In the summer of 1987, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers released the song “Jammin’ Me”, with an accompanying MTV video, embedded below.
The theme of the song is: mass media overload.Some of the specific references in the song are now dated (El Salvador, Vanessa Redgrave, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, etc.). But with a few updates, this song would be perfectly relevant in 2024.
It’s worth noting that 1987 was a year before social media, the Internet, and mass-market cell phones. There were no podcasters. Talk radio had yet to take off in a big way.
And even in 1987, it was possible to feel news and media overload.
While 1987 was not without its political controversies, that was a calmer, saner era than the one in which we find ourselves today. There was a general sense that in the halls of power, adults were in charge.
The video therefore focuses on the excesses of 1980s consumer culture, but you can see and hear multiple nods to the political issues of that bygone time, too.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was one of the 1980s teen movies that I never got around to seeing. This was not a conscious decision on my part. (No one thought of “boycotting” movies back then.) Rather, it was more like an oversight.
For one thing, the movie was released on June 11, 1986. This was the week after I graduated from high school. Perhaps I had a sense that having graduated myself, watching movies about high school kids was no longer an entirely appropriate thing for me to do. I had, after all, eagerly watched early teen films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and The Breakfast Club (1985). But I had no time for Ferris and his adolescent adventures. For me, the most memorable film experience of the summer of 1986 was the original Top Gun.
I’ve rewatched Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club as an adult. I’ve toyed with the idea of watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But I fear that moment has simply passed. I’m now 56 years old. I have even less interest in watching a teen movie in 2024 than I did in the summer of 1986.
One factoid for you, though: that movie I never saw was a box office success. So much so, that the dust had barely settled on the movie, before Hollywood got to work on a spin-off TV series, entitled Ferris Bueller.
The TV series was short-lived. It ran for only a single season, from 1990 to 1991. Youth culture has always been fickle and fast-changing. What was cool for high school kids in 1986 was uninteresting for high schoolers a mere four or five years later.
I only recently learned of the television series’ existence. 1990 and 1991 were busy years for me; I wasn’t watching much television.
Among the members of the Ferris Bueller cast was Jennifer Aniston, who was then unknown, and probably less annoying than she is now. But even Aniston could not make a success of Ferris Bueller the television show.
A late-summer heat wave has come to Southern Ohio this week. That means temperatures in the mid-90s, and high levels of humidity.
I am reminded of another heat wave, in another late summer, 42 years ago.
In 1982, I was a freshman at a Catholic high school in Cincinnati. This was a working-class parochial school of the twentieth-century kind, not one of the posh private institutions that is so popular today.
The school building was old. (My mother had attended the same school, in the same building, in the 1960s.) There was no air conditioning.
Also, in those days Catholic school kids wore hot, uncomfortable uniforms year-round: dress slacks and a button-up white or blue dress shirt for the boys, a button-up blouse and a skirt for the girls. No wearing shorts and golf shirts to school, as is so common nowadays.
The early September of 1982 was an exceptionally hot one. Mr. Fairbanks’s freshman English class was held on the second floor, during the fifth period. Around one o’clock in the afternoon.
One day it was perhaps ninety degrees outside. Mr. Fairbanks had opened the windows, but the classroom was still a sweatbox.
We students were miserable, but Mr. Fairbanks was just as miserable. (As a male teacher at the school, he had to wear a tie, in addition to a dress shirt and slacks.)
As class was about to begin, it was clear that no one was in the mood for the lesson. Yes, this was 1982. But even in 1982, 14-year-olds from the suburbs had certain expectations where creature comforts were concerned.
Struck by a sudden burst of inspiration, Mr. Fairbanks stepped over to the blackboard and wrote, in large letters, all caps:
“THINKJANUARY”
Everyone laughed. Then Mr. Fairbanks proceeded with the day’s lesson, which—if memory serves—had something to do with diagramming sentences.
Did those two words on the blackboard do anything to lessen the heat? No. Nor did this turn into a life-changing, mind-over-matter exercise for me. I may have tried to “think January” for a minute or two, but there was no thinking away the heat that day.
