As Close To Live As You Could Get From The Middle Of Nowhere Without A Car

By the autumn of 1984, my friends and I all had our driver’s licenses.

Not that much could be done with them sans a mode of transport.

A fair number of the kids in our high school had cars. Our small town was rural enough that it was a necessity for some of the kids living on farms in the hinterlands.

(thus making the pick-up to car ratio close to 50/50 in our high school parking lot)

There were also those who had inherited vehicles from older siblings and, as there was a bit of wealth in the area, there were the kids whose coming-of-driving-age arrived with a complimentary car.

I belonged to none of those categories.

The lack of transportation plagued me and my friends’ efforts to attend concerts. The nearest cities having arenas of 20,000 seats – the ones most likely to get dates for the most high-profile tours – were sixty and eighty miles plus down one interstate or another.

(close enough to shimmer like an oasis on the horizon)

The first challenge was to get everyone to commit and have the funds.

To even get tickets meant getting to one of the cities to acquire them in person. If such a thing could not be arranged, it was a Saturday morning on the phone, trying to get through to Ticketmaster as thousands of other people attempted to do the same in the pre-internet ’80s.

(after someone having convinced a parent to part with a credit card)

It was quite an operation.

Most of the shows I attended in high school were someone coming up with tickets at the last minute and, usually, our buddy Beej loaning himself his older brother’s car to provide transport.

More often than not, it would be settling for a concert replay. There were stations from Cincinnati and Indianapolis at the time that would sometimes air the songs that had been played at the show with “live” crowd noise mixed in.

It wasn’t quite the same, but as these replays would air immediately after the show ended, the consolation was knowing that you weren’t sitting in post-concert traffic.

I’d often listen to the concert replays whether it was an act that I might have wanted to go see or not. There was something compelling about the rudimentary recreations.

Here are four songs that I might have heard on one of those replays in autumn of 1984…

Billy Squier – All Night Long
from Signs Of Life (1984)

For a few years, Billy Squier was a rock god amongst my classmates in junior high and high school. Don’t Say No and Emotions In Motion must have resided in everyone’s collections and songs like The Stroke, In The Dark, and Everybody Wants You were staples on the rock radio stations.

And then, Squier released Signs Of Life. The first single, Rock Me Tonite, was a fixture on the radio that summer, but the song was also accompanied by an infamous video clip.

I remember the video being ridiculed, but it seems as though its role as scapegoat for Squier’s subsequent career decline has grown throughout the years. Personally, the songs just didn’t reach the heights of pure rock goodness of Don’t Say No and Emotions In Motion, though I always dug the frenetic All Night Long.

Ratt – Wanted Man
from Out Of The Cellar (1984)

Unlike Billy Squier, Ratt’s career was rocketing into the stratosphere in 1984 thanks to Round And Round, which seemed to be blaring from every car stereo wherever high school kids congregated thar summer.

It didn’t get played as much, but I quite liked the more mid-tempo Wanted Man. It has a swagger and I always picture a spaghetti Western in my head when I hear the song.

Sammy Hagar – I’ll Fall In Love Again
from Standing Hampton (1981)

In the autumn of 1984, Sammy Hagar was simply The Red Rocker, ex-member of Montrose, and a fixture on the rock radio stations in our area with songs like There’s Only One Way To Rock, Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy, Rock Is In My Blood and I Can’t Drive 55 (from his then-current album VOA).

A year later, he was the most polarizing lead singer in the history of mankind, having replaced David Lee Roth in Van Halen.

I liked Sammy fine as a solo act and, though Van Halen’s second chapter wasn’t going to make anyone forget the DLR era, I thought there was some cool stuff from the band with Hagar as lead singer.

Though I’ll Fall In Love Again didn’t make the Top 40, the Top 40 station that was my listening choice at the time played the song incessantly during the summer of ’82. The song never fails to take me back to that summer.

Triumph – Magic Power
from Allied Forces (1981)

Triumph never quite became a major act in the US, but I heard their songs often on radio in the early ’80s. And it wasn’t uncommon to see kids in our high school halls wearing Triumph concert shirts.

The trio seemed to pass through the area every six months or so and, in ’84, undoubtedly did so touring to support their Thunder Seven set.

I was mostly ambivilant about the band, but I did kind of dig Magic Power from several years earlier.

Uriah Heep Forever

Working in one of the larger record stores I’d ever stepped into for much of the ’90s provided the opportunity to encounter a collection of characters that one might ordinarily have to do time to experience.

