A Baker’s Dozen From 1986

Originally posted October 10, 2007

Well, 1986.

In late 1992, as the year was nearing its end, Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth characterized it as the annus horribilis, or horrible year. As 1986 turned into 1987, I felt the same way.

The year had started all right. A consortium of weekly newspaper publishers for whom I’d been covering government in Wright County as a freelancer had decided in December, not unexpectedly, not to continue the arrangement into the new year. And as January approached, I sought new employment. It wasn’t urgent, as I was married at the time and had been house-husbanding while I was a freelancer. But I wanted to get back into the workforce on a more substantial basis.

I was already teaching one course – a weekly night class: Introduction to Mass Communication – at St. Cloud State, so in mid-January I drove from Monticello to St. Cloud and the campus to nose around for possible additional jobs there. I dropped in at the university’s public relations office, where the director was a long-time family acquaintance. (My father had retired only two years earlier after thirty-three years as a teacher and administrator.) He took my resume and told me, regretfully, that he didn’t foresee any openings in his operations.

The next day he called. The main writer in his office had given him a week’s notice, and he wondered if I would fill in while a search began for her replacement. He added that I could certainly apply for the permanent position. So the following Monday, the last in January, I began to commute to St. Cloud every day. The thirty-mile drive, I learned, gave me time to organize my day in the morning, and time to wind down from it in the evening.

On my second day in the public relations office, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated in the Florida sky just more than a minute after it was launched. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but that horrible event can be seen in retrospect as an omen. In about May, my life – not a bad one at the time, as these things go – began to disintegrate as well, unraveling at the seams like a poorly sewn garment.

I don’t want to rehash the events of 1986, and I don’t want to bore anyone else with them. Let it suffice to say that by the end of the year, I could sit in my easy chair in Monticello and see, figuratively, the tatters of my life on the floor. It took a long time to clean up the mess and an even longer time – with a couple of false starts – to create a new garment in which to live my life.

So I wasn’t listening much to music in 1986, having other things on my mind. And in retrospect, that was good. If I had been attentive to music, then many of the tunes from the year would carry a layer of grief with them and would be nearly intolerable to hear even today. As it turned out, I generally absorbed the music of 1986 at a later date, so listening to the year’s music is not an unhappy exercise.

“Welcome to the Boomtown” by David & David, A&M single 2857

“Precious Memories” by Bob Dylan from Knocked Out Loaded

“I Ain’t Drunk” by Albert Collins from Cold Snap

“Shanghai Surprise” by George Harrison with Vicki Brown, Shanghai Surprise soundtrack

“All I Need Is A Miracle” by Mike & the Mechanics, Atlantic single 89450

“Under African Skies” by Paul Simon from Graceland

“Amanda” by Boston, MCA single 52756

“West End Girls” by Pet Shop Boys, EMI America single 8307

“The Spirit” by the Moody Blues from The Other Side Of Life

“Something So Strong” by Crowded House, Capitol single 5695

“Still Around” by Robert Cray from Strong Persuader

“Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel from So

“The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby & the Range from The Way It Is

A few notes on some of the songs:

“Welcome to the Boomtown” is one of the best singles that I think almost everyone forgets about. Its atmosphere, its story and its production values all sparkle as it tells its tale of dissolution, ennui and despair in the big city. Although Columbia, Missouri – which I’d left in 1985 – was no double for L.A., the reference to Denny’s always makes me think of the Denny’s along the freeway in Columbia. I would occasionally stop by for a late-night omelet, and the cast of characters I saw regularly there could easily populate a story set in any city about lives whirling into hard habits and out of control.

The Bob Dylan track is one of the lesser songs from one of his lesser albums. I had hoped that if a track from Knocked Out Loaded popped up during the random run, it would be “Brownsville Girl,” the eleven-minute epic Dylan wrote with playwright Sam Shepard. That track contains two of the more fascinating, disruptive and frankly strange verses ever to appear in a Dylan song:

“Well, we crossed the panhandle and then we headed towards Amarillo.

“We pulled up where Henry Porter used to live. He owned a wreckin’ lot outside of town about a mile.

“Ruby was in the backyard hanging clothes, she had her red hair tied back. She saw us come rolling up in a trail of dust.

“She said, ‘Henry ain’t here but you can come on in, he’ll be back in a little while.’

 

“Then she told us how times were tough and about how she was thinkin’ of bummin’ a ride back to where she started.

“But ya know, she changed the subject every time money came up.

“She said, ‘Welcome to the land of the living dead.’ You could tell she was so broken-hearted.

“She said, ‘Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.’”

Sounds like Bob Dylan meets Sam Shepard to me.

If you don’t recall “Shanghai Surprise” even though you’re old enough to do so, that’s not really startling. It was the title tune to a film starring Madonna and Sean Penn, then newlyweds. George Harrison’s Handmade Films produced it, which is how the one-time Beatle ended up doing the soundtrack, which was never released as an album. There are a few single-sided 45s of the title tune out there, selling for more than $1,000. “Shanghai Surprise,” along with “Zig-zag,” a song from the film that had been released as the b-side of the single “When We Was Fab,” ended up as bonus tracks on a 2004 CD reissue of Harrison’s 1987 album, Cloud Nine.