What I learned in that fifth-period English class, 42 years ago, was that sometimes you just have to put up with unpleasant circumstances and situations. Some of these circumstances are simply beyond your capacity to change—like a second-floor classroom in an unairconditioned school building on a hot September afternoon.
When that happens, you have two choices: wallow in your discomfort, or set it aside and get through the minor ordeal.
Sooner or later, every heatwave passes. Think January for long enough, and one day it will be January.
Twitter (or “X”, if you prefer) informs me that Shout, the highly successful album from the British new wave/synth-pop group Tears for Fears, was released this week in 1985. Thirty-nine years ago.
Aug 3, 1985: "Shout" by Tears for Fears hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. #80s Held the top spot for 3 weeks. pic.twitter.com/EkqZKAfPBB
A teen of that era, I liked lots of music from the 1980s. One of the wonderful things about that decade was the sheer diversity of the music scene.
And I mean “diversity” in the best sense of that word. There were plenty of nonwhite and female artists. That was the decade of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Pat Benatar, and Billy Ocean. But there was also a lot of stylistic diversity.
(This is one of the many aspects in which I pity the youth of today, who must face a nonstop barrage of coverage surrounding that overrated mediocrity, Taylor Swift.)
Everyone could find something that they liked in the 1980s. I liked Def Leppard, Triumph, AC/DC, Journey, and Rush.
British new wave/synth-pop? Not so much. I remember groaning when the eponymous single of Tears for Fears’s 1985 album came on the radio for what seemed like the zillionth time. (And “Shout” got a ton of FM radio airplay in the late summer of 1985, let me tell you.)
But time changes our perspectives in myriad ways. I’m still not a fan of 1980s British new wave/synth-pop. But it was so much a part of an era for which I am now hopelessly nostalgic. I find—somewhat to my chagrin—that this formerly groan-inducing music is now a trigger for scores of happy memories.
Ditto for a hit song from another ‘80s British new wave/synth-pop group called Soft Cell.
In 1981 and 1982, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was on FM radio nonstop. I literally cannot hear it today without being transported 40-odd years into the past. But there is one memory in particular that stands out.
For me, the summer of 1982 was the summer between the eighth grade and the first year of high school. That summer, I accompanied my parents on a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
I was thirteen years old, not quite fourteen. I was bursting with the hormonal energy that made me constantly preoccupied with all female humans falling between my age and about thirty.
But all of this was very new. Alas, I often found myself tongue-tied when it came time to talk to one of those female humans. And so it was on that trip to Myrtle Beach.
One afternoon, I walked out of the condo my parents had rented and headed for the beach. Little did I know, when I set out, that I would remember that walk for 40 years, though not for any reasons worth bragging about.
Directly in my path was a girl in a dark blue one-piece swimsuit. She was lying on a towel in the sand, facing my direction. I remember that she had shoulder-length brunette hair, and she was deeply tanned. She was wearing sunglasses.
She had an FM radio on her beach towel. What song was playing? Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”. I distinctly remember that.
As I drew closer, I saw that she was probably a year or two older than me. Maybe an incoming high school sophomore. A junior? Possibly.
And then, the impossible happened. She smiled and said, “Hi”. But not in a dismissive way. She removed her sunglasses.
That was my cue to talk, to strike up a conversation.
What did I do, though? I uttered some guttural response that roughly approximated American English. “Haa-augh!”would be a close transliteration, I think.
Then I kept walking. And walking. When I returned an hour later, she was gone. I looked for her later in the week (having prepared a dozen cool conversation openers), but I didn’t see her.
***
What would have come of it, if I’d had a bit more game in the summer of ’82?
Probably nothing. We were both very young, and we were both on vacation. Our homes were likely hundreds of miles apart. And that was long before email, texting, or FaceTime.
But hey, you never know.
That’s an embarrassing memory, but also a good one. As anticlimactic as that incident was, the summer of 1982 was the portal to many happy times. I had a pleasant teenage experience, as teenage experiences go.
