On The Road To Somewhere

Paloma got up, less than ten minutes into The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, to go read.

She muttered something about thinking Jackie Earle Haley was cute in the first movie and walked out before Kelly Leak arriving on his motorcycle kickstarted its sequel.

“It’s one of the greatest movies of all time,” I countered, but she was unswayed and headed off with Kindle in hand.

I don’t think I’d seen Breaking Training since 1977, but that review was the consensus of me and my friends leaving the theater.

(we were mostly nine or ten-years old, thus, our standards for such acclaim were the same as more noted critics)

We were growing up in a small town in John Mellencamp’s country and, at least at our age, playing baseball consumed much of our summer days.

We had embraced the ragtag collection of Bears with first movie. These kids looked like kids we knew and not kids in a movie.

And there was Jackie Earle Haley who, as Kelly was not only the best player on the team, but he was angry, long-haired, smoking cigarettes and hooking up with Tatum O’Neal.

He was as badass as a thirteen year-old could be in the mid-’70s.

The sequel lost the wonderful Walter Matthau and O’Neal, but gained a road trip.

Through the clever use of a dim-witted groundskeeper, the team manages to head from California to Texas in a stolen (and very ’70s-styled) van with Kelly Leak behind the wheel.

These were kids, more or less like us, unsupervised and mobile.

And Kelly Leak had the vision to make it happen.

The setting for their game against the Texas champions was the Astrodome, a stadium that was a favorite amongst us kids as the most spectacular of sporting venues on the planet.

(it was like something from some other futuristic world)

There was also a new kid playing Englebert the burly catcher. Not only was he now supersized, he was pivitol in the scene that elicited the biggest laughs from us.

During a brawl in the team’s hotel room, the bathroom door is knocked open to reveal Englebert, sitting on the can, trousers around his ankles, plowing through a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken while he answers nature’s call.

(high hilarity for nine year-olds and an act of multi-tasking that present-day corporate America would encourage)

Thirty-four years ago, it all made for a most excellent cinematic experience. Here are four songs from Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 chart for this week in 1977 that, had we been in that van, my friends and I might have heard…

Fleetwood Mac – Don’t Stop
from 25 Years: The Chain

In 1977, there was plenty Fleetwood Mac on the radio as their Rumours was in the midst of a run that would see it become one of the most commercially successful albums of all time.

The group had already had hits with Go Your Own Way and Dreams when the jaunty Don’t Stop became the third of Rumours‘ eventual four Top 40 singles.

Ram Jam – Black Betty
from Ram Jam

Paloma gets a bit giddy when she hears Black Betty and the lone hit by Ram Jam does grab one’s attention from the opening guitar riff.

I can’t hear Black Betty and not think of junior high when the song would invariably be blaring from the jukebox of the pizza place where most of our football team would gather to eat before home games.

The song made guitarist Bill Bartlett a two-time member of one-hit wonders as he had previously been lead guitarist for The Lemon Pipers who had topped the charts in the late ’60s with the bubblegum of Green Tambourine.

Paul Davis – I Go Crazy
from Sweet Life: His Greatest Hit Singles

Singer/songwriter Paul Davis’ I Go Crazy was in its second week on the charts thirty-four years ago. The song wouldn’t reach the Top Ten, though, until late February of the following year as it spent a then-record 40 weeks on the Hot 100.

Though I Go Crazy was melancholic light rock at its most mellow, I’ve often wondered if Davis was ever mistaken for a member of the Allman Brothers.

The Ramones – Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
from Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: The Anthology

Not long ago, a client was giving me his last name. “Ramone,” he said. “Like the band. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

He was surprised and duly impressed as I explained that I not only knew his reference, but that Paloma has a framed poster autographed by Joey,Johnny, Dee Dee, and Marky hanging in our treehouse.

A Hole In The Middle Of Summer

Last summer, I noted that I’d watched Major League Baseball’s All-Star game for the first time in years.

This summer, I mostly ignored the game again.

I watched a bit of the home run derby competition (and what I watched was uneventful). I spent most of the time trying to figure out if David Ortiz had actually gotten busted for performance-enhancing drugs, if he had been investigated for such hijinks, or if there had merely been rumors.