(an outcome that one co-worker narrowly avoided after being busted for manufacturing his own money)

Of these compatriots, The Drunken Frenchman was certainly one of the more memorable.

A good decade older than most of us, he had eased into the role of gruff, cantankerous elder so effortlessly that there was a yard no doubt lamenting his absence to chase neighborhood children from it.

The Frenchman quickly became a fixture in a group of a half dozen or so of us who would head straight from our shift to the cantina we had staked out as our own.

Throughout the successive rounds, The Frenchman would offer up bits of wisdom he’d accrued such as, if you’re good with your barkeep, you’re good, or, all a man needs is the love of a fine dog and an ingenue that understands him.

Questionable life lessons aside, The Frenchman likely knew as much about rock music, pre-1980, as anyone I have ever known, so there was usually a toast to commemorate the birthday of Hugh Grundy, original drummer for The Zombies, or the anniversary of the release of Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake.

During one of those countless evenings, the discussion turned to the fact that there were acts whose heydey in the States might have been twenty years passed – and brief – and, yet, were able to still pack venues in Europe and even notch the occasional hit.

(I believe Status Quo having a Top Ten single in the UK prompted the topic)

“Once you’re in over there, you’re in forever,” The Frenchman noted. “Uriah Heep still tours in Europe.”

I took him at his drunken word.

The only time I’d ever heard Uriah Heep on the radio had been somewhere in eastern Ohio, maybe West Virginia, rolling down an interstate as the family made the annual, summer trek to the ancestral homelands of western Pennsylvania.

It was 1982, late summer, and music had, during the past six months, become the shiny, new object in my life. The idea of not having the radio stations I knew for two weeks was distressing.

I sat in the backseat of the car, jockeying for space with my brother and listening to a transistor radio until the final station familiar to me dissolved into a drone of white noise.

I was in uncharted territory, but I quickly learned to hunt, surfing the band for a song that I recognized to materialize.

Then, we hit a stretch of dead air and few options and I had to settle on a station that was a bit harder than the Top 40 to which I usually listened.

(it helped that they played Journey’s Stone In Love)

And I know that the station played a song by Uriah Heep as their name – and that of their new album, Abominog - struck me as totally bizarre.

Some fifteen years later, not long after The Frenchman informed us of Uriah Heep’s fervent fanbase in Europe, I visited the UK for the first time. Emerging from The Tube, listening to Smashing Pumpkin’s Adore on my Walkman, I stopped.

Covering a section of the wall was a massive poster…touting tour dates for Uriah Heep.

Here are four songs from Billboard magazine’s album rock chart from twenty-nine years ago when some unfamiliar radio station gave me my one and only (as far as I know) dose of Uriah Heep…

Uriah Heep – That’s The Way That It Is
from Abominog

I got to thinking about Uriah Heep after reading a recent entry at 70s Music Mayhem on the debut of what would be the band’s lone Top 40 hit, Easy Livin’, in the US during late July, 1972.

(I don’t think that I’d ever heard the song before)

That’s Just The Way It Is apparently got enough airplay to give the band their biggest album in a decade and it’s not a bad song at all. It’s catchy, rumbles along quite nicely, and certainly wouldn’t have sounded out of place next to Journey and Foreigner at the time.

Nazareth – Love Leads To Madness
from 2XS

I’m familiar with little by Nazareth aside from Love Hurts and its accompanying album, Hair Of The Dog. My buddy Will had an older brother and the eight track seemed to be permanently lodged in his Trans Am’s player.

I dig Dan McCafferty’s gruff vocals which I’ve heard influenced Axl Rose and Love Leads To Madness is pretty cool. With what little I do know of Nazareth’s catalog and the fact that they’re Scottish, I’d be interested in hearing more.

The Sherbs – We Ride Tonight
from Defying Gravity

My buddy Beej would go to visit relatives out west most summers. He’d return after a couple weeks with tapes of exotic songs recorded from the radio and The Sherb’s We Ride Tonight might have been on one of those mixes.

I did hear the song here and there on WEBN or 96 Rock, but I never knew who it was or what it was called. It was one of those songs that was filed deep in my brain, making cameos throughout the years and causing me to wonder if I’d imagined it.

We Ride Tonight is a taut rocker with a mysterious vibe and a chorus reminiscent of the Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen classic Because The Night.

