Hall & Oates - Ultimate Daryl Hall & John Oates (Discs 1 & 2)

In July 1983, I returned to my old hometown of Annapolis, Maryland, and began my plebe (freshman) year at the Naval Academy, a lifelong dream of mine. Plebe Summer is a time-honored tradition at USNA, a time when inductees are tested, trained and molded into military officers. The (all too true) joke about Plebe Summer is that they take away everything you're accustomed to in life, and slowly give them back to you as 'privileges' during your remaining four years at the Academy. And that's EVERYTHING - freedom, civilian clothes, music (the hardest blow for me), sleep . . . (and some would say 'dignity' as well . . . but we'll just move on). That summer is designed to be demanding and rough, both physically and mentally, and many don't make it through these first few weeks. A few plebes excel, but most just grit their teeth and slog their way through it; I was one of the latter.

So I presevered like the rest. We were up before the sun every morning, and every minute of every day was tightly scheduled and fully utilized, with marching, three-mile runs, close-order drill, uniform and room inspections, sailing instruction, ship and aircraft identification, and a million other things to do before lights out. In the midst of all of this intensive training, physical exertion, spit-and-polish and military pride and tradition - I met a girl and fell in love.

Near the end of the summer, the authorities began giving us . . . well, not exactly free time, but the opportunity to choose for ourselves what we wanted to do during sports period in the late afternoon. We were free to try out different intermural activities, and one day, on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to look into the fencing class over in Ricketts Hall. I'd seen it on TV, and it looked like fun. It was in that class that I saw her close up for the first time. She was a fellow plebe in a different company from mine, and as such her living quarters were far away on the other side of Bancroft Hall. I had noticed her during marches and morning runs, but until that point I'd never been within 50 yards of her. A buddy of mine was in her company, and as luck would have it, he was also in the fencing class that day, and introduced us. We had the chance to talk a bit between waving epees around, and seemed to connect somewhat. Even wearing the drab Academy-issue athletic gear, I thought she was gorgeous.

Plebe Summer finally ended, and the upperclassmen returned for the start of the Academic Year. Even with the start of classes, a plebe's time was still tightly scheduled, but in a different way than in the summer. But with all that we had to do, I still made the time to cross the huge Bancroft Hall dormitory (I was in 7th Wing, she was in 4th) - down the center of each passageway at a dog trot, arms close to my body, shouting "Go Navy" or "Beat Army" when making a sharp 90-degree turn - to see her as much as I could. I was taking a risk seeing her so much - Academy regulations strictly forbid relationships between first-year students, so I had to play it uber-cool. Besides, early on I wasn't quite sure where I stood with her; I believed that she thought of me more than as a fellow plebe, but I couldn't get a sign from her either way. So I had to lay back, and see what happened.

In October, the Naval Academy Drama Club ('The Masqueraders') put on a multipart production of Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, calling the whole shebang Kings. I had a bit part in the first portion, but nothing in the latter parts. So on the second night, I invited her to attend the show with me. We sat side by side in the audience of the darkened Mahan Hall theater, the only lighting illuminating the stage. At one point in the play, Sir John Falstaff was parleying with his boon companion, the wastrel Prince Hal, and said/did something particularly uproarous. As I laughed with the rest of the audience, I brought my hand down on the armrest and, to my surprise, found it resting on top of hers. She instantly grabbed mine, and it was as though an electric shock ran up my arm! We sat there in the dark for the rest of the play, holding hands secretly, down low so no one would spot us. That's when I knew for certain how she felt about me . . . that is, at least I thought I did.

The next few weeks were . . . trying, to say the least. I wanted to see as much of her as possible, which of course wasn't much time at all. We began scheduling "study" sessions together in empty classrooms in Michelson and Chauvenet Halls after evening meal, but soon had to stop doing that after nearly getting busted by one of the upperclassmen patrolling these buildings one night. But finally, a rare and unique opportunity presented itself.

That November, for the first time (and as it turned out, for the ONLY time) ever, the annual Army-Navy football was played not in its usual Philadelphia location, but on the West Coast, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. And thanks to the efforts of Academy boosters and private contributors, the ENTIRE Brigade of Midshipmen and West Point Corps of Cadets would be in attendance.

For us plebes, this trip to California was to be a rare taste of freedom from Academy regulations for a couple of days. While many mids and cadets were going to be housed in various area hotels, the majority of us were put up, in twos and threes, with local families (from what I heard later, many more people volunteered to host us than were required - say what you want, but the L.A. area is pretty hospitable). As such, restrictions on civilian attire for all midshipmen, including plebes, were lifted - only on the day of the game would we be required to be in uniform. The game was also our only official function during that period; prior to that, we were on our own and could do what we wished. Needless to say, I was REALLY looking forward to this trip - not only for a mental break, but as a rare opportunity to spend some serious quality time with my girlfriend.

In California, I was going to stay with a sponsor family along with my buddy Jim, a fellow plebe in my company. We had been in touch with our temporary landlords in the week prior to the journey - they lived in Pasadena, fairly close to the stadium. My girl was staying with her roommate with a family in Torrance, California, which on a map looked reasonably close to Pasadena (I'd only been to Los Angeles once before, so I was clueless about the distances between places). At that point in my life, I still didn't have a driver's license (don't ask why - long story), but Jim was fully on board with hooking me up with her, with the nebulous promise of a double-date with her roommate as his reward. We arranged for the rental of a vehicle to tool around in during our time there.

The main body of midshipmen flew out of BWI to LAX on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (I still marvel at the logistics of moving 4,000 mids and 1,000 other related officers and staff - it all went like clockwork, without a hitch). We landed in LA that evening, and our host family met Jim and I at the airport. We immediately changed into civvies in the bathroom, then they took us over the rental car lot, where we found to our surprise and delight that the agency had upgraded us to a hot-looking red Mustang convertible. Jim put the top down, and we drove to Pasadena up the 110 through the relatively warm evening breeze, feeling on top of the world.

Having no access to my own music since the summer, my main preoccupation during the drive was finding a decent radio station. I settled on a station playing a new Hall & Oates song called "Say It Isn't So", released by RCA the previous month as one of the two new songs (the other being "Adult Education") on their greatest hits compilation album, Rock 'N Soul Part 1. "Say It Isn't So" was a continuation of Hall & Oates' evolution from a soft rock duo into more of a neo-blue-eyed soul, almost power pop band - a move that began in 1980 with their hit "You Make My Dreams", and continued through the early 80s with huge hits like "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)", "Maneater", "Private Eyes" and "Family Man". This latest song was filled with echoing vocals, syncophated electronic drums and synths, cowbell and wood block accents, and enough hooks to hang a full set of Calphalon cookware off of it. That ride to Pasadena that evening was the first of many times I heard that song that week - it quickly became the unofficial theme song to my California adventure.

