I really miss the music culture of the 1980s, especially MTV.
And John Mellencamp was one of my favorite solo artists. His commercial breakout album, American Fool, came out in 1982, just as I was entering high school.
Mellencamp was atypical in an era of polished arena rock and heavy synthesizers. Both his songs and his persona had a distinctly midwestern American vibe.
The singer hailed from Seymour, Indiana, less than two hours from my home in Cincinnati, Ohio. My dad grew up in the same general area of the Hoosier State. Perhaps for this reason, I found Mellencamp’s music relatable. (On the other hand, I could never relate to the worlds of David Bowie or Ratt.)
The attached video is for the single “Cherry Bomb”. It was released in 1987, and included on the album TheLonesome Jubilee. The music video features plenty of vintage footage from the 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t know if these video clips are from Indiana, but they sure look like Indiana, back in those days.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interracial couple featured in the video. John Mellencamp has never been shy about his (progressive) politics; and we can be sure that this was a deliberate choice.
I remember 1987 like it was yesterday. (I was nineteen.) In 1987, a young interracial couple in a music video was not as shocking as it would have been twenty years earlier, and not as ho-hum as it would have been twenty years later. And certainly not the cliché that it would be now, almost 40 years after the music video for “Cherry Bomb” was made.
In 1987, this was something that people would notice, without being either outraged or inspired by it. Mellencamp was not being “brave” or ground-breaking by presenting this in 1987. But he was making a statement.
When scrolling through social media, I can never resist anything about Rush, my favorite rock band since 1982. This morning I watched a YouTube video in which the band performed “Finding My Way”: a song from Rush’s 1974 self-titled debut album.
Yes, that was more than fifty years ago. Although I was alive, I was too young for Rush in 1974; I was a mere six years old.
The present Rush isn’t the same Rush of my early fandom days. In the early 1980s, Lee and Lifeson were just hitting thirty. Now both men are in their seventies.
Neil Peart, the band’s drummer and chief songwriter, passed away in 2020. (That happened on January 7. I took Neil Peart’s death as an omen of how 2020—and the rest of the 2020s so far—was going to go. I wasn’t mistaken.) Peart has been replaced by German drummer Anika Nilles.
Anika Nilles is a fine drummer, but she had not even been born when Rush’s breakthrough albums came out: 2112 (1976), Moving Pictures (1981) and Signals (1982). In certain online circles, Nilles’s gender has become a point of controversy. Not for me: I have never had any resistance to female musicians. But a part of me must ask: can a Millennial correctly interpret music born in the 1970s and 1980s?
That’s ultimately a silly question, though…and a futile one. Time marches on, and what endures will always be reinterpreted by people who were too young to be there at its inception. In fact, that passing of the generational torch is a requirement for any art that survives over time.
When I first heard Tom Sawyer back in the 1980s, I was struck by that line: “Changes aren’t permanent, but change is”. I of course interpreted that from a teenager’s perspective.
I’m now in my mid—no, late—fifties. Another lesson I’ve learned: If you live long enough, you will see the things and people that you love change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
I won’t pretend that I like this new version of Rush quite as much as the old one. But this version of Rush is more than good enough, considering how much time has passed.
People occasionally ask me what I like in the way of poetry. When this happens, I hem and haw around, and try to change the subject. I might suggest the lyrics of Neil Peart, the drummer and chief songwriter for the Canadian rock band Rush.
But that’s a non-answer. Neil Peart mostly wrote song lyrics, which are distinct from—though closely related to—poetry that is meant to be read from a page, rather than performed as music.
The sad fact is: a lot of contemporary American poetry is not very good. Regular readers will know that I’m fond of trashing the twenty-first century. But the decline of English-language verse began far back in the last century. By the time I was born (1968), English-language poetry was already in decline.
Most of it seems to fall into one of two camps. At one extreme, there is sappy love poetry that imitates the late Rod McKuen. At the other extreme, there is slam poetry, which devolved from the rantings of Allen Ginsberg.