I’m still not a fan of British new wave/synth-pop. But I no longer groan when I happen to hear it.
Geddy Lee was the bassist and lead singer of Rush, my all-time favorite band.
(I discovered Rush in the fall of 1982, when I heard “New World Man” playing on FM radio. I was instantly hooked. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer piece about my passion for Rush. For now: suffice it to say that I’ve been a rabid fan for 40-plus years.)
Geddy Lee begins his memoir with a discussion of his childhood. He was born Gary Lee Weinrib in Canada in 1953. Lee was the son of Jewish emigres and Holocaust survivors.
Lee discusses his Jewish identity and his youthful experiences with antisemitism. (Canadians, it seems, aren’t all nice…at least they weren’t in the 1950s.)
He includes a chapter about his parents’ ordeals in the concentration camps, in both Poland and Germany. This was not something that I had bargained for when I bought the book. But it’s one of the most interesting chapters, despite the dark subject matter.
He then takes the reader on a journey through the long history of Rush, album by album.
I devoured the book in about three days.
My only complaint was the repetitious—and inevitably tiresome—references to marijuana smoking. After a while, I was like: Okay, you guys toked up a lot; I get it. Enough already! But that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise engaging story.
Speaking of story: Geddy Lee is a talented and relatable storyteller. My Effin’ Life is obviously a book that will only be of interest to Rush fans. But if you do like Rush (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), it is a read that you shouldn’t miss.
Hello, Dear Reader. I hope you have a safe and happy Memorial Day, and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the USA.
For traditional holidays like this one, you can’t beat Norman Rockwell. The artist painted the above work, Homecoming Marine, in 1945.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the painting conveys a significant amount of backstory. The young marine, and his relationship to the setting, are evident in the painting. The painting also gives us a rough idea of where he served. (Hint: not Europe.)
The obvious youth of the marine in the painting reminds me that at 55, I am now decades older than most of those who served in World War II and all subsequent wars.
I am also humbled. I have never served in the military. But I send out my appreciation and respect to those who have, and do.
Some books bring back memories. And so it is for me, with Stephen King’s illustrated novella, Cycle of the Werewolf.
I remember purchasing this book at the B. Dalton bookstore in Cincinnati’s Beechmont Mall in the mid-1980s. I had only recently become a Stephen King fan, and I was working my way through his entire oeuvre, which then consisted of about ten years’ worth of novels and collections.
The copy I bought in the 1980s has long since been lost. I’m glad to see that the book is still available, with the original illustrations from Bernie Wrightson.
You can get a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf on Amazon by clicking here.
I discovered the books of historical novelist John Jakes (1932 – 2023) as a high school student during the 1980s. The television miniseries adaptation of his Civil War epic, North and South, aired in 1985.
North and South was extremely well-done for a network (ABC) television production of the mid-1980s. The cast included Patrick Swayze, Kirstie Alley, David Carradine, Lesley-Anne Down, and Parker Stevenson. The sets were realistic and the production values were high.
After watching that, I decided to give John Jakes’s books a try. I read North and South(1982), plus the subsequent two books in the North and South trilogy, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987).
Then I delved into The Kent Family Chronicles. The books in this long family saga were published between 1974 and 1979. These are the books that really put Jakes on the map as an author of commercial historical fiction.
I emphasize commercial. John Jakes never strove for the painstaking historical accuracy of Jeff Shaara, or his approximate contemporary, James Michener. Jakes’s first objective was always to entertain. If the reader learned something about the American Revolution or the Civil War along the way, that was icing on the cake.
As a result, John Jakes’s novels lie somewhere along the spectrum between literary fiction and potboilers. His characters are memorable and he imparts a sense of time and place. But these are plot-driven stories.
At the same time, Jakes’s plots have a way of being simultaneously difficult to believe and predictable. Almost all of his books have a Forrest Gump aspect. His characters are ordinary men and women, but they all seem to rub shoulders with figures from your high school history classes.