"We like to be the strangers at the party, two rebels in a shell.
You like to move with the best of them you know we move so well.
Don't need someone to lean on. I know that there's an open door.
But if I'm faced with being replaced I want you even more so baby say it isn't so...."

The next day was Thanksgiving Day, and as such we were obliged to spend the day with our host family. I was itching to get down to Torrance, but it just wasn't happening that day. Friday was planned as the Big Day of Freedom for the visiting academies - the only things planned for us that day was a special evening at Disneyland, with admittance only for mids, cadets, and their families and guests. I finally connected with my girl over the phone, and the plan was that Jim and I would drive down to Torrance that evening to meet up with her and her roommate, and from there we would proceed in a two-car convoy to Disneyland. Upon arrival there, we would pair off and go do our respective things.

Well, the first thing I discovered on our trip south was that Pasadena to Torrance was a hike, at least 35 miles, a trip made even longer by the standard Friday evening L.A. traffic. So we had several opportunities to hear "Say It Isn't So" during the drive down, since it seemed every radio station in the Los Angeles Basin had the song on heavy rotation.

"Who propped you up when you were stopped low motivation had you on the ground.
I know your first reaction you slide away hide away goodbye.
But if there's a doubt maybe I can give out a thousand reasons why.
You have to say it isn't so..."

By the time we finally got to the place where she was staying, Jim and I were both frazzled. But I perked up immediately upon seeing her - it was the first time I'd ever seen her out of uniform (so to speak), and she looked GOOD. We said a quick hello-goodbye to her sponsor family, then we all hit the road. It was at that point that I learned that she didn't have a valid license either, so we couldn't ride with one another to Anaheim. She hopped in their rental car with her roommate, while I somewhat dejectedly climbed in beside Jim, and we began another 30+ mile drive in the dark to the park.

The traffic to Anaheim down Route 91 was pretty heavy, but for some reason, despite my protests, Jim insisted on driving like a maniac. He was weaving in and out of traffic like Mannix, music blaring ("Say It Isn't So" was heard at least once more during that drive), and soon the girls were nowhere in sight. I was plenty pissed, but fortunately she and I had made plans for this contingency - whoever got to Disneyland first would wait for the others by the front gate. So when we arrived, I immediately stationed myself by the ticket entrance near Main Street, U.S.A., and waited for her . . .

And waited . . . and waited. For nearly 2 hours. Jim waited with me for a while, then I released him from his unspoken obligation so that he could enjoy himself while I waited alone. There were thousands of people, military academy members and their guests, who streamed into the park during that time. And I'm pretty sure I eyeballed every single one of them on their way in. But somehow, someway, I missed seeing her arrive. Whether it was accidental or deliberate on her part didn't cross my mind at the time; all I could think about was how I missed my one big chance. I met up with Jim again as the park was closing, and we drove back to Pasadena, with me slumped in the passenger seat as, sure enough, "Say It Isn't So" played in the background.

The next day was the football game at the Rose Bowl. Due to my state of mind, I remember very few details of that day. We formed up into companies a couple of miles away from the stadium, and marched through a couple of Pasadena neighborhoods on the way there. Navy stomped Army, 42-13, a score that at any other time would have given me a great deal of satisfaction - but not that day. I finally met up with her late in the game, behind the stands. Couldn't get a clear explanation as to what had occurred the night before; in my mind, Jim and I were to blame for losing them on the highway. I was hoping to set up some time with her that evening, after the game, but she claimed she had other plans she couldn't break - which only added to my dejection. Overall, I was getting a weird vibe from her, and I didn't like it.

However, I saw her once more in California, in the airport waiting area the next day, just before we flew back East. In full view of other mids, she was overtly affectionate to me, in a near-blatant-disregard-of-Navy-rules sort of way. So that cheered me somewhat, and I felt pretty good on the flight back.

"Say it isn't so painful to tell me that you're dissatisfied.
Last time I asked you I really got a lame excuse.
I know that you lied.
Now wicked things can happen...you see 'em goin' down in war.
But when you play in a quiet way that bites it even more."

Back at Navy, we again carried on as before. But the rendezvous quickly became shorter and farther between. Finally, a couple of days before Christmas break, in an empty classroom in Michelson Hall, she lowered the boom on me - we were through; she was seeing someone else. Whether this new thing had begun prior to or after Pasadena, I never got an answer to. But I was devastated, and went through the holiday back home and almost the entire second half of Plebe Year pretty much in a depressed daze.

"Why you gonna go do you hafta say you wanna go ooh ooh baby say it isn't..."

Say it isn't so, indeed.

"Say It Isn't So" should have gone to Number One. But it had the misfortune of being released the same week as Michael Jackson's and Paul McCartney's "Say Say Say", off of the latter's Pipes Of Peace. The two songs battled for the top spot all through that November and December 1983 and into January 1984, with "Say Say Say" coming out on top. The Hall & Oates song was second-best every time - a ranking I suddenly could relate to.

For the next 3 1/2 years, she and I attempted to studiously ignore one another, a task made difficult by the fact that a) the Brigade of Midshipmen is fairly small; b) we were both English majors, a fairly rare breed at Navy, and as such were in several of the same courses over the years; and c) after graduation, we both chose the same speciality within the Navy, so we were in school together for almost another year after Annapolis, and encountered one another regularly since then. But in the past 25 years, we have only spoken together twice, very briefly, both times initiated by her, in a spirit of patently false bonhomie. While I was polite to her, both times I refused to be sucked in - some hurts never fully go away.

I used to be a pretty big fan of Hall & Oates back in their '80s heyday, but their appeal has definitely waned for me as the years have gone by. I don't have the same sort of nostalgia for them that I have for other bands from that era. Nowadays, I regard them more as "the Seals & Crofts of the 1980s" or "the American Wham! with a bit more testosterone". Yes, I know that sounds harsh, especially in light of all the hits they had - Billboard still regards them as the most popular duo of all time, beating out such acts as The Everly Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, Steely Dan and Ike & Tina Turner, among others. But for me, this band will always be associated with "Say It Isn't So", the song that played continually in the background in the Navy-themed, unhappy-ending version of my own personal John Hughes movie in the late fall of 1983.

