in November of that year, but that’s about all the record buying I did that autumn.

A year later, as I settled into my job in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, I got no LPs in November, but I made up for it a year later. November of 1992 brought me one of the windfalls I mentioned a while back: A charity based in Eden Prairie called Bridging, Inc., frequently got boxes of records – which it could not use – among its donations of household items. I knew the director, and for a few years, he’d call me when he had records for me to take away. I kept some, sold some (with Bridging getting a share of the take) and generally had to toss those in very bad shape. The November 1992 box from Bridging contained LPs by, among others, America, Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Stephen Bishop, Waylon Jennings, Michael Jackson and Edward R. Murrow. There were also a lot of K-Tel and Ronco compilations. On my own that month, I picked up LPs by Wet Willie, Dr. John and John Fogerty and a collection of Bruce Springsteen covers, bringing the month’s total to twenty-nine records.

I skipped three more Novembers for some reason, and then got back to business in 1996. The take was minimal, though: LPs by Clannad, Dion & the Belmonts, Carl Perkins and Mother Earth, and a new copy of Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. By the time November rolled around again, in 1997, I was heading into the years of what I call vinyl madness, with stops at Cheapo’s at least three times a week: I brought home twenty-five records that month. The best of them? Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, Taj Mahal’s Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home, and maybe the Who’s Live at Leeds. The least satisfying? Almost certainly one of the K-Tel anthologies I grabbed. Otherwise, it was a good month.

I more than doubled my November take the next year, bringing home fifty-seven records in 1998’s next-to-last month; among them were LPs by Poco, Rodney Crowell, Robert Cray, Harry Belafonte, Emitt Rhodes, William Bell, Nilsson, Fleetwood Mac, Clarence Carter, Bonnie Bramlett, Don Nix, Louis Jordan, Clannad, Malo and Mason Profitt. The best? Maybe War’s The World is a Ghetto or Live at the Regal by B.B. King. The least of them? Probably Night Flight by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues. The most interesting? I’d say it’s In The Shadow Of The Mountain on the Nonesuch label, a collection of Bulgarian choral music, which to this day I find eminently fascinating.

In November of 1999, I almost equaled the previous year’s take, with fifty-six LPs. They included works by Sam & Dave, Elmore James, the Yarbirds, Carole King, UB40, Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Koloc, Dave Grusin, Joe Jackson, Dave Mason, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Cris Williamson, Caravan, the Byrds, the Indigo Girls and Phoebe Snow. The best of the month was either Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison or the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. The least satisfying? Probably the Eagles’ The Long Run, and I’m not at all sure why.

Things tailed off from there, as I got a CD player, I met the Texas Gal and then moved, first to the ’burbs and then to St. Cloud. In November 2000, I found records by Ringo Starr, Steeleye Span and Bonnie Bramlett. In 2001, I brought home an LP by folksinger Kate Wolf. In 2002, I found a record by Dave Porter of Sam & Dave. And there the tale of Novembers ends.

So what to share? Well, I’m tempted to offer a track from In The Shadow Of The Mountain, but I’m aware my interest in Bulgarian choral music isn’t one that a lot of folks share. So I pulled out of the stacks a 1984 LP titled Cover Me, the collection of Springsteen covers I mentioned above. The first track was originally found on Dave Edmunds’ 1982 album, D.E. 7th, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

“From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” by Dave Edmunds from Cover Me [1984]

Play Ball!

Originally posted November 13, 2009

It’s a busy day today, but it’s for a good reason.

Tomorrow, my long-time pals Rick, Rob and Dan come into St. Cloud for our fourth annual Strat-O-Matic baseball tournament. From mid-morning to early evening, we’ll laugh, tell stories, listen to a wide variety of tunes and play a little tabletop baseball along the way.

Once again, Rob is the defending champion. In last year’s tournament, his two-time champ, the 1922 St. Louis Browns, were knocked off in the first round. But he took his second team – the 1995 Colorado Rockies – to the title with a remarkable combination of lots of offense, some good bullpen management and lots of luck. (Even he acknowledges that last part.)

So Rick, Dan and I will try to keep Rob from winning a fourth straight title. For those who are interested, here are the teams that are in this year’s tournament. (For those uninterested, you can skip to the next paragraph.)

Rob: The defending champion 1995 Rockies and the 1922 New York Giants
Rick: The 1976 Phillies and the 1990 Athletics
Dan: The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals and the 1927 New York Yankees
Me: The 1948 Indians and the 1961 Cincinnati Reds

Whatever happens, the day of the annual tournament is one of the best days of the year for me, a chance to share my home and some very good times with my long-time friends. The Texas Gal puts up with the noise and the disruption with an amazing amount of grace. I imagine that our two annual tournaments (baseball in the autumn and hockey in spring) leave her feeling as if she’s the housemother in a fraternity house for graying sophomores.

Each spring and fall, as we plan our menu and the required grocery and liquor store trips, she’ll remind me of something and say, “That’s for the Saturday the boys are here, so make sure we have enough.”

We’ll have plenty of everything we need tomorrow, when the boys are back in town.

A Six-Pack of Boys
“The Boys Are Back In Town” by Thin Lizzy from Jailbreak [1976]
“Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” by Brownsville Station from Yeah! [1973]
“Boys in the Band” by Mountain from Climbing! [1970]
“The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley from Building the Perfect Beast [1984]
“One of the Boys” by Mott the Hoople from All The Young Dudes [1972]
“The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” by Traffic from The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys [1971

The most anthemic of these is the Thin Lizzy track (though Don Henley comes close). With its almost relentless guitar riffs, “The Boys Are Back In Town” dares you not to tap your feet or bob your head or pound out a rhythm on the steering wheel. And if you’re in the car, there’s no way you’re not going to turn the radio up all the way. The single was Thin Lizzy’s only hit, peaking at No. 12 during the summer of 1976. Oh, and that line about “drivin’ all the old men crazy”? It’s a little disquieting to realize that if I were anyone in the song these days, I’d be one of those old men.