But not all is doom and gloom. Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was a twentieth-century poet who wrote verse as the English language gods intended it to be written. That is: with discipline and structure, and focused on concretes rather than abstractions.
Here’s a sample of Wilbur’s classic poem, “Advice to a Prophet”:
“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?…”
That is great stuff. I loved these lines when I first read them, back in the mid-1980s. And I love them still.
I briefly met Richard Wilbur in 1987, when he was a guest speaker at Northern Kentucky University, where I was a student. I was already a moderately enthusiastic fan by this point. I asked him a question or two during the Q&A session— probably dumb questions. But hey, I was nineteen years old at the time.
December 31st marked not only the end of 2025, but also the end of MTV (1981 – 2025).
As I explain in the video below, I was one of MTV’s young fans back in the early 1980s.
MTV was a brilliant mechanism for content marketing. Suburban teens like me would discover new bands on MTV. Then we would go to the local mall and purchase the albums.
I discovered many of my favorite bands on MTV, including Def Leppard.
I discovered the music of Kansas in the early 1980s, as I was entering high school. By that time, Kansas already had eight studio albums, including the new one at the time, Vinyl Confessions. I eventually purchased their entire back catalog.
I knew immediately that Kansas’s musicwas “different”. Whereas Van Halen was singing about beer and women, the typical Kansas song dealt with spiritual and philosophical themes.
Some Kansas songs are so intellectual that I didn’t connect the dots until years later.For example: “Journey from Mariabronn” on the band’s 1974 debut album, takes its inspiration from Narcissus and Goldmund, a 1930 Herman Hesse novel set in medieval Germany.
I happened to read this novel just a few years ago, when I was already well into my fifties. I had a classic “ah-hah” moment when I made the connection between the Hesse novel and the Kansas song—which I’d enjoyed in partial ignorance for all those years.
Kansas songs are full of Easter eggs like that.
The above documentary covers Kansas from its foundation, through the height of the band’s commercial and critical success in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, Kansas suffered a decline, as the group’s members disagreed on their creative direction. (I’ve written a post about that here.)
All musical acts have their ups and downs, though, and none stays at the top of the heap forever. Kansas remains one of my favorite bands, more than 40 years after I first discovered them.
The early 1980s gave us a famous song named after a phone number: “867-5309”. Even if you do not remember the early 1980s, you are probably familiar with the song.
The song was alternatively known as “Jenny”. Often the song was identified with both names: 867-5309/Jenny.
In the song, a male narrator describes his obsession with a woman named “Jenny”, whose phone number (867-5309) was written on a wall, presumably in a men’s room. (That was a common prank back in the 1970s and early 1980s—writing random women’s names and phone numbers on the walls of men’s rooms. Don’t ask me why.)
Tommy Tutone is the name of the musical act that performed 867-5309.
Tommy Tutone is not a single artist, but a California-based group. The original lineup of Tommy Tutone was formed in 1978. The band still exists today. Tommy Tutone released six studio albums between 1980 and 2019. But the band owes most of its name recognition to 867-5309.
867-5309/Jenny was released on November 16, 1981. By the end of the following year, everyone with an FM radio had heard it.
867-5309 was, and remains, a cultural phenomenon. Not everyone was pleased about the song’s fame, however. After the song became popular, homeowners who happened to have been assigned the number began receiving prank phone calls. Many changed their numbers. Some even unplugged their phones in desperation.
Still others went out of their way to acquire the suddenly famous seven digits. Now that the initial fervor over the song has long since died down, this is the more common trend. It would probably be difficult—if not impossible—for you to obtain 867-5309 as your personal phone number. But your odds will increase in less populated areas, and as the time between the heyday of the song and the present year continues to grow.