But for those of you lacking the same sort of visceral reaction to this band's music, here's an excellent two-disc compilation, Ultimate Daryl Hall & John Oates, released by RCA in 2004. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

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Halloween Horror: Scary Sounds From The Hex Files

With October 31st just around the corner (relatively speaking), here's a silly post for you - one of those "spooky" sounds effects recordings, the kind usually played on Halloween Night by the neighborhood house that always seems to go all-out for the holiday . . . You know the house that I mean; every neighborhood has at least one - where the yard is filled with fake tombstones, "ghosts" hang from the trees, and the man of the house is usually lurking in the bushes, wearing a Frankenstein or gorilla costume, ready to jump out and scare the bejesus out of unsuspecting trick or treaters.

I was never into Halloween as much as that. Therefore, for the life of me I can't figure out when, where or why I purchased this CD. I must've seen it in a cutout bin somewhere in the late 90s/early 00s - the come-on line of "More That 73 Minutes Of Continuous Scary Sounds!" on the cover must have enticed me to pick it up. Still, the sound effects contained on it are pretty good, and if anything, it'll get you in the mood for Halloween. I wouldn't recommend playing the entire 73 minutes while you're sitting around the house, however . . .

Anyway, here you are - Halloween Horror: Scary Sounds From The Hex Files, released by good ol' K-Tel in 1997. Hopefully at least one of you out there could use a record like this. Either way - enjoy!

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Another milestone reached

At around midnight my time last night, a visitor from Hayward, CA came to Pee-Pee Soaked Heckhole, looking for an old Starbucks Christmas compilation. That person was the 20,000th unique individual to check out my blog - which I think is pretty amazing! To all of these new visitors, and to all of you who continue to come back again and again to read my meandering screeds and check out my music, I just want to say "thank you" once again. I'm glad that you all like my little corner of the blogosphere, and I enjoy the kind comments regarding my efforts here that some of you have left. I'm still having a lot of fun with this, and don't intend to stop any time soon.

[While I'm here, a couple of quick administrative notes: Some of you may have noticed that I'm in the process of changing the music links so you can click directly on them to reach the downloads - just trying to make it easier for you all! And I received a notice from Rapidshare that since I'm not a Premium member, they will be deleting my uploaded files (beginning with the first one I posted there last year, The Crabs' Sand And Sea). So I'm phasing out all of the Rapidshare links on my earlier posts - it's all Mediafire, all the time now (Mediafire is better anyway).]

Thanks again - more to come!

Poll Results - "Who Destroyed Van Halen?"

Well . . . that was an easy question, wasn't it?

Here are the results:

- Eddie Van Halen: 7 votes (46%)
- Sammy Hagar: 3 votes (20%)
- David Lee Roth: 1 vote (6%)
- Gary Cherone: 1 vote (6%)
- Michael Anthony/Alex Van Halen/Wolfgang Van Halen: 0 votes
- This question is bullshit - they STILL rock!: 3 votes (20%)

Look - no one outside of Van Halen is ever going to know the FULL story of their breakup in the wake of their 1984 tour. The 'public' reason was the usual one - "artistic differences"; namely, control over the band's sound and image. But every band member from that era has a different story as to what really went down, and each gives a different reason - Eddie Van Halen was a dick and a control freak, David Lee Roth was a prima donna who "got too big for his britches", etc., etc. Throw in the pressures of humongous fame, shitloads of money, plenty of booze and pharmacological mind-benders to go around, and the age-old power struggle between "the guy who created the band vs. the guy who is the front man/public face of the band" (see "Rolling Stones, The", re: Brian Jones), and anyone could see that there was bound to be a flare-up within Van Halen sooner or later.

But my personal feeling regarding all of that is this: Eddie is one of the greatest guitarists in rock history, and the awesome licks he laid down over the years served as the foundation of Van Halen's sound. But Roth was the guy in charge of building an edifice on top of that 'rock'-solid base, and he infused the band's music with color, excitement, 'zazz' - things that rock fans look for in their favorite bands. Those two guys (and I'm not discounting the excellent rhythm section of Michael Anthony and Alex Van Halen, who were also integral parts of the band) were a unit, and without them working together, playing their particular roles within the band, Van Halen simply was not and would never be "Van Halen".

With that in mind, and in light of the fantastic success they had during their long time together with those two guys laying the musical smack down, both Eddie and David should have worked harder to find some common ground, or at the very least 'sucked it up' and stopped bitching about it. I mean, hell, we've all worked with people we don't particularly like. And there are plenty of relationships out there that aren't exactly Ozzie and Harriet. But most people find ways to work around or through situations, without stomping away in a huff. Bands are no different, and when the albums are flying off the rack and the money's flowing in, and you're driving a friggin' Lamborghini to your gigs, that's incentive enough to make things work.

In my opinion, Roth was better at finding and accepting those compromises than Eddie was. For example: for their 1981 album Fair Warning, Dave wanted to continue the rocking, poppy sound (where his vocals were the prominent feature) found on the band's previous two successful albums, 1979's Van Halen II and 1980's Women And Children First. Eddie, on the other hand, wanted the new album to showcase denser, more complex structures (that, coincidentally of course, made his innovative guitar work the album's focus). Roth didn't like it, but he acquiesed to Eddie - the result being that Fair Warning was the band's worst-selling album of their early years. In this case, Dave put the band, and overall band harmony, ahead of his own interests (although the fact that the album underperformed and he was proven right must have been sugar on his tongue . . . ).

I think that, for all of his antics and silliness, deep down, David Lee Roth knew the 'secret' of Van Halen, which was that the sum of him and Eddie together was much greater than the two of them apart. And frankly, it seemed that Eddie Van Halen never understood that, and he operated under the assumption that since the band bore his name, that he WAS the band. I think a lot of his dissatisfaction and frustration stemmed from not having the other band members, especially Roth, acknowledge this - and that's what led to their breakup.

[In many ways, the situation within Van Halen in the early/mid-80s is similar to the situation within The Smiths around that same period. Johnny Marr is one of the greatest guitarists of the past 30 years, and the music he made with The Smiths will live on long after we are gone. But without the combination of his talents with those of Morrissey, Johnny Marr is just another sideman - a superb one, but a sideman nonetheless.]

Now, as for Sammy Hagar . . .

A lot of people say a lot of bad stuff about Sammy, the circumstances surrounding his entry into the group and the nature of the band's music during his long tenure in Van Halen. But say what you will about him, Sammy's a smart guy - he saw his opportunity and he took it. I mean, honestly - what would you have done in his place?

