The Sunscreen Song and Teacher Hit Me with a Ruler

A little insight into the mind of a music obsessive. Two examples:

1) Last week as I was flossing my teeth, I heard a man’s calm but commanding voice utter a one-word imperative sentence. Floss.

Floss. Floss. This meant something. I’d heard this man’s voice before. Deep inside my twisted brain, neurons were fired, synapses were traversed, and within a minute or two I remembered that it came from a song of sorts. A song of a speech? 

A quick Google search of “song advice speech” resulted in a link to “The Sunscreen Song,” aka “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” a 1998 release by film director Baz Luhrmann that became a cultural phenomenon in the U.S. The song uses an essay of a hypothetical commencement speech written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich (widely misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.) and received nationwide radio play in 1999. It’s a terrific little oddity, and I think the advice given is an poignant and funny today as it was twenty years ago. It was great to hear again.

Thank you, twisted brain!

2) Then, this morning I read Heather Cox Richardson’s essay on the history of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song that’s perhaps best known for its first line, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Later, while walking my dog, I found myself stepping in time to the tune, and little by little I recalled that the reason I know the song so well is due to a parody that my brother taught me when I was a young grade schooler. These lyrics are NOT something that would be tolerated at any school today, but I recall them vividly with fondness:

My eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers we have broken all the rules
We have massacred the principal and barbecued the cooks
His truth is marching on

Glory, glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Hid behind the door with a loaded .44
And there ain’t no teacher anymore.

Oh, how I laughed at this rendition! I particularly like the irony of barbecuing the cooks. A quick search online reveals that there are many variations of this tune, no doubt sung with glee on school playgrounds everywhere back in the day. I believe that singing it today would result in a suspension. A shame.

And there you have it. Every so often a jumbled brain will reward you with a link to the past, usually right after misplacing your car keys or stubbing your toe. Gotta get a win some of the time.

Christie McVie's Brown Eyes

Christie McVie died today, and it brings to mind my favorite song from one of my favorite albums: the sultry and intoxicating “Brown Eyes” from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. Depending on my mood, it’s my favorite Fleetwood Mac song, along with “Silver Springs.” It’s another one of those deeper cuts from an album chock-full of deep cuts, a collection of songs similar to the Beatles’ white album in that the experimental whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But “Brown Eyes” stands on its own, with Mick Fleetwood’s simple but driving drum pattern (with some killer fills), John McVie’s smooth bass line and Christie’s repetitive electric piano (I believe a Wurlitzer) and beckoning vocals, a delivery that’s sexier than so many other vocalists have attempted. Original band member Peter Green plays the guitar outro. It’s a perfect track.

So long, Christie. I never got to see you play, but I’ll be listening to you for a long, long time.

MEMORY AND MUSIC TIME TRAVEL

If you’re human you undoubtedly know about the fallibility of memory, how even our most-assured recollections can be put into question or proven entirely false upon further examination.  It’s reassuring then to discover that at least in some cases, my first-hand memory is spot on and confirmable. For someone who loves music and has a penchant for nostalgia (guilty as charged) the miracle of technology allows me to listen back to concerts I attended long ago. And it turns out that at least some of my memory is intact.

I recall that on October 9, 1982, during Rush’s opening song “Spirit of Radio,” vocalist Geddy Lee sang “One likes to believe in the freedom of baseball,” substituting for the word ”music” in honor of the Milwaukee Brewers victory over the Angels in game four of the ALCS earlier that afternoon. I remember it. And now I can validate it, because the entire concert is available on YouTube. When the crowd screams, my fourteen-year-old self is there, unaware that forty years later he’ll be able to access his own applause. Remarkable.

Once I discovered this defining show from my youth, I turned to other concerts from long ago, and it turns out that there are at least seven shows that I attended from 1982-1986 available for streaming. (note: I find that YouTube regularly scrubs live recordings from its vault, and the Genesis concert link is already defunct. Bummer! A new Google search can often lead to an operational link):

Rush, October 9, 1982 (https://youtu.be/xgIhhNabk10)
Genesis, November 10, 1983 (link no longer working)
Yes, March 10, 1984 (https://archive.org/details/Yes_90125_1984-03-10-AnotherTownAndOneMoreShow-Milwaukee)
Bruce Springsteen, July 12, 1984 (https://www.guitars101.com/threads/bruce-springsteen-alpine-valley-music-theater-east-troy-wi-july-12-1984.678215/)
Elton John, September 9, 1984 (https://youtu.be/G51mCqcd_r0)
Tom Petty, June 23, 1985 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNviPMup2wA)
Rush, March 24, 1986 (https://youtu.be/M4kyxrp4N1E)

Before YouTube deleted the recording, I was able to confirm that during the Genesis show in 1983, Mike Rutherford had to sit out a good chunk of the song “That’s All” because of technical difficulties, and that the singer Phil Collins encouraged the audience to plug their ears and repeat the phrase, “Masturbation will not make me deaf.”