In late 1981, I was in the eighth grade in Cincinnati, Ohio. One morning—it must have been a few weeks before the Christmas holidays—I heard a girl in my homeroom say my name. When I turned around, she had a smile on her face. I sensed good things ahead. Continue reading “867-5309, and a lesson in the value of skepticism “
Escape is one of the few rock albums with no duds. Every song is good—if you like Journey’s style of music.
But the best song on the album, perhaps, is “Don’t Stop Believin’”. It is a great song because it is simultaneously specific and universal.
We wonder about the small town girl, and the city boy “born and raised in South Detroit.” What compelled each of them to take “the midnight train going anywhere”?
And at the same time, the song is vague enough that we can each apply it to our individual stories. “Whoa, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” My movie has gone on for 44 years since I first heard this song, and counting.
For years, this song instantly took me back to the 1981-2 school year, and the adolescent I was at that time. The song can still do that.
But then a few years ago, I watched The Sopranos from start to finish. (I was about a decade behind everyone else in doing this…the story of my life.) Then, for a long time, I would see the final, iconic scene of The Sopranos when I heard, “Don’t Stop Believin’”.
Most recently, I have discovered First to Eleven’s interpretation of the song. (First to Eleven is a very talented cover band based in Erie, Pennsylvania.)
None of the members of First to Eleven was even born when I heard “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the first time, back in 1981. (They are all very young.) And yet, their music video, and lead vocalist Audra Miller’s performance, put yet another spin on the song for me.
And some people worry—or hope—that AI will replace serious musicians? They base this on the fact (for example) that AI can now reassemble good music into mediocre music. (See my recent post about The Velvet Sundown.)
AI will never be good for anything but mediocrity. Only a human imagination could have come up with “Don’t Stop Believin’” almost half a century ago. And it took human imagination to come up with all these reimaginings of the song since then.
I discovered pop/rock music in 1981-2, when I was still in junior high. Because of the longevity of contemporary rock bands, I sometimes come across new material from bands that I first discovered 40 years ago.
This is always a treat, and it always makes me feel younger. (If the rock bands of your youth are still making new music, you can’t be that old, right? That notion works for the Boomers, so why not for Gen X?)
38 Special is one such still-active band from my junior high years. I became a fan of 38 Special back when their 1982 album Special Forces was new, and reached the number 10 spot on the Billboard 200. This album includes several of the group’s classic songs, including, “Caught Up in You” and “You Keep Runnin’ Away”.
The band has just released a new song on YouTube, “All I Haven’t Said”.
There have been some personnel changes since 1982, of course. (I believe 38 Special has a new lead vocalist.) So the sound is a little different, but the same spirit is there.
I like the new song, and I am glad to see that 38 Special is still around and making music.
When I was in junior high in 1981, everyone was talking about Ozzy Osbourne.
We were too young to remember when Ozzy was the lead singer for Black Sabbath (the band that finally fired him in 1979). But we all liked Blizzard of Ozz, and Diary of a Madman, the two solo albums of his that were then available.
Back then, we bought them in vinyl, or maybe cassette. There were no lame streaming platforms in 1981. In 1981, Taylor Swift would not even be born for another eight years. It was a grand time, indeed.
There were concerns about some aspects of Ozzy’s persona. His music, like that of Black Sabbath, had a quasi-occult vibe. That was typical for heavy metal music of the 1980s. On at least one occasion, Ozzy had bitten off the head of a (already deceased) dove. That was not so typical, even for heavy metal artists.
I still like Ozzy’s music. But as is so often the case with still-thriving Boomer artists whom I discovered in my tender years (like Stephen King, for example), I have a strong preference for the early portion of Ozzy’s oeuvre. And even that is something I have to be in the right mood for.
I never tire, however, of my interest in Ozzy the individual. A few years ago, I watched several of Ozzy’s reality show series with my dad. I could never get my dad to listen to Ozzy’s music back in the 1980s; but he liked Ozzy the reality show star.