Say you were a middle-aged rock 'n' roller with a small amount of success and a couple of fairly big hits (nothing major) in your solo career. But with your fortieth birthday fast approaching, it seemed that your chances of becoming a headliner were rapidly fading. One day out of the blue, some guys you barely know, members of one of the biggest bands in the world just coming off their second 10-million-plus selling album in five years, give you a call and ask you to join up. Would YOU have said "No"? Hell NO you wouldn't have.

Sammy might appear to be an 'all rock and roll, party-hearty'-type of guy on the outside. But as he's definitively proven over the years (through his profitable bike shop, nightclub and tequila enterprises), he's a businessman, pure and simple - with a keen eye for the bottom line. Sammy is not an innovator, per se. In all of his business ventures, he has taken existing concepts and products and successfully managed them, without really improving on them or bringing any new, unique ideas into the mix. That's not a critique of his operating style - it's proven to have worked for him time and time again, so more power to him. But you could argue that Sammy approached his tenure in Van Halen the same way. Hagar was never going to out-gonzo Roth - it would have been foolish for him to even try, and he knew it. His job in Van Halen was to keep the band going as an operating concern, and that was it. And in that regard, he was successful - every VH album he was involved in reached #1 US, and the band's singles still made regular appearances on the Billboard Top 100. So what if album sales were way off from the Diamond Dave days? And who cared if the live shows weren't as exciting, or Van Halen didn't seem as 'larger than life' than they were in the early 80s? Sammy did his job; by the measures that matter, Van Halen was still a headlining band. So Hagar shouldn't be "blamed" for the demise of Van Halen; in many ways, Sammy saved the band.

I've attached Van Halen's career-spanning 2-disc compilation album, The Best Of Both Worlds, released by Warner Brothers in 2004. It is, in my opinion, both the best and the worst VH compilation available. How can it be both? Well, I don't have the words to tell you - but fortunately, someone else already took care of that. If you have the time, please read Stephen Thomas Erlewine's superbly well written review of this album in Allmusic.com. I agree with every word he says here.

As always, enjoy - and let me know what you think (I have a feeling I'm going to get a fair amount of comment on this one . . . but I've been wrong before!)

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Jim Croce - Bad, Bad Leroy Brown & Other Favorites

When I was eight years old, my dad was accepted into a graduate study program at the University of Wisconsin, so that summer our family moved from Norfolk, Virginia to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a small town just outside of the state capital and university locale, Madison. Being a military family, we had already moved a couple of times before when I was younger, but this move was really the first one I was fully aware of. At that point, everything within the scope of my young awareness had been formed while I lived in Norfolk, and now that place was no longer to be my base. It was sad leaving behind friends like Ricky, Craig & Paul, and Warren & Wendell - kids who had lived in that neighborhood just as long as I had. It seemed that they were not only the best friends I ever had, but the best friends I'd EVER have in life - that's the sort of stuff you think about when you're eight. But even with all of that, I was still excited about the move. It was going to be a change, an adventure, a chance to see a new place and meet new people. I was looking forward to getting to Wisconsin and seeing what it had to offer.

And what it had to offer was plenty. Being fully immersed in the rural Midwestern experience was quite a change to a little boy who was used to "city" living (Norfolk wasn't a huge city, but it WAS an urban area). But for the most part, I found life in Wisconsin to be great, and in many ways idyllic; almost a living, breathing stereotype of what life for children was supposed to be like back then. Our new home was on the edge of the neighborhood, with a huge cornfield immediately beyond our backyard. In summer, the six-foot stalks would stretch behind us as far as the eye could see, and my new friends (the place was full of kids) and I would play hide-and-seek amongst them all day (never going too far inside, of course - the LAST thing you wanted to do was get lost in a big cornfield). My first winter there was the first time I'd ever seen snow piled so high - seven/eight foot drifts, a welcome sight to a little boy's eyes (the all-too-true 'joke' at the time was that you built a snowfort there by getting a shovel and digging straight down . . . ). Sun Prairie (BTW - what a great name for a Midwest town!) was the sort of place where the arrival of spring was heralded by boys and girls getting their marbles out of storage and having intense playground marble competitions; a place of spelling bee champs (the 1974 state champ came from my school), annual corn festivals, variety stores, tetherball and four-square, free milk & peanut butter sandwiches in the lunch room, and fresh air and good churchgoing people (we attended every Sunday, and practically every family in our neighborhood was there; I was even an alter boy for a time). It was sort of geeky, and completely "small town" . . . but nice. And I loved it.

But with all of the carefree, sun-drenched atmosphere of the place, there was a sort of dark undercurrent running below the surface appearances of country good times and happy, sunny days. Not a Blue Velvet-ish version of crime and menace, mind you, but a new feeling that became a significant part of my awareness just the same. It was while I was in Sun Prairie that I first became fully aware of the concept of mortality.

The first time I can recall a death even remotely touching my life occurred during fourth grade, my first year of school in Sun Prairie. We arrived back in school after the Christmas break to find that one of our classmates, a girl who lived on a farm just outside of town, was absent from class. Our teacher told us the reason why she was missing - her younger brother, a second-grader at our school, had been killed in a farm accident just after the holiday. I knew the boy (it was a small school, so pretty much every kid from kindergarten through 6th grade was acquainted with one another), but not that well. Still, it was shocking to know of someone who had actually died, who no one would ever see again on Earth. I remember when the girl came back to class a week or so later, and seeing her sad, pale face. I felt horribly sorry for her, but of course I wasn't old enough to know the right words to say or the right things to do. Before her return, our teacher had advised us to treat her as we did before the tragedy. But that was a difficult task - the death was always there, sort of like a grey mist floating all around us.

Later that same winter, the skeletal hand appeared once again. A man who lived in the circle across the street from our house, the father of two boys my brother and I played with quite a bit, was killed in a car accident on a snowy Madison highway. This time, the death felt a little closer - I knew this man and his family very well, a lot better than that girl in my class and her brother. They had his funeral at our church; my siblings and I didn't go, but my parents did. A couple of weeks later, compounding the tragedy for me, those two little boys moved away from Sun Prairie with their widowed mother, and we never saw or heard from them again.

Even with the poppy, lightweight stuff on the radio in that era (Three Dog Night, Seals & Crofts and Chicago were huge in those years), the music of the time also seemed be taking on a darker tone. The big hit of my first summer in Sun Prairie was Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)". I used to think this song was profoundly sad; the part near the end, when the singer sings about his father and mother dying, always made the 8-year-old me cry. When Casey Kasem would play this song on American Top 40 on Sunday nights back then, I would run out of the room, so my parents wouldn't see me break down. Another monster maudlin hit from around that time was Terry Jacks' "Seasons In The Sun", a similarly depressing tearjerker about someone kicking the bucket. Despite the morbidity of this song, for some reason it was hugely popular with kids; I recall at our school spring pageant later that year, it was one of the songs sung by the 6th grade class. I could give you many more examples - Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"; Don McLean's "American Pie" (which I understood early on was about the death of Buddy Holly, although I didn't hear his name mentioned in the song) . . . shoot, even Loudon Wainwright's "Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road" - behind the bright, sunshiny appearance of my life in Sun Prairie, death seemed to be infusing everything around me.