“Amanda” came from Third Stage, Boston’s long-awaited and long-delayed third album. In general, I have little affection for the music labeled arena rock. Boston, however, I like, and “Amanda” may be my favorite track by the group. Listening to it today for the first time in a while, though, I hear echoes of Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” from three years earlier.

The Robert Cray tune is an album track from Strong Persuader, the record that made Cray famous and, to my mind, signaled the blues boom that was to come in the 1990s. Cray’s R&B-tinged blues have aged well.

I was glad to see something from Peter Gabriel’s So show up during the random run. I was never much of a fan of Genesis, so I was surprised by the depth and beauty of the album. Even twenty-one years after its release, it remains fresh and truly beautiful at points, which is a rare thing.

Saturday Single No. 187

For some time now, the Texas Gal has been carrying some new clothing in her purse. She’s also been carting around a fair amount of groceries and a Mexican meal for two.

A while back, we got some gift cards from relatives: One for a chain of Mexican restaurants, one for a chain of high-end (at least relative to where we usually shop) grocery stores and one for a chain of women’s clothing stores. Two of those three cards are for establishments in the Twin Cities suburbs, where we don’t often venture. And those cards have been relaxing in the Texas Gal’s wallet, secure in the knowledge that we didn’t have time to get to those stores.

As for the clothing store card, it just got lucky; there is an outlet of the chain here in St. Cloud, but the Texas Gal’s schedule lately has been so busy that she’s not had time to get over there and exchange plastic for product. (Indulging in this little bit of personification makes me wonder if the cards would truly be pleased at not being used, or would they mourn in their plastic little ways that they were not being allowed to fulfill their purposes in life? Dunno.)

Anyway, all three cards are in for an awakening today. Sometime close to noon, we’re planning to head out to Maple Grove, where we’ll buy some high-end produce and other consumables and have ourselves a tasty Mexican lunch. And on the way back to St. Cloud, we’ll stop at the cluster of high-end discount shops near a small town called Albertville, where the agenda calls for new shoes for me – a purchase unrelated to gift cards – and new garments of some sort for the Texas Gal. (I imagine we’ll also likely manage a stop at one of the two budget CD shops we’ll see along the way.)

So it should be a pleasant day. And though George Harrison had something other than consumerism in mind when he wrote “Try Some Buy Some” for his 1973 album Living In The Material World, the song is nevertheless today’s Saturday Single:

I’ll be back Monday.

Sir Frankie Crisp: ‘Let It Roll’

So what did we know when the Beatles broke up?

There had been rumors for more than a year, but the news came out of London in the spring of 1970: Paul McCartney announced his departure from the band and then released McCartney, his first solo album, in April, just weeks before the scheduled release of Let It Be, which turned out to be the group’s final album.

To a fan in the American Midwest, one who’d only recently begun to listen seriously to the Beatles, the news was sparse. I’d imagine that my family paid more attention to current events than did a lot of folks in St. Cloud. We subscribed to two daily newspapers and to Time magazine. We listened to the world and state-wide news on the radio as we ate breakfast every morning. We frequently watched the evening news on television. We were about as plugged into current events as folks could be forty years ago. And I remember the dissolution of the Beatles being covered by all of those media: television and radio news, the daily newspapers and Time magazine. About the only additional source available that would have clarified – perhaps – the events was Rolling Stone, a magazine I’d eventually read, but not for a few years. (Newsweek magazine, which at the time seemed a little more tuned into entertainment and the like than was Time, might have given me a bit more information, but only a little, I think.)

But other than adding Rolling Stone to my mix of sources, there were no other places to go for information. I couldn’t click my way to forty-nine different websites for music and entertainment news. I couldn’t walk the remote control up fifty-five channels to see what the various cable outlets had to say. So my friends and I had nothing other than the very basic information that came through those very basic sources.

Beyond a galaxy of information sources that seemed like science fiction forty years ago, today’s media mix also includes the results of research, the release of archives and the revising of history that comes along to every major event as the years pass. We know more now about the events of those years, the Sixties and Seventies, and that includes the end of the Beatles. We know about the bickering during the Get Back sessions in 1969, we know about the hours of unfinished tape essentially laid in the lap of Phil Spector, which he cobbled into the Let It Be album, we know about the Beatles pulling it together to record Abbey Road, and we probably know more now than we really want to know about both the great and dismal portions of that last year of the band’s life.

(I should note here that I like Let It Be as Spector produced it. I recognize its limitations and find the short song jokes and asides a little tedious these days. But it was the first Beatles LP I’d ever bought, and as such it has some value to me. McCartney’s revisiting of the project a few years ago, resulting in Let It Be Naked, is interesting but not all that compelling.)