For the Yes concert in 1984, I distinctly recall Tony Rabin accidentally adding harmony vocals to a verse of the song “Hearts” (the “Many moons cascade one river…” section) quickly dropping out when realizing his mistake, and he and bassist Chris Squire cracking up as a result. I’m listening to the concert now, and…there it is! The blunder!

The guy who posted the Elton John concert calls it, “Elton John, Stoned in Alpine Valley” and includes this description: “Although there are some contenders for this, I still consider this Elton’s most drug-fueled show.” And now I can listen to his drug-fueled performance as if Elton’s sobriety is still a decade on the horizon. (It’s also fun to think that this was supposed to be his “final American tour.” The dude’s most recent farewell tour has been going on for over four years!)

I also appreciate that my memory of setlists is sometimes more accurate than what I can find on websites that archive such things. For Supertramp’s 1983 concert from Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, I reviewed the entry on setlist.fm and immediately knew it wasn’t correct because I remembered the band performing “Waiting So Long” and “Child of Vision.” Sure enough, I just checked the notes I wrote after the show, and both of these tunes were played. Unfortunately, I can’t find any recordings on-line of the Wisconsin show or any other shows with a similar setlist. The Internet has its limitations.

But not as many limitations as memory itself. Hell, I attended a Jimmy Buffett concert with my future wife and brother-in-law in 1993, and until one of them mentioned it to me a few years ago I had no recollection of even having been there! Worse, I’ll have a discussion with a friend today and forget the contents by the day’s end. A few weeks ago I was trying to recall the name of the actress “Carey Mulligan” and it eluded me. This morning I spoke to my mom, a nurse of over four decades, and she had trouble accessing the word “autoimmune.”

I’m looking forward to the day when physicians are able to employ a defrag of our internal hard drives, allowing us to access memories accurately and quickly like Jeopardy champions. But until then, most of us will have to muddle on through life knowing that while a portion of our recollections have some truth to them, many fall in a gray area somewhere between truth and fiction.

How gray?

Say it with me Fletch fans.

Charcoal.

12 Months of Live Music

When things started opening back up in 2021 after fifteen months of living in a cocoon, I was chomping at the bit. I purchased concert tickets left and right, many from bands that probably wouldn’t have made the cut in 2019, but in my newfound freedom seemed like necessary luxuries. Twelve months later, I look back on a year’s worth of live music. It was a great run. All but two of the acts I had never even seen before. You can read below for details, but Joseph and Sammy Rae & Friends win my two best shows of the year. The War on Drugs earns my worst. Nearly everyone else gets high marks.

September 18, 2021.  Black Pumas, preceded on different stages by Poi Dog Pondering, Moon City Masters and Sheila E.  Sheila E. proved to me that she kicks ass even in her 60s, putting the rest of us aging schlubs to shame.  I was unhappy that I had to leave the end of her show to ensure my attendance at the beginning of the Black Pumas concert, though they were terrific too, easily one of my three favorite bands of the past half a decade.  Sadly, they’ve cancelled shows for the latter half of 2022, leading to questions about the long-term health of the band.  Hopefully they’ll release more music soon.

November 13, 2021.  The Fixx, preceded by Fastball (the acoustic duo version of the group).  The Fixx was fantastic, one of two bands I had seen prior to 2021.  They are in my mind one of the most underrated bands of the 80s and 90s, achieving a level of musicianship and lyrical content that surpasses most of their contemporary and more-popular brethren.  Fabulous.

November 21, 2021. Sammy Rae & The Friends.  I’ve written about this band before, but they are ridiculous.  Sammy Rae’s voice is out of this world, and she really sings, eschewing the vocal shouting that appeals to the masses on shows like American Idol and The Voice.  As gifted and as ebullient a performer as you’ll ever see grace the stage.  One of my top two concerts of the past year.

January, 2022.  Pinegrove.  Postponed due to COVID.  Stay tuned.

January, 2022.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones.  Postponed due to COVID.  I eventually got my money back, but fortunately got to see the band in August at the Sacred Rose Festival.  Stay tuned.

January 15, 2022.  Nate Bargatze.  Not a musician, but a fabulous comedian who manages to be hilarious without resorting to the low hanging fruit of vulgarity and profanity.  Not that I’m a prude, but comedians like Jo Koy assault the audience with F-bomb after F-bomb, and it becomes tiresome.  Bargatze takes another path.