So when Jim Croce died in September 1973, I was very much aware of it; it was really the first "celebrity death" story that I followed closely.

Jim Croce was born in South Philly in 1943. After his graduation from Villinova in 1965, he busked around the Philadelphia area for several years, first with his wife Ingrid as a duo, and later as a solo act. The couple parlayed their hard-earned local recognition into a one-off deal with Capitol Records, releasing Jim and Ingrid Croce in 1969, and over that year traveling hundreds of thousands of miles across the U.S. and Canada in support of the album. But both the tour and the record were not as successful as the label or the Croces wished, and by 1970 the couple was back in Pennsylvania. Jim took odd jobs in construction and trucking to pay the bills, and it seemed that his hopes of becoming a successful musician were dead.

However, later that year, an old college friend introduced Jim to a guy named Maury Muehleisen, a talented pianist/guitarist from New Jersey whose first album, Gingerbreadd, was about to be released on Capitol. Maury was looking for a backup guitarist for some scheduled gigs in the Philadelphia area, and Croce jumped at the chance. The Gingerbreadd concerts weren't all that successful, but Croce and Muehleisen instantly bonded, and together started creating a sound that quickly caught the attention of their record producers. Although Jim initially backed Maury, eventually the dynamic was reversed, with Croce's extensive catalogue of songs (many written in off hours from his truck driving work) and outgoing personality making him the front man and driving force of the partnership.

In 1972, Croce and his partner signed a three-record deal with ABC Records. His first album, You Don't Mess Around With Jim, was released that April and met with gradual but widespread success, spawning two US Top 20 hits ("You Don't Mess Around With Jim" and "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)"). Croce and Muehleisen immediately embarked on months of nearly nonstop touring all over the U.S. and Canada.

The buzz around and about Jim Croce began slowly and steadily growing - a whirlwind of traveling, television appearances and concerts in front of crowds of more than 10,000 people. Recording sessions were sandwiched in between tour dates; in late 1972 the pair recorded the follow-up album, Life And Times. The lead single, "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown", was released in April 1973 and became Croce's biggest hit, reaching #1 by the end of that spring and remaining on the charts all summer. The album, released a couple of months later, was as successful as its predecessor, making it into the US Top Ten by the end of August.

Croce's songs were very popular with children back then; the words and harmonies were simple enough for kids to get the gist of them. And of course they were all over the radio. "Leroy Brown" was a special favorite that summer; I can once recall walking back home from the nearby school playground, arm-in-arm in a line with my friends, singing "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" at the top of our lungs, and thinking it was the greatest song in the world.

Meanwhile, the pressures of being a suddenly-popular musician began mounting for Jim Croce. With a Number One song on the charts, the tour schedule became even more hectic. ABC Records had scheduled studio time for Croce and Muehleisen at the Hit Factory in New York City that summer to record the third album (I Got A Name) under his current contract. The label was anticipating even greater success with this upcoming release, and was preparing a new contract far better for Croce than his initial three-album deal. The future looked pretty rosy from Jim as he recorded his final song for the new album on September 14th, then headed out on the road again with Muehleisen for a scheduled tour of the South and Southwest . . . a tour they never completed.

The plane crash in Natchitoches, Louiaiana that killed Croce and Muehleisen, along with two other people, was front-page news across the country; I recall picking up the local Star Countryman newspaper on the evening of September 21st and being so shocked and stunned by the news that I immediately burst into tears. For someone who had made such an impact in the music world in so short a time, to be suddenly and cruelly taken away - that seemed so unfair to me. I was too young to have lived through or to recall the plane crashes of Buddy Holly or Otis Redding, which occurred under similar circumstances and at similar points in their careers. But with Croce's death, I began to understand the profound loss behind those earlier tragedies.

I guess the thing I began to feel from these three recent events in my life was that death appeared to be random and arbitrary. That no matter how young or old you were, how good or loved you were, or how much you had accomplished or had yet to accomplish in your life, the Grim Reaper didn't care. This was an absolutely chilling concept to an eight-year-old boy, and it took a long time for me to come to grips with it, and work out in my own mind what life and living is all about. I still haven't got it completely worked out yet . . . but who amongst us has?

I hate to play upon this "loss of innocence" thing too heavily . . . but really, when I look back on it, Sun Prairie was the last chance I had to really be a kid, before moving again (after two years in Wisconsin, we moved to Maryland) and facing all of the pressures involved with moving out of childhood, leaving elementary school, and taking more and more responsibility for my life. And a significant part of that change can be traced back to that cool autumn evening, when I picked up the paper and saw that something and someone I enjoyed no longer existed.

I got this attached compilation, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown & Other Favorites, from my younger sister a few years ago. Frankly, it's really not a very good overview of Jim Croce's brief career - it's missing some significant hits, including "I Got A Name" (his first posthumous hit) and "You Don't Mess Around With Jim". I've included both songs in separate files here along with the album, released in 1994 by CEMA Special Markets. Enjoy, and let me know what you think:

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New Order - Fine Time 12"

"Fine Time" was the lead single and (in my opinion) best song on what I consider to be New Order's last decent album, 1989's Technique. The album came out shortly after I returned from six months in Europe, where I became a big fan of acid house music. I was stunned and happily surprised when I first heard Technique and found that New Order had heavily coopted that sound. What I learned much later (partly through Michael

Winterbottom's 2002 film 24 Hour Party People - a great movie about the Factory Records/Manchester scene, by the way) was that soon after recording 1986's Brotherhood, the band went on vacation to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain, a renowned European club and party zone. While there, they first came in contact with the rising acid house sound and with Balearic beat, a style of electronic dance music pioneered on the islands. The band fully immersed themselves into the music of Ibiza, and came away from their trip committed fans of that sound. They were determined to have their next album reflect this new musical sensibility.