I always thought Brownsville Station’s “Smoking in the Boys’ Room” was kind of a silly song, but then, it came along a little bit after I left high school and before there were hardly any anti-smoking regulations came to our college campus: Smoking was definitely allowed in school. But it moves along nicely, boogies a little bit, and it does have a hell of a hook. The single went to No. 3 during the winter of 1973-74.

Mountain’s “Boys in the Band” is a subtle track, almost delicate at moments, that seems to belie the band’s reputation for guitar excess. But the elegiac tone fits perfectly for a song that has its protagonist saying goodbye to his band and life on the road:

We play tunes today
Leaving memory of yesterday.
All the circles widen getting in the sun,
All the seasons spinning all the days one by one

The title of Don Henley’s album, Building the Perfect Beast, fits, because Henley darn near built the perfect pop song in “The Boys of Summer.” Backed on that track by a stellar quartet – Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, Steve Porcaro of Toto, studio pro Danny Kortchmar and bassist Larry Klein – Henley melds haunting music and literate and thoughtful lyrics into a cohesive whole. And you can tap your feet to it, too. (Or pound on the steering wheel, if you’re driving behind that Cadillac with the Grateful Dead sticker on it.) The single went to No. 5 during its fourteen weeks on in the Top 40 as 1984 turned into 1985.

Hey kids! Hear that odd sound at the beginning of Mott the Hoople’s “One of the Boys”? When we old farts talk about dialing a telephone, that’s what it sounded like. That’s an honest-to-god dial telephone. There are other positives to the song, too, of course: It’s a crunchy piece of rock, with its chords shimmering in the glam persona of Ian Hunter and his band, and it’s another opportunity to bruise your hands on the steering wheel.

On a Saturday sometime around 1975, I was sitting in the basement rec room, reading and listening to Traffic’s The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I’d borrowed the album from someone – maybe Rick – and was trying to decide if I should shell out some of my own coin for my own copy. I liked what I heard and was thinking about heading downtown later in the day to buy the record. As the languid title track played, I heard the door at the top of the basement stairs open and I recognized my dad’s tread. Steve Winwood sang:

If you had just a minute to breath
And they granted you one final wish . . .

My dad, coming into the room, sang, “Would you wish for fish?”

And from that moment on, every time I’ve heard the song, I remember my dad being silly. I miss him.

At The County Fair

Originally posted August 10, 2009

It’s county fair time. All throughout Minnesota – throughout the United States, for that matter – late July and early August is the time for county fairs, those sweet and dusty remnants of a time when agriculture was one of this nation’s main businesses.

So the Texas Gal and I took a couple hours yesterday and wandered through the grounds of the Benton County Fair in Sauk Rapids, the smaller city just north of the East Side of St. Cloud. We walked through the midway, shaking our heads at invitations to throw darts or basketballs, or to play the pinball-style Pig Race. We also decided against any of the rides; none of them looked too stomach-churning, but we passed anyway.

We spent a few moments near the animal barns watching eleven- and twelve-year-old girls on horseback compete in barrel-racing. And we walked through the animal barns themselves, checking out the horses and cattle, the pigs, sheep, goats and llamas, the rabbits, geese, chickens, ducks and pigeons. We also spent some time in a couple of the less-aromatic buildings, looking at the photography, quilting and crochet work.

And we had lunch. At the fair’s main crossroads, there was a cluster of booths offering nearly any kind of food you could want, from plain burgers and ice cream cones to funnel cakes, deep-fried cheese curds, smoked turkey legs, barbecued ribs and more. We looked around and finally settled on a French fry stand. The Texas Gal had hers plain, while I had mine covered with cheese and sloppy joe filling.

We don’t get to the fair every year, even though it’s less than two miles away.  Sometimes we just get distracted and forget about it, and other years, we end up with other events scheduled that week.

When I was a kid, however, I rarely missed the fair. I recall going with my family until I was maybe twelve. From then on, for the next six years or so, I went with Rick. Our main focus was the midway. We didn’t go on many rides, maybe the Tilt-A-Whirl or the Scrambler, but we wandered around, played a few games and looked for other kids we knew. We also found ourselves fascinated by the folks who worked the midway, the traveling carnies who went from fair to fair all summer long.

One year, when we were in our mid-teens (which means it could have been any year from 1967 through 1970; if I had to guess, I’d say 1968, when we were fourteen), we biked over to the fairgrounds on Thursday, the day before the fair opened. It was still a busy place. Farmers brought their animals and crops in for judging, as did kids who belonged to 4H. Crafters brought their projects. Merchants put together the commercial booths and displays. And down on the midway, rough-looking carnies put up tents, got the games running and assembled rides from the Ferris wheel on down.

We weren’t the only kids there that day. There were, I guess, about fifty kids, each one straddling a bicycle and watching as the carnies assembled the midway. It was hard work, and our attentions, I’m sure, didn’t make it any easier. After a while, one kid got too close to the work, and one of the carnies snarled at him, snapping off a line that I can still hear in my head: “Go home, kid, and tell your mother she wants ya!”

Rick and I didn’t get snarled at. We got hired. Sometime during that morning, we wandered by the dart game, and for some reason, we asked the guy if he needed any help. He eyed us skeptically, chewed his cheek and then nodded. “Not today,” he said, “but come back tomorrow, and you can blow balloons up for me.”