(that grew wearying and I lost interest in the contest)

I actually tuned in for the game in time to witness some well-meaning, but disturbingly-executed pre-game ceremony honoring good-deed doers. It gave me flashbacks of Up With People performing at the Super Bowl in the ’70s.

I watched the player introductions, recognizing no more than one of every three names, and began channel-surfing before the first inning had ended.

From the mid-’70s on, into the first years of the ’80s, the All-Star game was must-see television for me, an event that was anticipated for weeks. With only a couple national games each week, it was the chance to see players that you mostly had read about or saw brief highlights of on This Week In Baseball.

(that show was also appointment viewing each Saturday afternoon)

But somewhere along the trip, baseball became less a source of fascination to me. There are a lot of reasons, but it occurred to me that I might well be collateral damage from the 1981 players strike.

The plugged got pulled on the season in mid-June. Cleveland’s Len Barker had pitched the first perfect game in thirteen years and Fernando Valenzuela had been a sensation pitching for the Dodgers.

There was no baseball for two months, essentially the entire summer.

And plotting the timeline, it was the summer of ’81 during which music was taking on an increasing importance in my world. The time that might have been devoted to reading boxscores in the sports pages or watching a game was spent listening to the radio and becoming acquainted with the hit songs of the day.

In August, as the beginning of a new school year was bearing down on us, the strike ended and the baseball season resumed with the All-Star game. I’m sure I watched and I would continue to watch, but things had changed.

Baseball was never quite as important to me and it only became less so by the time I headed off to college a half decade later. By the time another strike wiped out the World Series in ’94, the sport was on life support for me.

Even if baseball hadn’t abandoned me that summer, I imagine that music would have still eclipsed my interest in the sport. I was thirteen and music was part of the required trappings of being that age.

Here are four of the songs that were filling the space that baseball had left during this week in 1981…

Rick Springfield – Jessie’s Girl
from Working Class Dog

In 1981, I was unaware that actors weren’t supposed to sing (and, usually, with good reason). Of course, I doubt that I was aware that Rick Springfield was a soap opera star aside from a DJ mentioning it in passing.

But Springfield was a musician before finding success on television and there was no denying that Jessie’s Girl was insanely catchy (as were most of his hits during the decade). Though there would be friends in my future who had girlfriends that I thought were fetching, none of them drove me into a state like Jessie’s girl drove poor Rick.

Marty Balin – Hearts
from Balin

Would I have know of Jefferson Airplane and/or Starship when Marty Balin scored a solo hit Hearts? Perhaps I knew the band’s more recent hits like Jane or Find Your Way Back, but I doubt I knew classics like White Rabbit, Somebody To Love, and Miracles.

I certainly had no idea of Balin’s connection to the legendary band unless, again, that information was passed on to me by the DJs playing the song or, perhaps, Casey Kasem, whom I had discovered earlier that summer.

Phil Collins – In The Air Tonight
from Face Value

Despite the dozens of hits that Phil Collins has had both with and wthout Genesis, I’d have to think that In The Air Tonight, his first solo hit, is the one for which he will be remembered. Not only are there the various urban legends about the song, but the cavernous drum sound would become Collins’ signature.

Add in the song’s use in the movie Risky Business and the television show Miami Vice as that program was becoming a phenomenon – as well as numerous commercials in the ensuing thirty years – and you have one of the more iconic hits of the early ’80s.

Greg Kihn Band – The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em)
from Rockihnroll

The Greg Kihn Band had a handful of hit songs including the mammoth Jeopardy in 1983, but the power-pop act wasn’t really able to break out beyond fringe status.

However, they got a lot of radio airplay in my corner of the midwest with songs like Happy Man, Reunited, and Lucky. As my friends and I became more interested in music, several of them were especially devoted to the San Francisco band, snagging each new release as soon as it was issued.

Though Jeopardy might have been the bigger hit, that song has nothing on the lean, wiry and concise The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em). In under three minutes, Kihn had me hooked with the song’s singalong chrous and his stuttered vocal at the end of each verse.