New Order took a longer-that-usual amount of time to record Technique - almost three years, much to their label's chagrin. By the mid-80s, Factory Records was bleeding money all over the place, but especially through the Hacienda, the Manchester nightclub and music venue jointly financed and built by Factory and New Order. Although popular, the majority of the Hacienda's patrons preferred taking ecstacy and other drugs to buying drinks at the bar. This, coupled with generally low admission prices, led to spiraling debts at the club. These debts were usually covered through revenues from New Order's record sales. By 1987, the Hacienda was costing Factory (or more specifically, New Order) nearly a quarter million dollars a year. So a quick turnaround on a new New Order record was necessary not just for the band, but more importantly for the label in keeping its various enterprises afloat. But New Order would not be rushed, and Factory was in no position to force the issue (especially since the band, not the label, owned all of their music). So all Factory could do was sit and stew as New Order flew back and forth to Ibiza month after month, tinkering with their new sound.

The long wait was justified when Technique was released in January 1989 and became an immediate hit, the band's first UK #1 album and their first non-compilation disc to go gold in the US (the Substance compilation went platinum in 1987), reaching #32 on the US album charts. Two album singles, "Fine Time" and "Round and Round", made the UK Top Twenty, but had even greater success in America, with both songs reaching the top five on the national dance and modern rock charts.

Being a long-time New Order fan, I bought Technique on cassette practically the instant it came out, and played it to death while driving around Virginia that winter. I especially liked "Fine Time", so much so that when I spotted a 12" disc of remixes available at the George Washington University branch of Tower Records that March, I immediately snapped it up. It's such a well-constructed song, that it can withstand the manipulation of several different mixes and still sound fresh and exciting each time.

So here you are, burned off of my still-mint condition vinyl copy - New Order's Fine Time 12", released by Factory Records in 1988 and distributed in the U.S. by Quincy Jones' Qwest Records (BTW - out of the 37(!) different versions of this record available internationally, this one is one of the few that have all five remixes available, along with the b-side "Don't Do It"). I think the quality of this burn is exceptionally good - if you feel otherwise, let me know and I'll rescorch it. Either way, let me know what you think:  

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The Fall - Kimble EP

Another part of my ongoing fetish to collect anything and everything related to my favorite band, The Fall . . . I picked this one up in the spring of 1993, the last music purchase I made in the US before leaving for New Zealand a week later. I lived in a hotel for my first few weeks in Christchurch, waiting for my household goods to arrive by slow boat from Baltimore. The only goods I brought with me were a bunch of clothes, my CD player with a little set of attachable speakers, and a pile of CDs, including this one - which I played to death during that time.

The four songs on this disc - the title cut (a great cover of a Lee "Scratch" Perry reggae classic); "Gut Of The Quantifier"; "Spoilt Victorian Child" and "Words of Expectation" - were all taken from a live 1992 John Peel session. As such, they have all been included on other Fall anthologies and compilations, including and especially The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004 box set from 2005. But if you don't feel like shelling out the big bucks for that set and running through six discs to find these tunes, here they are, all together in one place.

(And that's not to disparage the Complete Peel Sessions set - it's a simply superb compilation, and a must-have for any diehard Fall fan.)

So, for your listening pleasure - the Kimble EP, released by Strange Fruit Records in 1993. Enjoy, and let me know what you think:

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Hetch Hetchy - Make Djibouti EP

Oh-OK is one of the great forgotten bands from the early days of the Athens, Georgia music explosion, the movement that brought the B-52s and R.E.M. onto the world stage. The band formed in the spring of 1981, and originally consisted of David Pierce on drums, Linda Hopper on vocals and Lynda Stipe on bass. If you're thinking "Stipe, Stipe - now WHERE have I heard that name?" - the answer is "yes"; Lynda was/is Michael Stipe's younger sister.

Oh-OK's star rose and fell very quickly. Within two years of forming, the group had toured with Pylon, released an EP and full album, added (and lost) new members (including a pre-solo Matthew Sweet) and broke up by the end of 1983. At that point, the band members scattered. I got into Oh-OK long after their breakup, when I lived in Athens during during the late 1980s. They, like Pylon, were (and still are) revered in that town, sort of as the pioneers who fell off the trail. I was interested enough to track down bits and pieces of their music while I was there, and the little I heard was enough to make me a fan.

But unlike Pylon, who remained in Athens after their heyday and were still somewhat semi-visible, a lot of ex-Oh-OK members disappeared for a time - except for Matthew Sweet, of course. Linda Hopper quickly moved on to Holiday, which released an obscure EP in 1987, then formed the more successful Magnapop, which is still performing and putting out records (the latest being 2005's Mouthfeel). Lynda Stipe fell off the musical radar for a couple of years. But she resurfaced in the late 1980s fronting a new band, Hetch Hetchy, and sporting a new name, Lynda K. Limner. The band's first release was the Make Djibouti EP, produced by Lynda's brother (hmm - I guess there ARE benefits to having a sibling in R.E.M.) and put out by Texas Hotel Records in 1988.

I honestly don't know what to make of this disc. I purchased it because of the fond memories I had of Oh-OK, and seeing Michael's name in the credits didn't hurt either. But its sound is far different from the simple, almost-childlike melodies of Lynda's previous band (or anything related to R.E.M., for that matter). The six songs on this EP are heavy - and I mean HEAVY; even what could be considered to be the lighter, poppier attempts on this disc (such as "Present" and "Hard On Lynda") just feel wrong, dragged down by the weight of too much instrumentation. And the slower ones (like "Retarded Camel" and "Sad Song") are even more leaden, with plodding rhythms supported by a thudding bass drum. in addition, it sounds as though Hetch Hetchy hired the old keyboard player from Berlin to sit in on this session - every song seems to contain some version of that weird "doo-doo wah-wah" synthesizer riff from "The Metro" - which is NOT a good thing, especially in 1988.

All in all, the Make Djibouti EP was not a promising start for Hetch Hetchy. As for who to blame for the weakness of their debut, well . . . far be it from me to point fingers, especially more than twenty years down the road. I'll hold my peace. But I
will note that prior to recording their first full album, 1990's Swollen, Lynda got rid of most of the original band, and instead of using her brother again, enlisted the production services of former Hugo Largo bassist Tim Sommer. The resulting album was a lot better than the EP, but that didn't save the band - Hetch Hetchy broke up in 1991. Since then, Lynda has been part of a few obscure bands, like Flash To Bang Time, and is still involved in the Athens arts scene.

I guess in hindsight, I should be writing about and posting Hetch Hetchy's more superior Swollen, rather than gassing about this thing. Screw it - I'm almost done writing this, and don't feel like starting over. So what the hell. Maybe I'll post the other album sometime later. Until then, have a listen to the EP, and as always, let me know what you think.