February 27, 2022.  Ralph Covert.  Formerly of acts like The Bad Examples and Ralph’s World, this local Chicago musician played for 2 hours and 45 minutes!  I shit you not.  Playing as a trio for most of the night, Ralph told stories and played selections from throughout his career.  Terrific.

March 27, 2022.  Bright Eyes, preceded by Christian Lee Hutson.  I took a chance on this one.  I only know that band’s final two albums and really dig them, but my dabbling into their earlier efforts has left me mostly unimpressed.  Fortunately, the band brought it with a crazy number of musicians on stage, including at times a mini choir and orchestra.  Led by Colin Oberst, the band clearly has its fanatics, as illustrated by the woman behind me who sang every lyric to every song…loudly.  Admittedly, I was kind of annoyed, but also impressed!  And I didn’t feel that I – a minor fan at best – could possibly bitch to someone who was clearly more passionate than I was.  Great show.

April, 2022.  Spoon.  Cancelled by me due to double-booking.  Damn.  This one hurts a little, as I rank their latest album among the best of 2022, and it looks to have been a great show.

May 4, 2022.  Aimee Mann.  Postponed due to COVID.  To date, this hasn’t been rescheduled.  I haven’t seen Mann perform since Til Tuesday opened up for Tom Petty in 1985!

May 5, 2022.  Steve Hackett.  Performing a short set of solo stuff followed by the entire Seconds Out Genesis album, this was a kick to see live, especially with my son.  Such a high level of musicianship, and I finally got to see Supper’s Ready live!

June 25, 2022.  Again with my son, this was the first time I saw Billy Joel since 1990, and he really surpassed my expectations.  Sure, he played it extremely safe with the setlist, but damn, I can’t argue with the quality of the tunes, and I was impressed with Joel’s vocal ability at such an advanced age.  He seems very at ease in the elder statesman role, probably happy to be alive and still performing for appreciative fans.

July 15, 2022.  Adrian Belew.  I kind of went to this one on a lark, unsure if it was worth the hassle.  It was.  The show cost all of $35, and it was sparsely attended, so my friend and I could stretch out in relative isolation during a high-COVID time.  Belew was fantastic, playing the guitar as no other with an unbelievable bassist and drummer to fill out the trio.  The music is weird and not always in my wheelhouse, but he was fun to see live, and I’m thankful he performed “Three of a Perfect Pair,” a favorite of mine.

July 26, 2022.  Pinegrove.  My daughter turned me onto this band, and while I enjoy their output, I can’t exactly name a song by them.  But this was one of those tickets I purchased way back in the fall of 2021, figuring, “What the hell. Take a chance.”  Playing twenty-two songs almost uninterrupted, the band was tight, offering a multitude of changes of tempo and feel, with odd-metered output and crunchy guitar making this a feast for the ears.  I was glad to have the plugs handy!     

August 26, 2022.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones, preceded on different stages by Sierra Hull, White Demim, City and Colour, Punch Brothers, and afterward a half an hour of The War on Drugs.  A stellar opening day of the Sacred Rose Festival in Chicago, I was greeted with a variety of acts, all really good except The War on Drugs, who I found to be ponderous and overly sincere with songs lacking hooks.  Oh well.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones, on the other hand, were stellar, with lead singer Paul Janeway leading the way.  He especially gained my respect after thanking security for getting his “fat ass” back on stage after a romp through the crowd.  Anyone who can laugh at himself is cool by me.  Oh, he can sing too!

August 28, 2022.  Khruangbin (but it was not to be), preceded by The Infamous Stringdusters with Molly Tuttle.  Bad weather made this entire day at the Sacred Rose Festival precarious.  I got to see an abbreviated setlist with the Stringdusters and Molly Tuttle, who were terrific.  Alas, nearby lightening shut things down thereafter.  My friend was particularly distraught after waiting for two hours in the front row to see Khruangbin, only to be turned away.

September 9, 2022.  The Shins preceded by Joseph.  Such a score on this one!  I was a little unmotivated to see The Shins on a weeknight, concluding that I may have been a bit too zealous with my concert ticket purchases earlier in the year.  But then a few days before the show I discovered that Joseph were opening, another band introduced to me by one of my daughters.  I liked their output and wondered how they might perform live.  Wow.  I mean, wow!  Three sisters singing tight harmonies to nothing more than an electric guitar and an occasional MIDI kick drum trigger.  And they killed it!  One of my top two concerts of the past year. I came home and immediately ordered their acoustic album on vinyl.  The Shins came out and killed it as well, offering a lot more urgency and energy than on their studio albums, and singer James Mercer was in great form, nailing the high vocal parts that Mercer could have been forgiven for reworking to accommodate his aging voice.  But no, even on the powerhouse “Simple Song,” he hit those suckers perfectly.  Great show.