Billy Squier – Emotions In Motion
from Emotions In Motion

Billy Squier was about as popular as any act in my junior high/high school during his Don’t Say No/Emotions In Motion period.

There were three cities that were on most tour stops and within a two-hour drive of my hometown; Squier was playing one of them every few months, opening for some major headliner.

(there were more Billy Squier concert shirts per capita in my high school than any high school in America)

But it was straight-ahead, groove-driven rock that sounded great on the radio (and both Don’t Say No and Emotions In Motion had four or five songs that got played heavily in our part of the midwest).

Yes, Mr. Capra, You Are Correct

(written last Saturday, remixed from last year)

Most everyone with a passing interest in Christmas, movies, and/or Christmas movies knows the tale of It’s A Wonderful Life – how it slid into relative obscurity only to become a beloved classic in the ‘70s after its copyright lapsed and the film was shown repeatedly during the holidays.

There are no memories for me of seeing the movie as a child in the ‘70s. Actually, I didn’t see it until a good decade or more later when I was in my early twenties. I was renting some movies from the video store next to the record store where I worked. I had two days off, was broke, and wanted to veg. There was It’s A Wonderful Life. I shrugged and figured I was due.

It was the middle of July.

An annual viewing, seasonally adjusted, is now a bit of a tradition. So, I’m stretched out on the couch and watching as the plans of Jimmy Stewart get laid to waste one by one – no travel, no college, no life in the dirty city.

(and, as I think about it, I’ve been fortunate to do all of those things he’d set out to do)

Paloma trudged through half an hour of the movie. She was up very early this morning and she finds the flick to be depressing.

(it is a mostly grim slog to Jimmy Stewart’s epiphany)

Tonight is one of the coldest of the season so far, but the central heat is keeping the chill of the outside world at bay. Its steady hum is soothing.

The only light, aside from the television, is the glow of several strings of white Christmas bulbs. My eyes kept catching snatches of items about the living room in the firefly flickers from the black and white images on the screen.

Bob Marley is smiling from some odd print that has him juxtaposed against stars and stripes. Godzilla battles the Smog Monster on a framed Japanese poster, a gift from Paloma.

There’s some of Paloma’s artwork on the wall, a cattle skull painted metallic silver, a British Union Jack and a Singaporean flag, as well as nearly a thousand albums filed against another wall.

One small, black kitten, Ravi, is asleep on a large chair. Another, Ju Ju, sits on the back of the couch staring out the window behind me. Both were abandoned by a neighbor and neither was with us last Christmas.

Coltrane is missed.

Pizza and Sam are most certainly curled up with Paloma, sleeping in the next room.

It’s peaceful, it’s comforting, and it is quite wonderful.

Here are some songs of the season that made annual appearances on most of the radio stations I was listening to in the early ’80s…

Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas

Band Aid’s charity single from 1984 has been pretty maligned and, granted, it might not be a stellar musical effort, but, if you were a young music fan at the time, it had a certain charm that it likely retains to this day. It featured some of the superstar acts of the early MTV era and it was one of the first musical events I had lived through.

And, if you were a kid at the time, it very well was one of the first times you realized that as big as the world might be, it was one world. And, maybe it made you stop and think that there are a lot of people in the world who might not have the simplest things which we take for granted, not just at Christmas, but each and every day.

At least it did for me.

Bryan Adams – Christmas Time

It must have been sometime in the mid-’80s when Bryan Adams’ Christmas Time became a radio staple. Like the string of hits he had had at the time, the song isn’t rocket science and Adams hardly reinvents fire, but the sentiment is true and it’s an engaging track.

Billy Squier – Christmas Is The Time To Say I Love You

In the Midwest in the ’80s, Billy Squier was a rock god. The rock stations to which I was listening played not only the hits like The Stroke, Everbody Wants You, and In The Dark, but practically every track from the albums Don’t Say No and Emotions In Motion.

So, the rollicking Christmas Is The Time To Say I Love You was in heavy rotation each December.

The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping
from I Could Rule The World If I Could Only Get The Parts

The Waitresses only released one full-length album and an EP of their quirky, New Wave rock. But, despite their scant output, the group notched two, enduring classics – the sassy I Know What Boys Like and their modern holiday classic Christmas Wrapping.

I’m sure that I first heard the song on 97X during Christmas ’83 as I was discovering modern rock and it was immediately memorable.

Years later, I’d much better relate to the story within the song, and, somehow, despite how many times I’ve heard it, the ending is still a surprise that makes me smile.