Now 76 and beset by health issues, Ozzy is closing out his long career. This weekend marked his final solo performance. Not bad, for a man whose first stage performances date back to the late 1960s.
Now let’s turn our attention to something really important: the future of the rock band AC/DC.
I’ve been a fan of AC/DC since the early 1980s, when Back in Black was the latest thing. AC/DC isn’t my favorite band. (That honor goes to Rush.) But AC/DC is definitely among my top ten.
The members of AC/DC, just like the rest of us, are getting older. Angus Young, the group’s iconic guitarist, is now 70. Lead vocalist Brian Johnson is now 77.
No, it isn’t 1981 anymore. (And oh, how I wish that it were, for any number of reasons.) But AC/DC still gives a pretty solid live performance, by my estimation.
I took guitar lessons for a while in the early 1980s. But only for about a year.
I did not have a knack for music. I lack the sense of timing that is inherent in all great musicians. Writing comes naturally to me. Practicing the guitar was always a chore. I wanted the result, but I did not enjoy the process.
Forty years later, I can still manage most of the basic chords. But where music is concerned, I am content to remain in the audience.
Nevertheless, music is an art form that I appreciate. But I appreciate it selectively. There is music I love (most of it 1980s rock) and music that I will simply never enjoy. I acknowledge Taylor Swift’s commercial success. Her music is not my cup of tea.
But I’m a 50-something male, and we all hate Taylor Swift. Right? Well, maybe, but that’s an oversimplification. Even in the 1980s, there was popular music I never developed an appreciation for: A Flock of Seagulls, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, most of Michael Jackson’s catalog.
On the other hand, I loved Rush, Foreigner, Triumph, Def Leppard, Bryan Adams, Journey.
I think that’s normal, where music is concerned. We all have preferences. No one, I’ve found, is neutral about music. No one likes all of it.
Which makes the public soundtrack all the more annoying. Whenever one enters a restaurant, retail establishment, or waiting room, one is immediately assaulted with random music, piped in from overhead speakers. They play music at my gym, even though most members wear headphones.
Another problem with music in public places is that it is usually played too loud. I won’t get technical here, and speak of decibels. If when addressing my lunch or dinner companion, I have to raise my voice to be heard over the music, then the music is too loud.
Almost as annoying is the street guitarist, tambourine player, or vocalist. I admire the chutzpah of those who publicize their art this way. But I quicken my pace whenever I pass by a street musician. Similarly, I would not stand on the sidewalk and read from one of my novels, stories, or essays.
I want to consume my music selectively: the music I choose, at a time and a place of my choosing. I don’t want a restaurant, fitness club, or a grocery store to tell me that listening to the music of their choice, at the volume of their choice, is the price of admission to their place of business. This is especially true when I find their preferences actively annoying.
As a long-ago failed musician, I understand how difficult it is to become a real, skilled practitioner of that craft. How many hours of practice is required to perform music at even a journeyman level.
All the more reason not to cheapen music, by turning it into aural wallpaper.
I am a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a frequent visitor to Indiana. My father grew up in Indiana. I have many childhood memories of family holiday gatherings in Lawrenceburg and nearby rural Switzerland County.
I have always considered myself an “honorary” Hoosier (the nickname of a person from Indiana), because of my familial ties, and also because of my affection for the state.
Family reunion in Switzerland County, Indiana, 1987.
But there are famous Hoosiers, too.John Cougar Mellencamp was born in 1951 in Seymour, Indiana, and he grew up there. Mellencamp, now in his seventies, is a proud son of Indiana. He has long incorporated small-town Indiana into his musical brand.
Mellencamp was one of the most popular solo artists of my teenage years. He was also a frequent presence on MTV. (This was back when MTV actually played music videos, as every Gen Xer will remind you.)
Many of Mellencamp’s songs and MTV videos incorporated small-town themes. Whenever possible, he inserted an Indiana-related Easter egg or two. I have become aware of some of these only decades later.