Sharona Would Have To Wait

During the summer of 1979, I was still a couple of years from being a teenager, so it was one of the final years where summer meant no responsibilities.

The subdivision outside our small town where we lived was still sparsely populated and there were no more than eight or nine kids roughly the age of me and my brother. It was a forbidden trek into town on our bikes, but it was one we sometimes opted to make.

But it was a lengthy trip for us and though the lure of getting to hang out more with our classmates had sway, as our town was so small, there was an almost absolute certainty of running into a number of folks who spoke to your parents on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.

Usually, we hung out in the neighborhood or roamed the many wooded areas. Because we weren’t quite old enough to be focused on girls – not that there were many our ages in our subdivision – baseball was the constant.

Most mornings, we would be out on our makeshift field by mid-morning and would play until things ground to a halt because, a) of an argument over a call, or, b) our ball would be lost in the soybean field which bordered the third base line.

(there was also an outcome c where someone intentionally hit the ball into a neighbor’s strawberry patch down the first base line which allowed us to gorge on strawberries under the pretense of searching for the ball)

Tempers usually flared more quickly when we would, invariably, reconvene after lunch before wilting in the oppressive heat and humidity of early afternoon. The games we’d put together after dinner, when the early evening provided some respite from the heat, usually fared better and we’d often play until dark.

For us, there wasn’t much interest in music. Sometimes someone might have a transistor radio, but usually our only soundtrack was au natural. That’s why it wasn’t until I returned to school in late August that I caught the buzz that had been building for months surrounding The Knack and their monstrous single My Sharona.

So, for the most part, I missed the mania surrounding the band. By the end of the following summer, baseball was struggling to retain its hold on us, as both girls and music were becoming increasingly important. And The Knack had already flamed out, partially snuffed out by an inevitible backlash to the massive success of My Sharona.

The Knack would break up after releasing Round Trip in 1981 and though they’d reunite and issue a handful of albums over the next two decades, there was no recapturing that lightning in a bottle.

And, over the weekend, word spread that The Knack’s lead singer and founder Doug Fieger has passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer.

According to Billboard magazine, My Sharona reached the top of the US pop chart the final week of August in 1979 – just as the school year began. It would stay there for six weeks. Here is My Sharona and a trio of other songs on the chart as my friends and I settled in for sixth grade…

The Knack – My Sharona
from Retrospective: The Best of the Knack

Though I don’t really recall hearing My Sharona on the radio, I was well aware of the song. It was on my younger brother’s copy of Chipmunk Punk and a staple of the school band’s performances during high school basketball games that winter. It was simply an unstoppable power pop song.

Though what I know of the band, from their 1992 compilation Retrospective and, years later, snagging a used vinyl copy of the debut, reveals a band deserving far more than its brief time in the spotlight. It’s also understandable that everything else was swallowed by the wake of My Sharona.

Electric Light Orchestra – Don’t Bring Me Down
from Strange Magic: The Best Of Electric Light Orchestra

Willie, my best friend in our neighborhood, had older siblings, so there was some music that had been passed down to him – some 45s from an older sister, a Nazereth Hair Of The Dog eight-track.

And he did have a handful of more current singles of his own, including Don’t Bring Me Down which, without fail, ended up on his turntable on the rare summer day when the weather kept us indoors.

Sniff ‘n’ The Tears – Driver’s Seat
from Fickle Heart

Driver’s Seat is one song that I do remember from that summer more than thirty years ago. Though our town was small, we had a rather nice public pool where we spent as many days as we could and, on those days, it seemed I would often hear the wiry, nimble song playing over the loudspeakers.

Journey – Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’
from Evolution

In late summer of ’79, Journey was still two years away from being a commercial juggernaut with Escape, but the group was having a hint of that future success with the slinky Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.

The song was indelibly etched into my young brain that fall when, one Friday night at the pizza place that served as a hang-out for kids from junior high and high school, the song came on the jukebox. As my friends and I watched, Mary, one of the true beauties in our class, and Deb, a few years older and already possessing a PG-13 reputation, began to dance to Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.

As they swayed to the song, we all stood there – slack-jawed, inert, and mystified by the skittering rush of hormones.