That said, Jakes is one of the few authors whose books pleased both the teenage me and the fiftysomething me. This past year, I started rereading The Kent Family Chronicles, and catching up on the few installments I missed back in the 1980s. I have changed as much as any person changes between the ages of 17 and 55, but I still find these books to be page-turners.
This past week, I started listening to the audiobook version of California Gold. This one was published in 1989, after Jakes’s long run of success with The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold is the story of Mack Chance, a Pennsylvania coal miner’s son who walks to California to seek his fortune in the 1880s.
I will be honest with the reader: I don’t like California Gold as much as Jakes’s earlier bestsellers. California Gold is episodic in structure, and the main character is far less likable than some of Jakes’s earlier creations. In California Gold, Jakes indulges his tendency to pay lip service to the issues of the day (in this case: the budding American labor movement and early feminism) through the voices of his characters. Most of these pronouncements are politically correct and clichéd.
Worst of all, California Gold employs sex scenes as spice for low points in the plot. This is always a sign that a writer is struggling for ideas, or boring himself as he writes. When Jakes wrote California Gold, he may have been a little burned out, after writing The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold, though, won’t be tossed aside on my did-not-finish (DNF) pile. This is still a good novel. Just not the caliber of novel I’d come to expect from John Jakes. No novelist, unfortunately, can hit one out of the park every time.
There really was something special about growing up in an era when video games were not old hat, but something brand-new and on the cutting edge of the technology of that time.
I suppose I like my 21st-century iPhone and my MacBook as much as the next person, but they are tools for me, not objects of indulgence. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything quite as much as that first Atari console I received for Christmas in 1981.
Did I have a favorite game? Of course I did. Space Invaders, hands down. Missile Command came in a close second, though.
Amadeus, the biographical drama about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the mid-1980s. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus brought the famed 18th-century composer and his times to life.
Amadeus remains one of my favorite movies of all time. But when I saw it for the first time, as a teenager in the 1980s, I was inspired: I had a sudden desire to learn more about classical music, or at least about Mozart.
This was more than a little out of character for me at the time. As a teenager, my musical tastes ran the gamut from Journey to Iron Maiden, usually settling on Rush and Def Leppard.
So I read a Mozart biography. I was already an avid reader, after all. Then it came time to listen to the actual music. That’s when my inspiration fell flat.
I found that Mozart the man was a lot more interesting than his music. At least to my then 17-year-old ears. Nothing would dethrone rock music, with its more accessible themes and pounding rhythms.
Almost 40 years later, I still prefer rock music. In fact, I still mostly prefer the rock music I listened to in the 1980s.
Recently, however, I took another dive into classical music.
Classical music, like popular, contemporary music, is a mixed bag. Some of it is turgid and simply too dense for modern ears. Some pieces, though, are well worth listening to, even if they were composed in another era.
Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is one such piece. For the longest time, I mistakenly assumed that this arrangement was written for the 1986 Vietnam War movie, Platoon, in which it is prominently figured.
I was wrong about that. “Adagio for Strings” was composed in 1938, long before either Platoon or the Vietnam War.
“Adagio for Strings” is practically dripping with pathos. It is the perfect song to listen to when you are coping with sadness or tragedy. This music simultaneously amplifies your grief and gives it catharsis. You feel both better and worse after listening.
“Adagio for Strings” was broadcast over the radio in the USA upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. It was played at the funeral of Albert Einstein ten years later. The composition was one of JFK’s favorites; and it was played at his funeral, too, in 1963.
Most of the time, though, you’ll be in the mood for something more uplifting. That will mean digging into the oeuvre of one or more of the classical composers.
While the best-known composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc.) all have their merits, I am going to steer you toward Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) instead.
Dvorak was born almost a century after Mozart and Beethoven, and longer than that after Bach. To my philistine ear, Dvorak’s music sounds more modern, while still falling within the realm of the classical.
Antonin Dvorak
I would recommend starting with Symphony Number 9, Aus der Neuen Welt (“From the New World”). This is arguably Dvorak’s most accessible work, and my personal favorite at present. Symphony Number 9 contains a lot of moods. It takes you up and down, and round again.