Anyway, to get out of the thickets and back to where I thought I was going, there were far fewer sources of information about, well, about anything and not just the Beatles back in 1970. And as the year moved on, Rick and I and our pals at his school and mine traded rumors about what would happen next. And we heard in the autumn of 1970 that George Harrison was going to release a three-LP album at the end of the year.

Now, we knew that Harrison had provided one, maybe two songs per Beatles album for years. We had no idea that he could’ve done so much more had he been given the opportunities. (It’s worth keeping in mind, I think, that, as good as many of his compositions turned out to be, Harrison was fighting for album space with the best pair of writers in the history of rock music. It was a tough spot to be in.) Nor did we have any idea that his impending album had been recorded with the same musicians who made up Derek & The Dominos and Delaney & Bonnie’s Friends (with a few other friends thrown in). Not having any information beyond the fact that album, All Things Must Pass, existed, we didn’t know what to think.

We got a preview in early December when “My Sweet Lord” popped up on radio, on its way to No. 1, and we liked what we heard. (We were utterly unaware that Harrison had, evidently accidentally, plagiarized the melody for “My Sweet Lord” from the Chiffons’ 1963 hit, “He’s So Fine.” We’d been nine when the Chiffons’ song was on the radio.) And sometime during December 1970, Rick wound up with a copy of All Things Must Pass.

I borrowed it and taped it, of course, and during the winter of 1970-71, as I played Don Quixote to my Dulcinea, I spent many evenings listening to Harrison’s work. I pretty much ignored the “Apple Jam” that made up the third disc of the three-record set. But the rest of the album became ingrained. I remember now leaving a purple-ink copy of the lyrics to Harrison’s valedictory “All Things Must Pass” in my young lady’s locker. I bought the book of sheet music for the album and began to master “Beware Of Darkness.” And I lost myself in the surreal lyrics of the song that became my favorite on the album:

I still like the song a lot.

A Six-Pack from the Ultimate Jukebox, No. 11
“Hitchcock Railway” by Joe Cocker from Joe Cocker! [1969]
“No Time” by the Guess Who, RCA 0300 [1970]
“The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)”  by George Harrison from All Things Must Pass [1970]
“We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk, Capitol 3660 [1973]
“The Circle Is Small (I Can See It In Your Eyes)” by Gordon Lightfoot from Endless Wire [1978]
“Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson from Thriller [1983]

I’ve written about most of these songs and/or these artists before, so there are only a few things to say. First, about Grand Funk: I was not a fan during my high school and college years. I recall that one of the guys who’d worked on the lawn-mowing crew during the summer of 1971 loaned me the group’s 1970 album Grand Funk for a few weeks. I was still unimpressed. And I’m not sure that I was all that taken by “We’re An American Band” when it came charging out of the radio speakers in the last weeks of the summer of 1973. I left for Denmark early that September, so I wasn’t around when the record hit No. 1 at the end of the month, and the record was never really a part of my internal soundtrack. But when the song popped up during my sorting for this project, I put it in the keeper pile without a moment’s hesitation. In 2010, “We’re An American Band” sounds a lot better than a lot of things that I thought sounded pretty good in 1973.

“No Time”  is probably my favorite Guess Who record, and the Guess Who was a pretty reliable singles band during my first couple years of Top 40 listening. The record went to No. 5, and I can’t ever hear it without being pulled back to February of 1970: Rick, Rob and I, along with a friend of Rob’s whose name I have lost, are heading to the Twin Cities to see the Minnesota North Stars play the Montreal Canadiens. We expect the North Stars to lose because, well, the Canadiens are the defending Stanley Cup champions. But somehow, the Stars manage a 1-1 tie, and as we drive back to St. Cloud late that evening, we hear “No Time.”

I don’t know whether the video I’ve found of “Billie Jean” is the single or the album track (or if there’s a difference, for that matter). The single spent seven weeks at No. 1 in the Top 40 and nine weeks at the top of the R&B chart. As is true of almost everything else from Thriller, if the song doesn’t make you wanna dance, you might as well be a zombie.

My affection for “Hitchcock Railway” comes from three sources. First, the version that closes Side One of Joe Cocker! still gives chills. Second, when I saw Cocker live in the spring of 1972, he took on “Hitchcock Railway” toward the end of the show, and his performance redeemed what had been to that point a less-than-good concert. Third, I have – through Patti Dahlstrom and this blog – the Internet version of a nodding acquaintance with the song’s writer, Don Dunn, and that’s kind of cool.

I wrote once long ago about my first boss, DQ, and how we staff members at the Monticello Times used to tease him about his affection for the music of Gordon Lightfoot. I joined in the joshing although, had truth been told, I also enjoyed Lightfoot’s music. During my nearly six years at the Times, I gathered in a few Lightfoot albums, and gathered in more as time went on. Many tracks from those albums were candidates for this project; the most difficult to discard were “If You Could Read My Mind” and the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” Two of Lightfoot’s tracks made it into the final list, and one of those is “The Circle Is Small (I Can See It In Your Eyes),” which went to No. 38 during the spring of  1978. It’s one of the Lightfoot tunes that I first heard in the offices of the Monticello Times.