I had visions that evening of running out of breath blowing up balloons. But when we go to the fairgrounds the next day, I learned to my relief that we’d be using an air compressor, located in the back of the tent, behind the big dartboard. Our employer – I never knew his name and never thought to ask – showed us two chairs, the air compressor, two big empty boxes and a cartoon of balloons waiting for air.

Our job was to blow up balloons, tie them off and fill the two big empty boxes. For doing that, we’d get five or ten bucks, I don’t recall which. We sat on the chairs and got into a routine: Rick would fill the balloon with the compressor, and I’d carefully take it off the compressor’s nozzle and tie one knot in the neck. Into one of the two boxes it went, and by the time I had tossed the balloon into a box, Rick had another ready for me to grab and tie.

It all went pretty fast. In two, maybe three hours, we’d filled both boxes, and we reported back to the dart man. He gave us our money, and we headed off into the fairgrounds with a little bit of extra cash to spend.

A Six-Pack of Fairs
“Scarborough Fair/Canticle” by Simon & Garfunkel from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme [1966]
“County Fair” by Bruce Springsteen, recorded in California, released in 2003 on The Essential Bruce Springsteen [1983]
“Renaissance Fair” by the Byrds from Younger Than Yesterday [1967]
“Too Long At The Fair” by Bonnie Raitt from Give It Up [1972]
“Roseville Fair” by Nanci Griffith from Once In A Very Blue Moon [1984]
“The Fair Is Moving On” by Elvis Presley from Back In Memphis [1970]

There is a temptation, given the monumental status of Simon & Garfunkel’s ”Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” to find a different song to lead off this selection, perhaps one of the several covers I have of the tune. That’s a temptation that arises frequently with well-known recordings, and my reaction to that internal censor often is – as it is today – “Then let’s remind everyone why the song has that monumental status.” When two alternate versions of the song were used in the soundtrack for the film The Graduate in 1968, Columbia released as a single the original 1966 version from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme (at least, I believe it was the original version). As a single, “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” spent nine weeks in the Top 40, peaking at No. 11. As a cultural artifact, it seemed to be omnipresent during that spring of 1968, nearly as omnipresent as the duo’s “Mrs. Robinson.”

Springsteen’s “County Fair” was included on the bonus CD that came with the 2003 anthology The Essential Bruce Springsteen. In the notes to the CD set, Springsteen simply labels the song a “portrait of an end-of-summer fair on the outskirts of town.” He goes on: “It’s from a collection of acoustic songs I cut shortly after the ‘Nebraska’ album in California in ’83.” The lyrics are spare, which fits in with Springsteen’s other work at the time. I love the name of the band that’s playing the fair: James Young and the Immortal Ones.

The Byrds’ “Renaissance Fair” was co-written by Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, and has a good dose of Crosby’s impressionistic approach to songwriting:

I smell cinnamon and spices
I hear music everywhere
All around kaleidoscope of color
I think that maybe I’m dreaming…

In less than two minutes, the song does its work: It pulls the listener – this listener, anyway – out of humdrum twenty-first century America to a moment when neither place nor time are specified (though with the song’s title, one wonders about, say, fifteenth century Florence). It’s an easy song to get lost in.

Give It Up was Bonnie Raitt’s second album, and it held – notes All-Music Guide – to an “engaging blend of folk, blues, R&B, and Californian soft rock.” “Too Long At The Fair” fits snugly into that mix. An oddity: The song’s title was listed on the 1972 record jacket as “Stayed Too Long At The Fair,” with the more familiar title printed on the record label. The website of composer Joell Zoss calls the song “Too Long At The Fair.” I’ve never seen the CD package, so I’ll assume – I would hope, anyway – that the correct song title now appears on the label.

“Roseville Fair” shows Nanci Griffith doing what she did best during the early years of her career: Country-based folk and pop. Her version of Bill Staines’ tune is one of the highlights of Once In A Very Blue Moon, her third album.

“The Fair Is Moving On” is one of the tracks that Elvis Presley recorded during his 1969 sessions in Memphis. Though not as gripping as other tracks that came out of those sessions – “True Love Travels On A Gravel Road,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Only The Strong Survive” and more – it’s nevertheless a strong performance in its own right. I pulled the track from a two-CD package titled Suspicious Minds and subtitled The Memphis 1969 Anthology. If I’m tracking things correctly, this was the version of “The Fair Is Moving On” that ended up on a 1970 LP titled Back In Memphis.

‘Things’

Originally posted August 5, 2009

A long-time friend stopped by for dinner the other evening. We talked about our cats (five between the two households) and about K’s work in online education – she teaches students all over the world from her home in Nevada. We talked about our families and about the Texas Gal’s current college coursework. We talked a bit about books, and we shared the nuggets of news that folks do when they’re catching up.

As we were dipping into dessert, K began to look around the dining room/library, then craned her neck to peer into the living room. “Where are they?” she asked.

I was puzzled. “Where are what?”

“The penguins.”

I laughed. For years, I collected penguins, mostly ceramic, and at one point – when I lived in Minot, North Dakota – had a collection of about twenty-five, maybe thirty. I also had penguin bathroom accessories – wastebasket, shower curtain and soap dish – and there were other penguin things around my home.

It was an accidental collection. In 1976 or so, I was sharing pictures from my time in Denmark with my then-fiancée’s family. One of the pictures was of a fountain on the pedestrian mall in downtown Fredericia, a fountain decorated with statues of penguins. My future mother-in-law thought it was odd that I’d take a picture of something so prosaic; from then on, during nearly every visit to her home before and during my marriage to her daughter, she gave me a ceramic penguin figurine or something with penguins on it. The collection grew, and other folks – family and friends – gave me occasional gifts of penguin stuff.