Consider, for example, the MTV video for “Hurts So Good”. This song hit number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982. In the summer and fall of that year, it was hard to turn on FM radio without hearing “Hurts So Good” within the hour.
The “Hurts So Good” MTV video was also popular on MTV. Little did I know, back then, that this video was filmed in the small town of Medora, Indiana. Medora is close to Seymour, where John Cougar Mellencamp grew up, and about ninety minutes from Lawrenceburg, where my father grew up.
The lesson here, for me, is that great art—and great artists—can come from anywhere. John Cougar Mellencamp would not have been the songwriter and musician he became, had he spent his formative years in Los Angeles or New York.
Many people grow up in small town or rural environments and do not find art, of course. But it is a mistake to assume that every denizen of LA is working on a screenplay, or that every NYC resident is an aspiring novelist.
It is difficult to believe that 5150, Van Halen’s seventh studio album, is now 39 years old. But this is indeed the case. 5150 was released on March 24, 1986. Has that much time really passed? I’m afraid so.
I can still remember when “Dreams” and “Why Can’t This Be Love” were new songs on FM radio. I immediately liked what I heard; and I became one of the thousands of people—mostly teenagers—who purchased the album in its early days. (More than 6 million copies of the album have been sold since then.)
This was the 1980s, and so we bought all of our music in record stores at the mall, of course. The album cover featured a muscle man holding up a metallic sphere, Atlas-like. This struck me as both interesting and strange, but I shrugged and went with it. (I was an avid reader of Muscle & Fitness in those days.)
The big news about this album was that Van Halen had a new lead singer. David Lee Roth was out, Sammy Hagar was in.
Sammy Hagar already had a following of his own as a solo artist. So this was rather like a merger between two companies with established brands. I was already a fan of Hagar, so I was predisposed to like the new, changed Van Halen.
Speaking of which: I had been a very lukewarm fan of Van Halen until then. Like everyone, I appreciated Eddie Van Halen’s unique guitar skills. But the Van Halen songs of the David Lee Roth era were banal in the extreme, even by the standards of a high school kid. The Roth-era songs were all about girls and parties, or they were about nothing at all.
I also suspected, even back then, that David Lee Roth was something of an egotistical jackass. These suspicions were confirmed for me decades later, when I read Runnin’ with the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen. Written by former band manager Noel Monk, Runnin’ with the Devil describes Roth’s self-indulgent, often vindictive behavior in detail. I didn’t know any of these details then; but I was glad to see Sammy Hagar replace the compulsively peacocking Roth.
5150 was a different kind of Van Halen album. The songs on this album had a mystic, almost aspirational quality. And yet—5150 was still upbeat, fun, and accessible. It wasn’t one of those dreary, navel-gazing rock albums that people claim you have to smoke weed in order to appreciate.
Van Halen would never be its old self again. The new trend—of better songwriting—would peak over the next two VH albums: OU812 (1988) and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (1991).
Should Sammy Hagar be credited for these changes? Given the magnitude and the timing of the shift, it is difficult to conclude otherwise.
“Love Walks In”, the second song on Side 2 of the album, is one of 5150’s most interesting pieces. The song’s lyrics suggest time travel, fate, reincarnation….who knows?
Some years after 5150 was released, Sammy Hagar stated that “Love Walks In” was written about communication with extraterrestrial aliens. I took a very different meaning from the song at the time—which I’ll spare the reader. And I still do. But that is one of the hallmarks of successful art: each person can walk away from it with a slightly different interpretation. For decades now, millions of people have regarded the Beatles’ “Let It Be”, as a Catholic ballad about the Virgin Mary. Paul McCartney actually wrote the song about his deceased mother, who was also named Mary.
5150 is one of those albums that, for me, will always represent a specific time and place. The spring of 1986 is long gone. I will turn 57 this year, and I don’t try to pretend that I’m still a senior in high school…not even when I listen to my favorite music from that bygone era.
