Catchy Name Needed

I'll get some "real" content up sometime over the weekend, but meanwhile here's what I've put up for #musicadvent in the last few days:

• Feist, 1234 ("the best song I ever learned about from an Apple commercial")
• The Police, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
• Kacey Musgraves, Slow Burn (from SNL)
• Taylor Swift, 22
• Mandalorian End Credits Theme

That last one is an unheralded favorite - it starts out as just the regular Mandalorian theme, but towards the end the volume comes down and down. I love the very end of it. I always let the credits of every episode run the whole way through, so it gets to that last bit.

I also feel like I need to point out that I put the TS song in there before I knew anything about the new album coming out. We went on a big road trip the year that "22" was a big thing, so that's what I associate it with. Good times.

(Hey, only one 80s song, and everything else is newer!)

I'm behind on both Music Advent and Holidailies, now. But as Christmas gets closer I feel less and less guilty about that.

Anyway, I was watching MTP Daily on MSNBC and Chuck Todd said, seemingly just out of the blue, "Give us any chance we'll take it, give us any rule we'll break it" - and I thought, "Oh, thanks for the earworm, Chuck!" But then it caused me to remember this version.


(I hadn't heard when I posted this about Penny Marshall dying; it doesn't seem like that could just be a coincidence, though. I think they must have said it and I just missed that part at the time.)

Well, before I get around to talking about concerts, let me tell you what happened to me in 1985, in a nutshell. I got one full-time job, replacing the two part-time ones. It still didn't pay very well, but better than I was making before. It was back in the Serials department, where I had worked before, and... I hated it. Once the new wore off, I could barely stand to go to work. I also bought a car, a used Datsun - I forget what year model it was - 82 or 83, I think. I had been in Austin all these years with no car, and having that freedom of movement was weird. And then I moved out of the co-op. I found a girl who wanted a roommate, and I moved into an apartment for the first time. (That didn't really work out so well, either. The roommate and I didn't particularly get along.)

The part of my life that did go well was my social life. I wasn't dating anybody, but I hung out with a couple of my old co-op friends, and a couple of their friends, and as you may have deduced if you've been paying attention, we did a lot of concert-going. We also went to clubs - especially we went to one gay bar on 4th Street. It was sort of fashionable for straight people to go there, at the time, but really the reason we kept going was that one of my friends was in the process of deciding to come out of the closet - which he finally did at the end of the year, to nobody's surprise. I suppose that was also related to why we went to see Frankie Goes to Hollywood (which was an education all by itself. I thought I was all grown-up and sophisticated, but... oh my). But we did plenty of other stuff, too. We went to Esther's Follies - which is apparently still going strong. We went to see small acts - we were very partial to a guy named Dino Lee, and saw him several times at different places. (Oh, look, here he is on MTV in '86, and it looks like he's still around, too.) We went to see Timbuk 3 - that's the "Future's So Bright We Gotta Wear Shades" guys - on campus, I think it was at the Cactus Cafe, which was a really small venue. I think that was just before they had the one big hit song, which is this one:

(We also saw Katrina and the Waves - another one-hit wonder act, at least in the States. I gather they were around for longer in the UK.)

We also went to bigger acts - the big ones and the medium-sized ones, too, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Howard Jones. We went to U2, which I found rather a disappointment, because I loved U2 but it was exactly like the Live at Red Rocks concert, I thought, which I had seen on MTV. There wasn't anything wrong with the concert, it just... didn't grab me like I thought it would. My Music Advent choice was U2, probably their most famous live moment, from LiveAid, which was in the summer of '85:

(I watched parts of LiveAid live, when it was originally on, but I don't think I actually saw that bit.)

I've been poking around trying to figure out when these various concerts were, and for U2 I came up with February 85. I mostly remember Bono waving a damn flag around, 30 years later, but I'm pretty sure they did sing "Bad" along with the other stuff that you'd expect. I had the EP - I think it's "Wide Awake in America" - that had the live version of "Bad" on it.