I liked my penguins, and I happily displayed them in two homes in Monticello and then in my apartment in Minot, after the marriage had ended with a sigh of exhaustion. I think that’s where K saw them, during one of her visits to Minot. I might also have had them on display in my next place, in Anoka, Minnesota, where she was a regular dinner guest.

But the penguins are no longer on display. I’m not even sure where the collection is, whether it’s in a box nested in another box on the shelves in the basement or whether I gave them away sometime in the past twenty years. I still have a few penguinish things: A stapler, four newer figurines on the mantel, a sweet powder blue Pittsburgh Penguins cap and a few other items here and there. But my days of collecting all things penguin are gone. I do wonder a little bit about the whereabouts of the ceramic penguins. Some of them were quite nice, and I imagine some had some value as collectibles. But I honestly don’t remember what I did with them.

They were, after all, just things. Nice things, yes, but just things. And as I thought about my penguins this week, I also thought – and not for the first time – about how we here in the U.S. have let our things become so important to us. We collect, accumulate and want more things, whether they’re automobiles, backyard decks, bracelets, books, cookware sets, CDs, sweaters, power boats, coffee-makers or any of the other desirable bits and pieces with which we seem to clutter our lives.

Clutter? Yeah, sometimes – a lot of the time – I think so. We’re not rich, the Texas Gal and I. But we sometimes look around our home and realize how much stuff we have, stuff that decorates our lives and makes them more pleasant. It’s nice to have those things, but in the end, they’re not essential. They’re things. I sometimes think that we can examine our priorities by thinking about what we would make sure to take out of our homes if they were on fire.

Even during the times I had them on display, my penguin figurines would have been far down that list. What’s at the top of the list? Obviously, the Texas Gal and the three cats come first. Then the box that contains documents like our birth certificates, marriage license and so on. Then would come our financial records, which we’ve made easily accessible and portable. Then, if there were time, the Texas Gal would probably grab as many of our photos as she could, and I’d grab my journal from my year in Denmark and my external hard drive, where I keep my writing projects (as well as my mp3s). In a fire, I think we’d be lucky to get that much. And if all we got out was ourselves and the cats, well, the rest of it – all of it, no matter how dear some of it may be to us – is just things.

Are those things irreplaceable? Some of them truly are, and we would grieve those losses. But in the end, we’d be safe and whole and they’re just things.

A Six-Pack Of Things
“A Thing Going On” by J.J. Cale from Grasshopper [1982]
“You’re The Best Thing” by the Style Council from Cafe Bleu [1984]
“All These Things We Dream” by the Living Daylights from The Living Daylights [1996]
“Bags and Things” by Dennis Lambert from Bags and Things [1972]
“Things Yet To Come” by Sweathog from Sweathog [1971]
“If It Ain’t One Thing It’s Another” by the Staple Singers from City in the Sky [1974]

All I’m going to say about these songs today is that, even though a couple of them are by lesser-known artists, they’re all worth hearing.

Saturday Single No. 739

Earlier this spring, in a piece about the passing of musician/producer Jim Steinman, I wrote:

I was in Missouri and I was the arts editor for the Columbia Missourian, published by the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. And one week, there were more new movies in town than my small staff could review, so I needed to jump in and review one of them. That happened occasionally, maybe four times during the year I filled the post. Out of the five or so movies opening that week, I selected Streets of Fire, more because I recognized the name of the female lead, Diane Lane, than for any other reason.

I loved it, especially the music. I cadged a bit on the grade I gave it, maybe awarding a B+. (I cannot put my hands on the review this morning although I know it exists in the filing drawers of unorganized clips from about fifteen years of reporting and editing.) Director Walter Hill called the movie a “rock and roll fable,” but even so, it’s over-the-top storytelling put me off just a bit.

But the music! There was stuff from the Blasters, Ry Cooder, the Fixx, Maria McKee, and a few others. And the Steinman-penned songs that opened and closed the movie blew me away: “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,” with – as I learned later – Laurie Sargent providing the vocals for Lane on the former and Holly Sherwood doing the same on the latter, both backed by a group of musicians that the filmmakers called Fire Inc.

Within a few days, I had the soundtrack, knew the writers and producers and anything else I could glean from the jacket. And in the thirty-some years since, any time I hear either of those two tracks from the soundtrack, I remember the thrill of finding something utterly new, a feeling that can stay with you for years.

The LP database tells me that it was thirty-seven years ago today that I picked up the soundtrack to Streets of Fire and took it home to the south end of Columbia. And today, sorting out the third-best track on the album, I dithered between Maria McKee’s “Never Be You” and Marilyn Martin’s take on the Stevie Nicks-penned “Sorceror.”

I came down on the side of “Sorceror.” Martin was the first to record it; Nick’s version came out only in 2001 on her album Trouble in Shangri-La. And Martin’s version from 1984 is today’s Saturday Single.

Thanks, Jim Steinman

Looking at the listing of works by Jim Steinman, who died two days ago, leaves me feeling as if I missed out. I truly know so little of what the man did as a writer, musician and producer. He remains one of the large blank spots in my musical awareness.

There’s a reason. My memory tells me – and bits and pieces of what I’ve read over the past few days confirm – that Steinman came to mass awareness with his writing and production of Meat Loaf’s 1977 album Bat Out Of Hell and the resulting 1978 single “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.”