This is not the story of an older adult turning away from the pop culture of his youth for more sophisticated fare. Far from it. Dvorak is not going to replace Def Leppard on my personal playlist. Bach and Mozart have not supplanted Rush and AC/DC.
But time has made me more musically open-minded. Almost 40 years after I was inspired by the movie Amadeus, I have, at long last, developed a genuine appreciation for classical music.
But that is a qualified appreciation, for an art form that I still prefer in measured doses.
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 late 1970s/early 1980s
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.
Led Zeppelin formed in 1968, the year I was born, and disbanded in 1980, when I was twelve.
I was therefore too young to become a Led Zeppelin fan while the band was still a going concern. But Led Zeppelin was still enormously popular when I discovered rock music as a teenager in the early to mid-1980s. Lead singer Robert Plant, moreover, was then launching a solo career, and making use of the new medium of MTV.
Most of my musical interests lie in the past. I admittedly lack the patience to sort through the chaotic indie music scene on the Internet, and I shake my head disdainfully at the overhyped mediocrity of Taylor Swift. When I listen to music, I listen to the old stuff: Rush, Def Leppard, Led Zeppelin, and a handful of others.
Led Zeppelin is very close to the top of my list. I listen to Led Zeppelin differently than I did in the old days, though. The lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” sound less profound to me at 55 than they did when I was 15. I now appreciate Led Zeppelin when they’re doing what they did best: raucous, bluesy rock-n-roll that had only a hint of deeper meaning: “Black Dog”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “Kashmir”, etc.
And of course, reading remains my first passion. I’m still waiting for an in-depth, definitive biography of Canadian rock band Rush. (I suspect that someone, somewhere is working on that, following the 2020 passing of Rush’s chief lyricist and drummer, Neil Peart.) But a well-researched and highly readable biography of Led Zeppelin already exists: Bob Spitz’s Led Zeppelin: The Biography.
At 688 pages and approximately 238,000 words, this is no biography for the casual reader. But if you really want to understand Led Zeppelin, its music, and the band’s cultural impact, you simply can’t beat this volume. I highly recommend it for the serious fan.
Kansas was one of my favorite bands while growing up. But this was always something of a minority viewpoint. Sadly, Kansas is a band that never reached its full potential.
Kansas, like the Canadian rock trio Rush, always had an intellectual, progressive streak. Kansas always wanted to make rock music “something more”.
Here’s an example: the band’s debut, self-titled album contains a song called “Journey from Mariabronn.”
What the heck is Mariabronn, you ask? That’s a reference to German-Swiss author Herman Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund.
Highbrow, yes. But a little too highbrow for popular music. Even in the artistically indulgent 1970s. How many 16-year-olds—either then or now—are conversant in mid-twentieth-century German classic literature?
Leftoverture contains the spiritual rock anthem “Carry On Wayward Son”. This song brought the band mainstream success. This is also the Kansas song that non-devotees are most likely to recognize.
On Point of Know Return you’ll find “Dust in the Wind”, another Kansas song that still gets a fair amount of airplay.
That was about it, as far as commercial success went for Kansas. Although the band soldiered on for years (a version of Kansas continues as a going concern today), the group was fading out by the mid-1980s.
Kansas’s songs are well-thought-out, often to the point of being abstruse. In short, most of the group’s music isn’t immediately accessible to the casual listener. And that’s a fatal flaw in rock music, where the competition is fierce, and audience attention spans are notoriously short.
Kansas was also riven by an internal philosophical dispute. Founding member and chief songwriter Kerry Livegren became a born-again Christian in 1979. He often infused Kansas’s lyrics with quasi-Christian themes. These were seldom preachy or bombastic, but their spiritual import was hard to miss.
The other members of the band weren’t on board with this new direction. Many of Kansas’s albums during the 1980s (Drastic Measures (1983), comes to mind here) contain songs that aren’t really enough of one thing or another. It wasn’t explicitly Christian music, but it wasn’t mainstream rock—or even progressive rock—either.