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D-Mob (feat. Gary Haisman) - We Call It Acieed/Trance Dance 12"

In the summer of 1988, six weeks after I arrived on board my ship in Norfolk, VA, I began my first long deployment as a young Naval officer. We headed over to Europe for a six-month stint as the American participant in NATO's Standing Naval Force, Atlantic (otherwise known by its abbreviated name, STANAVFORLANT). STANAVFORLANT (now known as "Standing NATO Maritime Group 1") was established in 1968, at the height of the Cold War, as an immediate reaction force. Just in case the Warsaw Pact countries decided to get a little frisky, our force was designed to be the "first responders", in the forefront of protecting and defending Europe from attack by sea. The force was (is) made up of frigates, destroyers and cruisers from the NATO countries, with the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands always having at least one ship in the fleet, and the smaller NATO countries (such as Belgium, Norway and Denmark) contributing a ship periodically.

Now, while being part of this first-reaction force may sound a bit hairy and Dr. Strangelove-esque to you, by 1988 glasnost and perestroika were in full swing in the Soviet Union. While the Western countries and Eastern Bloc weren't exactly bosom pals yet, the competitive tensions between the free and Communist worlds were considerably toned down. And accordingly, the formerly deadly serious nature of STANAVFORLANT was also ratcheted down. That is not to say that there wasn't serious work to do or a sense of purpose present during that deployment. There were still a lot of joint training exercises between the NATO participants, and on occasion we shadowed (or were shadowed by) Soviet ships coming out of the Baltic and traveling through the North Sea. And at one point early in the cruise, the group was diverted from its planned route to assist in the immediate aftermath of the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion, a horrific disaster that claimed 168 lives.

But for the most part, the deployment was pretty cruisey (so to speak). The ship I was on was the last one built in her destroyer class, relatively brand-spanking new, and as such it sort of served as a "showboat" for the US Navy with this group, showing the European countries what was then considered our maritime best. While the work at sea was intense, the frequent port visits were great, as the hosting port cities and the participating ships tried to outdo one another with the parties, dinners and functions (official and otherwise) they organized.

[Quick aside: Our ship was the only one in the force that was "dry", i.e., carrying no beer or liquor; the other nations' ships had no such restrictions regarding alcohol on board, which led to some wild times in port. Almost every participating ship (except for the US) had a signature booze they carried aboard to offer to visitors. The Norwegians, for example, kept iced aquavit in a locked safe in their officer's wardroom; one sip of that stuff would knock you flat on your ass, but those guys gargled it like it was water. The West German vessel carried the most outstanding beer I've ever tasted, served in big stoneware schooners specially made for

the ship (I still have the one they gave me). But of all the countries, it was the Canadians who were particular hard-core party hounds. In port, they occasionally used to invite the crews from the other STANAVFORLANT ships over for what they called "Moose Milk", a potent and evil concoction they brewed up and always seemed to have plenty of. The antics that went on aboard the Canadian ship on Moose Milk nights would put the wildest college fraternity to shame. But at sea, those guys were the most professional, competent sailors I've ever run across. So go figure.]

I saw and did a lot of new and cool things during that cruise. I visited London, a place I'd always dreamed of seeing, for the first time on that voyage (met some great people, went to a couple of clubs and even made it to Brixton, homebase of my beloved Clash). In Germany, I checked out the nightlife in Kiel and took a tour through Hamburg's red light district; I was in Antwerp at the peak of the Belgian acid house wave, and danced until the sun came up at clubs all over that city; I partied all one July night in Narvik, Norway, a town above the Arctic Circle, and was completely thrown off when I emerged from the club at 3:30 am to find the sky as bright as noonday. And one calm, dark night, far out in the North Atlantic, I stood out on deck for hours watching the aurora borealis dancing like a weird curtain of light over my head. It was all quite an adventure, and the months away from home passed very quickly.

By late October, we had less than two months left in our deployment. We were making another transit across the North Sea from West Germany to Scotland, and one evening en route, the force was practicing refueling operations with a West German replenishment tanker. While that exercise was going on, I was down in my midships office, a couple of decks below topside, doing some paperwork. At one point, the ship took a hard and unexpected starboard turn, sending all of my paperwork crashing to the floor. I was like, "what the heck?", and reached for the nearby phone to call the bridge. The officer of the deck (OOD), the person guiding the ship at the time (as opposed to the ship's captain), was a buddy of mine, and I was going to call him up and give him some good-natured shit for making such a wild maneuver. Just as my hand touched the phone, there was a loud and violent CCCRRRAAASSHHH!!! which shook the ship from end to end, sending everything not bolted down flying and me and everyone else in the room sprawling on the floor. I looked up at the person next to me on the floor, and half-asked/half-exclaimed, "We ran aground?!?!" His response was, "No, I think we were just hit!"

His word "hit" was sort of floating in the air, like in a balloon in a comic strip, when at that very same moment, every alarm on the ship went off in sequence - Collision, General Quarters, Man Overboard - and the emergency lighting immediately kicked in, bathing everything in an eerie and ominous red glow.

In a nutshell, what had happened was, due to a conflict between the OOD and the captain, and some miscommunication on the bridge, our ship had somehow placed itself directly in the path of the tanker we were trying to take station around. The tanker couldn't swerve, because of its size and speed, so a collision was imminent. What SHOULD have happened was, the way we were positioned in front of the German ship, it should have come straight on and sliced us neatly in two right at amidships, exactly at the point where my office was and where I was working at the time, unaware of what was about to transpire. But in the last few seconds, the OOD made a desperation move, kicking the rudder over hard right in an attempt to swing the stern out away from the oncoming ship and hopefully avoid a collision by mere feet. That was the turn that knocked my stuff on the floor, that I was going to call to complain about. It was also the turn that probably saved my life . . . although it wasn't completely successful. Instead of whacking us right through the middle, the tanker delivered a heavy but glancing blow on the starboard side, about ten yards forward of the stern.
It put a hole in our ship you could have driven a minivan through, destroyed the after steering compartment and sheared off the starboard screw and rudder. And we started taking on water - a LOT of water.

Through the diligent efforts of every member of that crew, damage control stabilized the ship's wounds within the hour. It was still pretty bad; the ship's maneuverability was gone, and with the water we had taken on, the ship had developed a not-insignificant starboard list of about 7 or 8 degrees.
The Man Overboard call turned out to be a false alarm; the splash the lookouts heard was the sound of chunks of the ship falling into the water (thank God for that - no one could have survived for long that night in those icy North Sea waters). But the ship was a mess. We limped across the rest of the North Sea and made it to our intended destination, the shipyard in Rosyth, Scotland. But instead of the planned five-day stop there, our ship was immediately put into dry-dock for weeks of emergency repairs.