By the time the single came out, I was in the working world, and I crammed my radio listening into what I could catch in the car as I drove from one reporting assignments to another and whatever I could catch at home on an aging stereo system my folks had found for me in a second-hand store. Still, I heard “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” occasionally, and I liked it, even if I found it a bit bombastic.

(A lot of other folks liked it, too: It went to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 31 on the magazine’s easy listening chart.)

But “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” and “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth” – the follow-up singles – didn’t grab me. And as I listened less and less to pop music in the late 1970s and early 1980, I missed whatever came next for Steinman.

Then, in 1984, I was in Missouri and I was the arts editor for the Columbia Missourian, published by the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. And one week, there were more new movies in town than my small staff could review, so I needed to jump in and review one of them. That happened occasionally, maybe four times during the year I filled the post. Out of the five or so movies opening that week, I selected Streets of Fire, more because I recognized the name of the female lead, Diane Lane, than for any other reason.

I loved it, especially the music. I cadged a bit on the grade I gave it, maybe awarding a B+. (I cannot put my hands on the review this morning although I know it exists in the filing drawers of unorganized clips from about fifteen years of reporting and editing.) Director Walter Hill called the movie a “rock and roll fable,” but even so, it’s over-the-top storytelling put me off just a bit.

But the music! There was stuff from the Blasters, Ry Cooder, the Fixx, Maria McKee, and a few others. And the Steinman-penned songs that opened and closed the movie blew me away: “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,” with – as I learned later – Laurie Sargent providing the vocals for Lane on the former and Holly Sherwood doing the same on the latter, both backed by a group of musicians that the filmmakers called Fire Inc.

Within a few days, I had the soundtrack, knew the writers and producers and anything else I could glean from the jacket. And in the thirty-some years since, any time I hear either of those two tracks from the soundtrack, I remember the thrill of finding something utterly new, a feeling that can stay with you for years.

I missed a lot of Steinman’s stuff, and maybe I should go back and dig into it, but I at least found two pieces from the man’s work that will always be a part of my life, and for that, I thank Jim Steinman.

Here’s the official video for “Nowhere Fast” and a clip with the last minutes of the film that includes “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,” both credited to Fire Inc.

X’s & O’s

Watching the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four this past weekend reminded me of the one time in my life I was a basketball scout. (The Final Four took place in Minneapolis, seventy miles away, but I watched from my study, not tempted one minute to be in the midst of the activity. Had I been thirty years younger, things might have been different.)

The weekend’s games brought to mind a weekend in early 1979: The Other Half and I were heading northwest from Monticello about 125 miles to visit her family, who lived between the two small towns of Eagle Bend and Parkers Prairie, going up Saturday morning and coming back Sunday afternoon.

On my newspaper rounds that Friday, I mentioned our plans to the boys’ basketball coach at Big Lake High School. “Really?” he said. “I noticed that Swanville is playing at Eagle Bend Saturday night. They’re supposed to be good, but nobody I know has had a chance to look at them.”

That wasn’t surprising. The basketball district included about twelve schools – smaller ones tagged as Class A by the state high school league – all within about forty-five miles of St. Cloud. Big Lake was at the southeastern corner of the district, and Swanville, a burg of about 300, was in the northwestern corner of the district.

The coach looked at me, and I knew what was coming: “What are you doing Saturday night?”

I had no plans other than being in the farmhouse halfway between Eagle Bend and Parkers Prairie with the Other Half, her parents and her nine siblings. Based on previous visits, it wasn’t like we all did things together around the huge kitchen table. The Other Half would be catching up with her mom and her sisters, and I’d likely be on my own.

“I’ll see if I can get into town,” I told the coach. “But you know that I’m not an X’s and O’s guy. I’m not that good.” After all, I’d only been covering basketball for a little more than a year.

He dismissed that concern with a wave of his hand. “You’ve learned more than you think,” he said. “You can tell zone from man-to-man, you can tell when a team likes to press or to run fast off rebounds. You can see a team’s tendencies in the half-court game.”

He shrugged. “And even if you couldn’t see all of that, you might see one thing that gives us some insight if we end up playing them in the tournament.”

So after dinner Saturday evening, I drove our Toyota from the farm to Eagle Bend High School to watch the Eagles host the Swans. As it happened, my father-in-law was on duty that evening as a custodian at the high school, so I stopped in at his workroom for a few minutes, then headed into the gym with my notebook.

I don’t recall if the Swans played man or zone. I don’t remember if they won the game although I think so, as they had a far better record coming in than did the Eagles. I do remember one thing about their half-court offense: From the top of the key, the Swans would pass the ball to the side about halfway between mid-court and the baseline. From there would come a pass to a player in the corner, and he would attempt to drive along the baseline and shoot. If the shot wasn’t there, he’d retreat to the corner, passing the ball back to the top of the key for a shot or more rarely, a pass to the halfway point on the other side of the court, followed by another attempt at baseline penetration.

I’d watched a lot of high school basketball games in the previous year and a half, and I’d never seen anything like what the Swans were doing. It looked odd and inefficient.

At halftime, the fellow I’d noticed doing radio play-by-play of the game approached me. If I recall this correctly, a decal on his equipment or a patch on his jacket told me he was from a station in Wadena, a larger town a little bit north of Eagle Bend. He asked if I was a reporter, and I said I was but that I was playing the role of scout for the Big Lake coach. He invited me to join him on the air to talk about the teams in the southern portion of the district, and I shared what I knew and what I thought for a few minutes.

He asked me who I thought might reach the district title game, and I said that based on what I’d read and seen, it would be the teams from Big Lake and from Albany, which is just a little northwest of St. Cloud. (I was right: In the title game, Albany’s tough defense shut down Big Lake’s running game and outside shooting, ending the Hornets’ season for the second year in a row; a year earlier, the loss had come in the quarterfinals.)