My other favorite band was R.E.M., and we saw them, too - I came up with August for a date on that one. I can't say I remember exactly what they played - I always have trouble with that part - but I remember that I loved it. I mostly have an impression of it in my head - standing on the floor of the Austin Coliseum and bouncing up and down because there wasn't enough room to really dance. (The song my brain wants to set it to didn't come out til the next year. That song will be in the next entry, because I picked it for '86. However, somewhere online I found a reference to "Fall On Me" having been played that night for the first time in public - here - and it's on the same album, so who knows? It's doubtful they played it, but possible.)

I also loved Tom Petty, and yes, we saw him too, with Lone Justice opening - I think that one was probably in July. I mention seeing Katrina and the Waves, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood (my research there says June). I mentioned a few days ago seeing New Order and thinking it was boring, and I think that one was in the fall, although I haven't attempted to check my memory there. My impressions of the time of year things were often seem to have been more accurate than my memories of what year was which, though. (I remembered Fleetwood Mac being at Halloween and Echo and the Bunnymen being around the time school started, for example. But I don't always have anything like that to tie things to.)

If you're wondering how I afforded all of this on a Library Assistant's pay, well, I really couldn't. By the end of the year I was pretty badly in debt, between credit cards and the car payment. I actually sold most of my vinyl albums that fall, among other cost-saving measures. (It wasn't as much of a wrench as you'd think - CDs were starting to come along by then, and I figured vinyl albums were going to go the way of the cassette and the 8-track tape. I sold them at Half-Price books and got quite a bit of money.)

Videos at the bottom.

OK, so in 1981, I graduated from UT. But then I stayed at UT, because I decided to go to library school. ('Cause, I dunno, I like libraries. I didn't really think this out too well.) I ended up living at The Ark, which was a student housing co-op, and a really wonderful and nutso place. (It's still there, but nowadays it's called Pearl Street Co-op, I understand.) It was rather famous for its parties. That fall, as I remember it, we paid the unheard-of sum of $1000 to have local favorite Stevie Ray Vaughn play at one of the parties. We would get some kind of temporary liquor license (this was how it was explained to me, anyway) and we could basically operate as a club for the night, and sell beer and everything. Well, honestly, I can't tell you much about Stevie Ray's performance because I over-indulged with the beer and I really don't remember a lot of it. I do remember that I wandered into the house living room before the performance and Stevie Ray was in there waiting to go on. I don't think I exactly knew what he looked like, although I did know who he was, he was sort of a cult figure around Austin at that time. I just mostly remember him looking at me and my friend like, "Who the hell are these people?" And I remember that there was a mob there and and we made the thousand bucks back several times over, and we bought new washers and dryers, as I recall. (Another thing I don't remember is exactly why I know all these technical details - I must have been on some committee. Everything in co-ops is done by committee.)

Oh, and the little kicker to that story is that that same weekend there was a Rolling Stones concert in Dallas, which I couldn't go to because I had a job. (Unlike as an undergrad, I was paying my own way in grad school.) Many of my friends got up hung over the next morning and drove to Dallas - or maybe they never went to bed at all, I'm not sure which. But in any case, I was told by what I considered to be reliable sources that the Rolling Stones knew about our party, and said something about it onstage, of all the crazy things. (This makes a certain amount of sense because Stevie Ray's brother Jimmie was in the Fabulous Thunderbirds, at the time, and the T-Birds were opening for the Stones on that tour.)

I was a lot more interested in the co-op and generally having a good time than I was in grad school, really, but I enjoyed library school. Most of what I learned is of course totally obsolete now, but it was interesting. I took a lot of reference classes, which meant a lot of hanging out in the library trying to look things up without computers. It was like puzzle-solving, it was fun. We did actually get mainframe time to do research once or twice - you had to parse your queries just so, almost like writing a computer program.