The last Kansas album I bought was Power (1986). Kerry Livegren had left the band by this time, and the remaining members cobbled together an album that was imitative of the commercial rock music that was popular at that time.
Power contained a few worthwhile songs. But by this time Kansas had simply become too unpredictable as a musical entity—even for fans like myself.
Kansas had a good run in the 1970s, but the band ultimately floundered because its members couldn’t agree on what the band was supposed to represent musically and artistically.
Kansas was never going to be Foreigner or Journey, let alone a Led Zeppelin. All the group’s movements in those mainstream directions were awkward stumbles.
Christian rock was a thing in the 1980s and beyond. (The Christian rock group Stryper, founded in 1983, still has a fan base.) But Kansas never fully cultivated that market, because at least half of the band’s members were uncomfortable with the “Christian rock” label.
So Kansas was ultimately a lot of half-hearted missteps in many competing directions. But not enough of any one thing.
What’s the lesson here? Creator, know thyself. That advice applies not only to rock bands, but to anyone trying to stand out in a marketplace filled with “me-too” offerings.
When I was a kid in the mid-1970s, my dad used to sing this song from the radio. The refrain went:
“Sundown, you’d better take care
If I find you’ve been creepin’ round my back stair.”
This was Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song, “Sundown”, of course. In the year the song climbed the charts, 1974, I was but six years old. I therefore didn’t grasp its meaning. But the song still brings back memories of that time.
And now that I’m old enough to understand “Sundown”, I find it an unusual take on the familiar romantic love triangle: that of the cuckolded male.
Fast-forward to 1986. My high school English teacher, wanting to demonstrate how stories could be told in poems and song lyrics, played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for us on one of the AV department’s record players. Yet another of Gordon Lightfoot’s songs.
I immediately connected with this song, even though I was unaware of the historical reference behind it. My teacher told our class about the November 1975 shipwreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. That gave the song even more weight. It was a work of imagination and art…but also something real.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released in 1976, to commemorate the shipwreck of the previous year. It remains one of my favorite songs from a musical era that I was too young to appreciate as it was taking place.
Last November marked the 47th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This got me thinking about the song, and about Gordon Lightfoot. According to Google, Lightfoot was still touring in his eighties.
But all tours, and all lives, must come to an end. Gordon Lightfoot passed away on May 1, of natural causes.
While Lightfoot and his music were a little before my time, I always appreciated his work. There are few songs quite as haunting and memorable as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. And whenever I hear “Sundown”, I always hear my dad singing along with the radio in the mid-1970s.
A brilliant musician, and an artistic life well-lived. Gordon Lightfoot, 84, RIP.
Former politician and talk show host Jerry Springer has died.
Most people know Springer for his gonzo talk show work on national television. Decades before that, he was a well-known figure in Cincinnati politics and local broadcasting.
Springer spoke at my Cincinnati-area high school in 1985. At this time, the biggest skeleton in Springer’s closet was a 1974 scandal in which Springer, then a Cincinnati City Council member, paid a sex worker with a personal check. Springer resigned from city council in a certain degree of disgrace.
Several of my male classmates couldn’t resist calling out, “Where’s the check”? while Springer was speaking at our school in 1985. Springer, a good sport, laughed off their taunts and moved on.
Jerry Springer was never one to be impeded by other people’s opinions of him. I recognized that in 1985.
After the Jerry Springer talk show debuted in 1991, I tuned in a few times. In all honesty, the show was never for me. But I didn’t watch much network television of any kind during the early 1990s. I was too busy, and my life too disjointed.
I’ll always remember the local, Cincinnati version of Jerry Springer, anyway. The speaker at my high school who wasn’t about to be deterred by an embarrassing incident from his past, or others’ ungracious insistence on calling attention to it.
Perhaps there is a lesson for all of us here. One can go far, despite being hampered by very human flaws and a less than perfect track record. The trick is to shrug off the crowd’s disdain, and keep moving forward.