The Swans beat the Eagles, and I headed via country roads to the farmhouse and – a day later – back to Monticello. On Monday, when I made my regular stop at Big Lake High School, I handed in my scouting report. When tournament time came, the bracket put Swanville up against the Bulldogs from Becker, eight miles northwest of Big Lake, and – without my knowing it – the Big Lake coach passed my notes onto the coach from Becker, a close friend.

And on another Monday, the Big Lake coach told me he’d talked to the Becker coach over the weekend, following Becker’s victory over Swanville. “He said that Swanville did exactly what you said they’d do,” the Big Lake coach told me. “From the key to the side, down to the baseline and back to the key with a few outside shots added. Becker shut down the baseline, challenged the outside shooters and frustrated ’em all night long.”

I’ve never been called on to scout another game. Why should I? I’m 1-0.

I have one track on the digital shelves that has the word “basketball” in its title. (I expected at least two, but I tend to forget that I lost my copy of “Basketball Jones” in the hard drive crash a couple of years back and haven’t replaced it.) Here’s “I Never Play Basketball Now” by Prefab Sprout. It’s from the English band’s 1984 debut album Swoon.

Into The Eighties

Originally posted June 24, 2009

I generally don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the 1980s. The years of big hair, thirtysomething and “Greed is good” don’t attract me much. I find myself, as regular readers no doubt figured out early on, much more interested in the 1960s and the 1970s, the years when I did the bulk of my growing up.

I do tend to subscribe to the theory that we never cease growing up. There is always work to be done, and there always will be. For me, some difficult parts of that work came in the 1980s, making some of those years hard. On the other hand, some of the finest years of my life – professionally and personally – came during that decade, so on the plus-minus scale, it’s mostly, I would guess, a wash.

But according to the numbers I shared here a few weeks ago, I’m not all that much interested in the 1980s, as least as far as the music of the decade goes. Here are the numbers of mp3s, sorted by decade since 1950, as I reported a few weeks ago:

1950s: 1,152
1960s: 8,820
1970s: 13,445
1980s: 3,327
1990s: 4,525
2000s: 5,319

There are fewer songs from the 1950s than from any other decade because, turning six just before the decade ended, I remember so little of those years, both in a large sense and musically.

If I were asked what song from the Fifties I remember most from hearing at the time, it would be a tie between Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” (No. 1 for six weeks in 1958) and David Seville’s “Witch Doctor” (No. 1 on three different charts in 1958 as well). Those are fun, which has its place, but not exactly the kind of artistry I like to recognize here.

Leaving the 1950s, then, as something incomplete, the numbers above show an interesting tale: I clearly have much less interest in the 1980s than I do in any of the other decades I remember. And I’m not sure I know why.

I used to think it was the music: arena rock and synthpop and drum machines and dancepop are what come to mind. I know I wasn’t listening to much pop music when the decade started. As I spent time on various college campuses through the decade, as a grad student, a writer and a teacher, I heard more current music than I had in a while. I liked some of it, and as I dig further into that lost decade these days, I find I like more of the music than I would have expected. (That means that on another day down the road, when I run the numbers, that imbalance may have diminished a bit.) So it might not have been the synthpop and the drum machines and the dance pop. (Arena rock remains less than attractive.)

I called the 1980s a lost decade just above. That might be a bit harsh, but it’s not far from the truth. I didn’t care for a lot of what I saw happening in public affairs or in popular culture, so I think that for chunks of the decade, I just checked out – from music, from most television, from film, from current fiction and nonfiction and from current events (with the exception of those that immediately affected how I was earning my living at the time as a reporter, a public relations writer or a teacher). And at the same time, I was looking for a place to roost, moving from Monticello, Minnesota, to Columbia, Missouri, and back to Monticello. From there, I spent a summer in St. Cloud, then moved to Minot, North Dakota, for two years, and finally ended the decade in Anoka, Minnesota, just north of Minneapolis.

And here’s a random selection from each year of that decade of drifting:

1980: “One Love” by Sniff ’N’ The Tears from The Game’s Up
1981: “The Innocent Age” by Dan Fogelberg from The Innocent Age
1982: “Tables Turning” by Modern English from After the Snow
1983: “Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart” by Bob Dylan, New York City, April 23
1984: “None But The Brave” by Bruce Springsteen, Born In The U.S.A. sessions, New York City
1985: “Minutes to Memories” by John Cougar Mellencamp from Scarecrow
1986: “Love You ’til The Day I Die” by Crowded House from Crowded House
1987: “Isolation” by Joe Cocker from Unchain My Heart
1988: “Let The Rain Come Down On Me” by Toni Childs from Union
1989: “The Last Worthless Evening” by Don Henley from The End of the Innocence

That’s kind of an interesting mix. I do have a few thoughts:

As much as I like most of Fogelberg’s work, and as beautiful as I thought The Innocent Age was when it came out, its lush orchestration is sounding more and more overblown as the years pass.

The Dylan track is an early version of “Tight Connection To My Heart,” which showed up on Empire Burlesque in 1985; you can find this version on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3. It’s interesting to compare the two and get a look at Dylan’s creative process, looking at what he retained and what he changed. The Springsteen track is from the third CD of The Essential Bruce Springsteen. It sounds more relaxed – but no less muscular – than the songs that made it on to Born In The U.S.A., if that makes any sense.

The Crowded House tune is a lot more, well, angular than the stuff I know best by the band. I have a soft spot for “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” but the lushness of that ballad wasn’t a fully accurate picture of the band, either. The truth was, I guess, in the middle.