I was trying to remember any concerts I went to in 1981 and everything I was thinking of seems to have been in 1982, so I will save those for the next entry. I spent a fair amount of time watching MTV, although we generally liked to think we were above all that kind of thing, and we made fun of it a lot. That was the year "Bella Donna" came out, and I remember that Stevie Nicks' voice really annoyed me at first (I think it's "Leather and Lace" I'm thinking about) but eventually "Edge of Seventeen" kind of won me over. Joan Jett was a huge thing, too, and Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl."

Two Music Advent selections for 1981:
first, John Lennon, which I mentioned yesterday


and secondly, representing the MTV era, Billy Idol (with a video directed by Tobe Hooper - which I didn't know until I looked this up yesterday):

(Oh, I loved this so at the time!)

I felt like the 70s should have an Eagles entry for Music Advent (just like I felt like the 60s should have a Beatles entry) and Hotel California was the Eagles album that was a huge thing in 1977 (although I think it was officially released in '76). I didn't especially want to be so obvious as to pick "Hotel California" the song, so instead I picked "The Last Resort," which was really my favorite one off that album anyway:


1977 was the year I graduated from high school. (Yeah, I know, I'm old, in case you hadn't figured that out already. I seem to be the oldest person doing Music Advent so that makes me feel it every day.) This entry from 2007 talks about how I ended up going to UT rather than somewhere else, so I won't repeat that. I wasn't at the very top of my class because I was kind of a slacker, but I was firmly in the top 10% and I had good SAT scores, so basically I could go just about anywhere I wanted, short of Harvard or Princeton. I was in All-State Choir that year and I was pretty full of myself, but I was geekier than ever, too, and I only turned 17 a month before graduation, so that kind of balanced things out. ("Obnoxious and immature" probably about covers it.) (The entry I linked above also talks about how my parents tried to get me to go to school somewhere closer to home, because I was so young. But I was adamant and I won that one.)

(I keep wanting to reference these: the posts I wrote for holidailies one year - 2007, apparently - about music: grade school, the breathing issue (which you could also call high school part 1), high school part 2, college ) Basically, I've been talking off and on this year about choir and how much I loved music and stuff, but I didn't try to tell the whole story about that, because I knew I had done that previously. So in case anybody is actually interested in hearing all that, there it all is!)

So, I had gotten into UT and I had gotten accepted as a music major, which was a whole separate thing, and sometime in the summer I went off to Austin for freshman orientation. You registered for classes and I think you could take advanced placement classestests, which I did, and they took you around on tours of campus and taught you the words to "Texas Fight" and all that kind of stuff. I mostly mention this because it intersects with the biggest cultural phenomenon of 1977, which was the original Star Wars. Somehow - I would really like to know how - the RAs running orientation had gotten their hands on a Darth Vader mask, and there were Star Wars jokes all over everything. (I particularly remember them acting out the Force Choke sequence.) I knew that there was a movie called "Star Wars" that had come out, and I think I knew that it was probably something I would like, but I hadn't seen it yet. Most people hadn't, I don't think. But you can bet that I went running to see it as soon as I got home (and for a miracle, it was actually showing at home). (Possibly they had subdivided the one big theater into several smaller ones at that point, anyway - and cineplexes were starting to pop up in Houston, as well. So it was not as hard to get to see movies as it had been previously.)

Is it necessary to say that I loved it? I loved it. I didn't buy a bunch of merchandise, because I was supposed to be too old for that kind of thing and because I was a poor college student and never had any cash, but my big Christmas present in 1977 was a stereo and at the top of the pile of albums was the Star Wars soundtrack. (The stereo also had an 8-track player, but 8-tracks were on the way out by then, although I obviously was unaware of that at the time. I think things I had on 8-track included some Aerosmith album with "Dream On" on it, and maybe some Steely Dan. But the Star Wars soundtrack was on vinyl.) It was also the first movie that I went to see multiple times in the theater, mostly with various groups of kids. My mother never understood going to see movies more than once, and for that matter she never understood Star Wars, - I remember at some point in the early 80s watching it on TV, maybe on cable, by that time - and my mother being flabbergasted that both my sister and I knew all these lines from it. (My sister was not what you'd call a geek, at all, so I think I was a little surprised by that one myself.)