I still have my own interpretation of “Love Walks In”, though. And I still enjoy listening to this almost 40-year-old album. Its songs never get old. If only the same could be said for this particular listener.
Members of my generation lived to see plenty of changes in the ways popular music is consumed. We were born in the golden age of the vinyl album. As adults, many of us are learning to cope with streaming music services.
Throughout most of the 1980s, the audio cassette tape was the most popular means of buying music and listening to it. When I see nostalgic Facebook posts about physical music media from the 1980s, the cassette tape is most often the subject.
But there was another musical format that was already dying out as the 1980s began, but which was actually quite good, by the standards of the time. I’m talking about the venerable 8-track tape.
The 8-track was a plastic cartridge that had dimensions of 5.25 x 4 x 0.8 inches. Like the audio cassette, the 8-track contained a magnetic tape. But unlike the audio cassette, the 8-track was much less prone to kinking and tangling.
The 8-track was actually 1960s technology. The 8-track took off in the middle of that decade, when auto manufacturers began offering 8-track players as factory-installed options in new vehicles. Throughout the 1970s, 8-track players were popular options on new cars. 8-tracks were further popularized by subscription music services like Columbia House.
Columbia House magazine ad from the 1970s
I purchased my first home stereo system for my bedroom in 1982, with money I had saved from my grass-cutting job. I bought it at Sears, which was one of the best places to buy mid-level home audio equipment at that time. The stereo included an AM/FM radio, a turntable for vinyl records, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player.
I quickly discovered that I liked the 8-track format the best, because of its relatively compact size and ease of use. That spring I bought 8-track versions of Foreigner 4, Styx’s Paradise Theater, and the Eagles Live album. All of these produced good sound (again, by the standards of that era), and none of them ever jammed or tangled. I was convinced that I had found my musical format.
It has often been my destiny to jump on a trend just as it is nearing its end. Little did I know that my beloved 8-track was already in steep decline.
8-track sales in the USA peaked in 1978, and began falling after that. The culprit was the slightly more compact, but far more error-prone audio cassette. This was the format that all the retailers were suddenly pushing. By the early 1980s, cassette players were also replacing 8-track players in cars.
I would like to say that I yielded to the march of technological progress, but this wouldn’t be truly accurate. The audio cassette, invented in 1963, was slightly older technology than the 8-track.
I did, however, yield to the march of commercial trends, simply because I had no choice. Nineteen-eighty-three was the year that retailers began phasing out 8-tracks in stores. You could still purchase them from subscription services, but they were disappearing from the shelves of mall record stores and general merchandisers like K-Mart. By early 1984, the venerable 8-track had completely vanished.
In recent years, there has been a movement to resurrect the vinyl record. I’ve noticed no similar trend aimed at bringing back the 8-track. At this point, in the early- to mid-2020s, I may be the only person left on the planet who still fondly remembers this bygone musical medium.
“The Trooper” appeared on Iron Maiden’s 1983 album, Piece of Mind. Both the song and the MTV video are now regarded as classics.
But when I first saw and heard this, it was just another new song in the MTV lineup.
Not to me, though. I immediately recognized something special about “The Trooper”. I can’t say I predicted that it would become a timeless classic. But I’m not exactly surprised, either.
Yes, of course, there is the hard-driving beat. Also, the juxtaposition of old movie footage with studio clips of the band in the video. (This would become a signature technique for Iron Maiden music videos.)
Even more than all that: this is a heavy metal song about the Crimean War, inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1854 narrative poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.
In the early 1980s, heavy metal bands like the Scorpions and AC/DC were singing about the usual, tired topics: sex, parties, and rock-n-roll. Iron Maiden was writing songs about 19th century warfare. And the musical results were pleasing to the ear.
Now, if you don’t think that’s cool, well, I don’t know what to tell you. This is why I’ve been an Iron Maiden fan for over 40 years.