I’ve never known Sniff ’N’ The Tears’ work well, so we’ll let “One Love” pass. As to the Modern English track, “Table Turning” is kind of just there, with nothing – to my ears – that differentiates it from a thousand other songs from the same period. It certainly pales next to the same album’s gorgeous “I Melt With You.”

The Toni Childs’ track is from a cryptic album I’ve loved since 1988. The Mellencamp and Cocker can go without any comment. I do wish that a different Henley tune from The End of the Innocence had popped up. From the first time I heard “Heart of the Matter,” I’ve thought that Henley asked the key question about the 1980s:

“How can love survive in such a graceless age?”

Well, love did survive, of course, as did I and most of us who were around for those years. But they truly were, in so many ways, graceless. As do most years, however, they at least left some good music behind.

Legs & Needles

I learned about something called “dry needle therapy” yesterday, a process that closely resembles acupuncture.

Since about mid-June, I’ve been having problems with my legs: tightness in my hamstrings and my calf muscles, accompanied by painful occasional cramps. The two physical therapists I’ve been seeing have tried deep massages and have prescribed some simple exercises, which I’ve done on a generally regular basis. The tightness hasn’t gone away, and as of this week, the cramping is stronger and more frequent (although I take a few meds that usually help me get up and down the stairs or out to the mailbox without screaming).

So let’s cue up ZZ Top with “Legs” from 1984:

Neither of the physical therapists nor I expected Billy Gibbons and his pals to show up and solve my problems, so yesterday, one of them brought out the needles. The form I signed to consent to the treatment said that the technique wasn’t acupuncture, but it sure sounded like it, and once the treatment started, it felt like it. (I had one round of acupuncture back in 1999 after the on-set of my chemical sensitivity, when I was looking anywhere for answers.) I found a clarification this morning through Google:

Dry needling, according to one website, “involves needling of a muscle’s trigger points without injecting any substance. . . . The approach is based on Western anatomical and neurophysiological principles. It should not . . . be confused with the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) technique of acupuncture. However, since the same filament needles are used in both dry needling and acupuncture, the confusion is understandable.”

Did it hurt? Well, most of the twenty or so needles she placed in my hamstrings and my calves gave me a light poke that I could easily ignore, but two of three of them had me gritting my teeth. Did it help? I think it’s too soon to tell. The therapist said the muscles she treated would likely be a little weaker today, and I think that’s true. I’ve got three more sessions scheduled, with an appointment with my regular doctor nestled in between to talk about my legs and a few other concerns I have.

All I can do is keep on with the program, which means do my exercises, drink more water and take the needles. And in the meantime, lend an ear to Jackie DeShannon. Here’s “Needles & Pins” from 1963.

The Peddler Of Dreams

Something reminded me the other day of this bit of fiction. I’m not entirely sure when I wrote it, but it was sometime during the mid-1980s, probably in 1984 in Columbia, Missouri.

In the dim light of early morning, he came down the cobblestoned street, half shuffling, half dancing. His hair, like silver feathers, peeked out from under a hat that had been new many towns ago. He rubbed the knuckles of his right hand on the right breast of his tan jacket, where the nap of the fabric was only a memory, then breathed on the hand as if for warmth and stuck it into his trouser pocket. His left hand swayed in the air, holding tight against the breeze to the eight balloons tethered on strings.

As he came down the empty street, the balloons danced with him, bouncing in the air. They were as blue as a kitten’s eyes.

He made little noise as he passed. Only the slight whisper of his soft shoes on the cobbles and a faint melody hummed under his breath gave note of his passing in the small alley where working folk lived. Their daily labors were some hours ahead, and few had started to prepare. Of those, only one saw the man with the balloons.

She was Ritva, and she had lived alone for years, less by choice than by circumstance. Her morning tea was ready, and she sipped it standing by the single window in her second-floor rooms, watching the shadows retreat before the day in the little canyon of the alley. She sipped, then grimaced. Her tea was unsweetened; sugar was a luxury although she would have denied herself sweetness even if she could have afforded it. There was something noble for Ritva in the bitterness of the tea.

She sipped again. Her tongue curled, seeking refuge from the tartness, as always. Then she saw the balloons. They jumped and twisted on their strings as they capered past her window. She leaned closer to the glass and peered downward to see whose fist held the strings. A simpleton, no doubt, for who but a fool would prance through the alley with balloons?

She savored the bite of the last swallow of tea, found her cloak and walked carefully down the narrow stairs to the street. The fool with the balloons was heading out of sight around the small curve to her left. She turned right, toward the counting house and work, but then turned in pursuit of the fool; someone had to tell him not to bother hard-working folk who needed their rest.

She rounded the slight curve in the alley and came nearly face-to-face with him. He smiled as if he’d been waiting for her. “Hoy, Ritva! You must have stern business this morning to be off so fast with so grim a look. Who draws your wrath today?”

“It is you,” she said, then paused, less certain. “How is it you know my name, as I do not know yours?” She dismissed the question with a sharp wave of her hand. “What business have you in the alley, bothering sleeping folk? Are you foolish or simply idle?”

He laughed, his head thrown back, the sounds of his amusement coming from deep within his chest. The sun, peering through a gap between buildings, caught his upturned face under the brim of his squashed hat and made it glow like embers not quite gone. He shook his head when his laughter was done. “So many questions and so little time for answers,” he said. “I bother no folk in their beds, nor am I foolish. I sell my wares and bring what all folk need.”

“Balloons? We all need balloons?” Ritva’s scorn was as bitter as her tea.