Anyway - I duly moved up to Austin in August (and except for a couple of summers early on, I would stay for the next decade or so) - I lived in Jester, for those of you who know what that is (here's the inevitable Wikipedia article) - and actually you can more or less see my room in that picture. I lived in the smaller wing facing the picture there, on the first floor - which was not the ground floor, on that side. Our room was right above the entrance on that side and some previous occupant had painted a longhorn on the window, so it stood out. It was all girls at my end of that wing, but right down the hall were boys, which was sort of radical at the time and frankly I'm not sure my parents knew about that when they let me live there. (Mostly we didn't interact with them much, anyway.)

Oh, I almost forgot to say that my freshman year at UT was also Earl Campbell's senior year, and UT was ranked #1 going into the Cotton Bowl against Notre Dame - which we resoundingly lost - but Earl won the Heisman and football season was a blast. The football players lived in Jester East, which was the other building, and normal students didn't actually have much interaction with them, unless they happened to be in your classes or something. They even had their own dining hall. My one personal interaction with Earl was running smack into him in a stairwell later on - about all I can tell you is that he was huge. It was like running into a wall.

I was looking at 1977 in music and I don't see a whole lot there that I'm moved to talk about and this is plenty long already anyway. Well, maybe a couple of things: somewhere in that entry I linked is a note that "You Light Up My Life" is from that year and in fact is the #1 song of the '70s, which I'm not sure I knew. I do remember that it was a huge hit, and I really kind of liked it (I had the sheet music, inevitably), although we also mocked it a great deal. Another album that I know I had - I think I bought it when on some trip to Austin earlier in the year - was Dan Fogelberg's "Nether Lands" which I adored. I may get around to talking about him later in the next couple of entries, because he was one of my favorites for years. He was more or less in the same sort of country-rock genre as the Eagles - nobody called it that at the time, but there were definite country influences there - but more... bombastic than the Eagles. At least some of the time. Here, I'll give you an example. (Bombastic was kind of in at that time, anyway - I may get to another couple of examples, coming up!)

I loved Elton John when I was a teenager, and I remember I especially loved this song when it came out, so for 1975, I give you (a '76 live version, actually) of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight". (It's a long song; if you stick with this all the way through, you may notice that Elton appears to be running out of voice by the end of it, in which case let's hope it was the encore of that concert.)

The Wikipedia page for the song says that the length was supposed to be cut down for the radio, and Elton had enough pull at that time that he was able to force them to release it as is. (Before I started this, I didn't realize how many big hit songs had their own Wikipedia pages.) I think I responded to the tone of desperation in this song, as a teenager. I also think I was vaguely confused about what the song meant because I had gotten the general idea by then that Elton John was gay, but really I think the meaning was pretty clear ("altarbound, hypnotized/sweet freedom whispered in my ear") and what I thought it meant was basically correct.

I mentioned before (in the 1970 entry, I believe, if you really want to know) that at some point I was given a little dinky cassette player for Christmas, and at some point (maybe the same year or maybe not) I was also given a cassette of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" - I'm not sure any more about what year was what, but GYBR came out in '73 so that's the earliest that part could have happened, anyway. I know I also got a Jackson 5 album and it's possible that all of that happened in 73, because certainly the Jacksons were still popular by then. (I think "Ben" had come out by then so Michael was already having some solo success as well.) I know I listened to the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album a lot because I still pretty much know every song on it. Later I bought or was given an Elton John songbook with the music to a lot of the early John/Taupin output - I remember picking out "Skyline Pigeon" on the piano and also some things I had never heard before, like "Where To Now St Peter?" - and I remember playing "Your Song" in the choir hall at some point and everybody singing along.