And so ended twelve months of live music.  Not too shabby.  At present I don’t have tickets to see anyone, perhaps needing to take a reprieve after such a breakneck pace.  But it was a helluva good run.

The Cheap Trick book, This Band Has No Past

It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m ready to get things rolling again.

Last spring I wrote about Brian Kramp’s run-in with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a short-sighted entity who temporarily shut down his music podcast, Rock and/or Roll. The silver lining in this fiasco was that it freed up Kramp’s time to complete This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, available now at Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores. I am not a die-hard Cheap Trick fan by any means, though I do think that Dream Police and In Color are nearly perfect power pop albums. Beyond that I’m a modest fan at best. Nonetheless, I found Kramp’s 300-plus-page read to be a delightful trip to the world of live music in the Upper Midwest during the 70s, and a meticulous record of how this band earned their success. If the book can capture the interest of a casual fan, I think that hard-core Cheap Trick followers will be ecstatic.

Kramp conducted more than eighty interviews for the book, including particularly insightful contributions from original drummer Bun E. Carlos and band manager Ken Adamany. The other original band members – Tom Petersson, Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander – didn’t participate, but their words are well-documented from past interviews, and I didn’t find their lack of direct input to be a drawback. If anything, it may have helped to keep the book focused and allow for more contributions from other players in the band’s history.

This Band Has No Past, a title taken from the mock-biography included in the band’s debut album, meticulously covers the origins of Cheap Trick from its modest roots in Rockford, Illinois, with forerunning bands such as The Grim Reapers, Bo Weevils and Fuse, to the recording of the wildly successful Cheap Trick at Budokan, the album that finally garnered the sales that eluded the band through their first three releases. You might be asking, “How the heck can a 300-page book only cover the band’s first few albums?” Kramp does this in a multitude of ways, all of which I found appealing.

First, he put the band’s evolution in context with contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and the releases of Jaws and Star Wars, plus events that played tangential roles in band members’ lives, such as the details of the Richard Speck murders (which would inspire the song, "The Ballad of TV Violence") and the story of the plane crash that took the lives of Otis Redding and six others in 1967. As it happened, future band manager Ken Adamany owned the Madison, Wisconsin club where Redding was to appear that night, and Rick Nielsen’s band, The Grim Reapers, opened for what turned out to be somber occasion.

Second, Kramp’s devotion to details that other author’s may have deemed unimportant give the story its scope and vibrancy, such as the story of Chris Crowe, a graphic artist who created the band’s logo, the inclusion of setlists from various shows, and an in-depth analysis of which of the debut album’s sides was supposed to be played first (it’s not as obvious as one would think). Kramp scoured seemingly every publication that included even a passing mention to the band – the Racine Journal Times, the Rockford Register Republic, Estherville Daily News, etc. Seriously, I admire the efforts it must have taken for Kramp to amass so much information and portray it in an entertaining fashion. Hell, he included two pages worth of adjectives that various publications used to describe Cheap Trick, and another two pages of adjectives used to describe at Rick Nielsen. Kind of crazy, but really rewarding!

Which brings me to the third point: just as Kramp appears to have worked tirelessly to write This Band Has No Past, the book highlights just how hard-working the members of Cheap Trick and a multitude of other bands were at the time, playing show after show after show at tiny venues throughout the Upper Midwest, from bowling alleys to high school dances to clubs to festivals. The book serves as a time capsule of the gritty but vibrant live music scene during the 70s, a scene that modern day musicians can only long for. While most of the venues were foreign to me, I have to imagine that anyone from the area who came of age during the 70s is going to be thrilled with this trip down memory lane.

Most illuminating for me was the realization that Jack Douglas, the producer of Cheap Trick’s debut album, hand-picked the songs for that 1977 release, overlooking tracks that would later prove to be very important to the band’s success, most notably “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender.” And it’s mind-boggling to me that “Hello There” wasn’t chosen to open the first album; it would have rivaled other great debuts such as “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Chuck E.’s in Love” and “Runnin’ with the Devil.” A fan of alternative history might ponder what would have transpired if these songs had been released earlier. Perhaps success would have come sooner, but perhaps Budokan wouldn’t have become phenomenon it became

Somehow it all worked out. And thanks to Kramp, much of it has been documented in an enjoyable read, and the book itself is an attractive, sturdy publication with color photos and appealing typesetting, making it well worth the price.