“Nay, not just balloons, but dreams. I am a peddler of dreams, and all folk here and in all the other cities and villages in this world need dreams. We all need a moment in the day to wonder, to hope, to pretend. We need to counter the fear, the anger, and the sorrow that wait at work, at home, and in between. We need to hear the sun sing its golden aria, to know that the mountains we climb in our minds are real and that our failures are not so important.”

He paused and looked directly into her eyes, his own eyes as blue as the balloons that swayed in the slight morning breeze.

“We need our dreams,” he said. “They chase the nightmares from our sleep and hold us steadfast in our waking hours. Gloom falls in the face of their gentle advance. Come, Ritva, choose a dream!”

“I need no dreams,” she said. “And I need no balloons. I have work.” She moved to go back down the alley. He bowed and waved her on with his right arm. The balloons bobbed on their strings as he bowed.

“I charge no coin,” he said. “If the balloons be only balloons, you lose naught. Come, the figures at the counting house can wait. Buy from me a dream!”

Ritva hesitated. “You must leave the alley,” she said. “I shall have a balloon, but you must go elsewhere.”

“You would deny your neighbors the dreams they need, just as you deny your own need for dreams?” He waited for no answer but reached to his left hand and selected a balloon. He brought it down to her, held it near her chin and popped it with the thrust of a fingernail.

“Hai! You did that intentional!” Ritva glared at him for an instant, then gasped. She looked at the peddler of dreams, but he was already fading from sight.

She stood atop a tall hill, taller than any near the village, and the grass under her feet was greener than springtime and softer than the velvet worn by kings. The air was sweet like ripe fruit and just a bit cold. She was waiting for someone.

How did she know that? Ritva shivered, made anxious by this place where she had found herself. Where was the idle fool with his balloons? She brought her hand to her mouth in fear and stopped in wonder. The skin of her face was smooth, the wrinkles she’d long ago accepted with little grace now gone. She looked at her hand and saw the hand of a young woman. And she was waiting for someone.

She turned into the wind. The wind was real. It blew her hair back, flattened the fabric of her dress against her body, shaping the cloth to a figure that was never Ritva’s, even when she was young. It was like a dream. No, she thought and closed her eyes, and the young hand went again to the smooth face in astonishment. It was not like a dream. It truly was a dream. She’d bought it from the peddler of dreams.

She opened her eyes and looked down the hill. A young man with brown hair and a thick beard, strong and ruddy, was rushing up the hillside toward her. Still a little fearful, she waited for him, and he took her into his arms as he reached the summit. “I’m home,” he said, his hazel eyes looking at her as if to compare reality with memory. “We can be married now.” Then he leaned over and kissed her. Ritva, who had never been embraced, kissed back. It tasted like cinnamon, she thought, though she’d never tasted the spice. Somehow, she knew.

The kiss ended and Ritva opened her eyes. She was in the alley again, and the peddler of dreams stood beside her, watching her closely. “That was the dream of a young woman from Hardin Province,” he said. “Her young man went away to war and never returned, and she dreams of what would have been.”

Ritva gathered her thoughts, like weapons, to deal with the intrusion of fancy. She was no young girl in need of kisses from a lost lover. She was a woman, an old woman, and she had work at hand. Still, she delayed. The dream had been pleasant, maybe something more than pleasant, even if it was not real.

“If I can pay you” she said slowly, her eyes on his, “may I have another?” She frowned, for that was not what she had intended to say.

He smiled and then shook his head. “No, Ritva. One is all you may have. More than that, well . . .” He paused, evidently thinking, and then nodded. “Have you ever had airwine?” She shook her head. “No? You must someday, and you will learn that the first sip of airwine is the best ever, that moment when the racing bubbles fly out of the glass as you sip, when some of them streak into your nose to tickle it with tiny feathers as the sweetness of the nectar slides across your tongue.”

He sighed and shook his head again. “After that, as fine as airwine is, it’s never quite so fine. And so it is with the dreams I sell. The first time is all there can be, for it can never be so fine again.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue balloon. “Now you may pay me,” he said. “I will take your dream in return for the dream of the girl in Hardin. Here,” he said, placing the balloon in her hand, “give me your dream.”

“I have none,” Ritva said. “Even so, I am an old woman. Who would want my dream?”

“You have dreams, Ritva, even if you do not care to remember them. Like any young woman, you once sat in the moonlight on Midsummer, wearing a crown of silverflowers, and thought about the man you hoped to meet. Your sleep brings you dreams.”

She shook her head quickly, sharply. He chuckled.

“Yes, your sleep brings you dreams although you, like many, refuse to receive them. There are dreams hidden inside you, Ritva. You might dream of the first taste of an apple in the autumn or the laughter of young children. We all have dreams, but it sometimes takes the dream of another to bring forth our own.” He looked at her with a soft smile. “I know these things. I am a peddler of dreams.”

Wordlessly, she brought the balloon to her mouth and filled it with her breath until it shone from the light of the day reaching through its thin blue shell. He tied it on a string, and it rose into the air, lifted by Ritva’s dream. He turned away as if to leave. She stood silently, and he looked back at her.

“Come, Ritva,” he said, “go to your work. You have had another’s dream, but your life is still your own to lead, and your duties are your own to fulfill.” He stepped closer and placed his hand gently on her cheek. “Go. Live your life and remember the dream.”

He began to hum a strange tune and then his shuffling dance took him away down the alley. It was full morning. The alley’s dark corners were gone, and windows were opening. She turned toward the counting house.

Horses ran free in her sleep that night. She awoke from the dream, her own dream, and in her mind, she could see him: On the road between Ritva’s village and the next, blue balloons glimmering in the moonlight, the peddler of dreams danced a little faster.