Elton John is not the most uncool artist to admit to having liked, so let me tell you about some of the less cool stuff: I know I loved The Captain and Tennille - everybody did. (Well, probably not everybody, but they were pretty popular in my circle of 14-16 year olds, anyway.) I loved Barry Manilow and especially I loved "Mandy" - I remember being at my best friend Julia's house and trying to call in to the radio station to request it. The Carpenters were still a big thing, and Neil Diamond, and The Eagles were starting to be a big thing. I remember at some point during high school being mad that my mother wouldn't let me go with some kids to an Eagles concert. (Until I had a car for my own use, the second half of my senior year, trips to Houston with other kids were not much allowed unless there was one or more adults along. And even then I couldn't go anywhere out of town without permission.)

In 1975, I of course did not have a drivers' license because I was just turning 15, but I took drivers' ed that summer and I had a learners' permit, and the fact is that my mother was sick of driving us everywhere, especially my endless choir practices and various related activities, and once I got the hang of driving, she let me drive around town without her along quite often - more and more as I got closer to being 16. She claimed later not to remember this.

Also in 1975, I suppose (or if there was a lag in such things getting to small towns it could have been '76), my mother actually allowed us to go see the movie of Tommy. I wonder if she knew about the part where Tommy gets molested as a child, or about the Acid Queen. Anyway, I liked the music - which I think was why we wanted to go see it in the first place, and I know I thought the film was interesting but I don't think I really loved it. (Which, if you've seen it, is pretty reasonable. I haven't rewatched the whole thing since I saw it in the theater, I think, but the three or four sequences I've watched in the last couple of days confirm the impression I already had that it was in fact a pretty bad movie. But in bits and pieces, it's still interesting. Tina Turner! Jack Nicholson - singing! Oliver Reed! Pretty shirtless Roger Daltrey!)

Bonus video: the Pinball Wizard sequence from the movie, with, guess who, Elton John:

(Be warned: I wrote this entry at work and the memories in it are disjointed even by my low standards.)

I have iTunes radio blasting rather loudly in the whole building trying to wash "Cover of the Rolling Stone" out of my head. (I'll put the video link at the bottom. This one has a series of Rolling Stone covers to go with the song, which is kind of neat to look at.) Not that there's anything wrong with the song, but it's been stuck in my head for two days and I'm ready for a new earworm. (Memo to iTunes: on what planet does a cover of "Falling Slowly" from The Voice count as "alternative" music?)

OK, so 1973, the year Rolling Stone became a household name  - well, in some households, anyway - was also the year I started high school. I had sung in choir through junior high, but high school "a cappella" choir was a whole new world. For one thing, it was full of people a lot older than me - there were only a handful of freshmen and I was as always the youngest freshman. (I was allowed in, I think, on the basis of being able to sight-read music rather than really on the quality of my voice.)

Choir was really the only thing I really cared about in high school. I could coast through most classes - with the exception of algebra, which I spectacularly failed to get the hang of and almost failed that year. I just squeaked through. I did better in geometry, the next year, but nobody found a way to explain algebra to me at that time in a way that made sense to me. I'm not sure anybody tried too hard to explain it to me, quite honestly - it was the 70s and the idea that a girl would need to know higher math was still pretty radical.

The choir geeks liked to hang out in the music building at all hours, and the choir director did not seem to discourage that at all. I use that term, "choir geek" - but actually in our school just being in choir did not make you a geek in and of itself, and a lot of "popular" kids were in choir. That said, I was totally a geek. I was smart and at the same time immature and socially inept and had a tendency to have fits of obnoxiousness besides. But I was not friendless; choir and music gave me a place to fit in. We did "Camelot" as the school musical that year and I was an accompanist rather than being on stage - which meant I went to almost all the rehearsals, and I loved it all. (I had attention-span problems with acting; when I tried it, I'd forget when it was my turn to say my lines. I never had that problem with music, somehow - because with music, I was singing along in my head even when I wasn't singing out loud, I think.)

The music that was most popular then is music that would mostly be considered very uncool nowadays: The Carpenters, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John. I do remember "You're So Vain" being a big thing - I think I started being influenced to some extent by hanging around with older kids - I had several friends who were juniors that year. That may be why I knew all about "Cover of the Rolling Stone" too.