Although the long stay in Rosyth was unexpected, life there quickly settled into a routine. I still had plenty of work to do in port, so my days were pretty busy. The major city of Edinburgh was about 15-20 miles away from the shipyard. I planned to visit the city later during my stay, but in the meantime I spent many of my nights in the nearest town of any consequence, Dunfermline, about 3 miles up the road.

Dunfermline, with a population of about 40,000 people, was a former seat of the Scottish royal family, and as such was the de facto capital of Scotland from the 11th through 15th centuries. It is renowned for containing the historic ruins of the old Royal Palace of Dunfermline. and Dunfermline Abbey, one of the most important cultural sites in Scotland and the burial place of several Scottish kings. It was also the birthplace of 19th century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who left the town as a boy, but never forgot where he came from and later in life donated large sums of money to his hometown. I, of course, didn't know any of this; the only thing I knew about Dunfermline at the time was that the band Big Country came from there.

For a relatively small town, Dunfermline had an OUTSTANDING nightlife. There were a number of bars and decent dance places, all of which were jam-packed every single night in the weeks we were in the city (although that may not normally have been the case; a local bloke told me that when the word came out that "the Americans" were going to be in town for a while, the women "came out of the woodwork in droves"). My favorite place in town was a gleaming dance palace called Lourenzo Marques on St. Margaret Street, directly across from the abbey. The place had great music (house and dance music ruled there back then) and an even better crowd, and I quickly became a regular.

Lourenzo's was the first place I ever heard D-Mob's tune "We Call It Acieed", released earlier that year on FFRR (Full Frequency Range Recordings), a subsidiary of London Records. I told this story in an earlier post, but will repeat it here:

"One of my most vivid memories from that time is sitting in a seemingly dead and half-empty disco in Dunfermline, Scotland one chilly October night, waiting for something to happen. The DJ there put on D-Mob's "We Call It Acieed", and it was like a bomb went off - people came from everywhere, and in an instant, the place was packed with wild, gyrating Scots shaking the dance floor with a frenetic, tribal stomp that left me sitting there with my mouth wide open . . ."

And with all of the adventures and fun and danger I experienced during that deployment, in Dunfermline an additional wrinkle was added . . . a bit of romance.

I went to Lourenzo's one evening after a hard and frustrating day of work aboard ship. I was in a foul mood and it showed. I shouldn't really have gone out, but I was damned if I was going to sit on board and stew all evening. So the plan was to head out, alter my attitude with a drink or five, then stumble back to the shipyard in a different frame of mind. I was standing at the bar, clutching a glass of cider (the first and last time I drank any of that stuff in any quantity) and scowling to myself, when a female Scottish burr, full of smiles and promise, softly purred into my ear, "Why don't you smile more?"

I turned to look upon one of the most amazing girls I've ever laid eyes on - simply breathtaking in the best sense of the word, with long honey-blonde hair, a lovely face and an outstanding smile. And the voice - ah, that voice! All these years later, and I can still remember the way her Scottish accent surrounded and caressed every word. And not in a Groundskeeper Willy-sort of way, either. It was something altogether different - and vive la difference! That's what shook me out of my funk.

I quickly bought her a drink, and we stood at the bar and just talked for a while. I found that her name was Margaret, and she worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland branch in the center of town. Despite the noise, the people around us and the booze, we managed to carry on a lengthy and fairly serious conversation, touching on a variety of subjects - at one point, I recall we were discussing the IRA. The music and crowd just sort of faded into the background for me. I kept expecting her to walk away at any time, but she seemed to be enjoying my company as much as I was enjoying hers, and we remained together at that bar until last call.

I then made one of the stupidest, most lunkheaded moves I've ever made in my life. They flipped on the house lights, signifying closing time. I turned to Margaret, thanked her for a pleasant evening - then I whirled around and headed for the door, leaving her standing there. I know, I know . . . I don't know WHAT the fuck I was thinking - I'll use the excuse that I was half-drunk (God, I still cringe when I think about it . . .).

I was standing outside the place in the cold, queued up for a taxi, and somehow still oblivious to the humongous mistake I just made. But apparently, God smiles on idiots from time to time - I suddenly felt an arm slip into mine, and turned to find Margaret next to me, inviting me to her place for a nightcap . . . Thank goodness for small miracles.

I spent a lot of time with her over the next couple of weeks, both out at the clubs and at her place. She showed me the town, and I took her on a tour of the dry-docked ship. I had so much fun with her in Dunfermline, I never even bothered to go to Edinburgh. But we both sort of knew that time was short, and whatever we had probably wasn't built to last. The repairs on the ship went quicker than they anticipated, and just before Thanksgiving we were back in the water and ready to rejoin the rest of the STANAVFORLANT force in southern England.

I spent my last night in Scotland with Margaret at her house, saying goodbye. I gave her some pictures I had taken of us and our time together, some other mementoes and other stuff to remember me by. She gave me her picture and address, and promised to write. And that was that. It was a sad group of sailors that left Rosyth on that snowy November morning, myself included. I think that everyone enjoyed their extended time in Scotland, an unexpected silver lining to the near-tragedy that almost sank our boat.

I sent Margaret postcards from every remaining stop on our deployment: Portsmouth, England; Zeebrugge, Belgium; and the Azores. We returned home to Virginia just before Christmas, and I wrote her a couple more times in the months that followed. But I never heard from her again.

Later that winter, I found a vinyl copy of various mixes of "We Call It Acieed", along with three mixes of "Trance Dance", at 12 Inch Dance Records in Washington, DC. It took America a year longer than Europe to get into this song, but our country managed to catch on in the end - "We Call It Acieed" topped the US dance charts for several weeks during the spring of 1989. I still have this record, in its original sleeve and all, and once in a while I still do the "old school" thing and play it on my turntable. And every time I do, I think back on that cruise and on my time in Scotland so long ago . . . and wonder about Margaret, whatever became of her, and how her life turned out.

Such is life.

Here's the music, cooked off of my meticulously maintained vinyl copy. Enjoy, and let me know what you think:

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Betty Boo - Boomania

Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia is one of the largest universities in the Tidewater area and one of the top institutions of higher learning in the state. It boasts superb facilities, nationally ranked athletic teams, a decent financial endowment and a loyal alumni fanbase. The only knock I have against the place is that, in terms of nightlife and activities, it's dull as dishwater.

I got to know ODU when I lived in nearby Virginia Beach about 20 years ago. My brother was a student there, and on occasion I used to head down into Norfolk to hang out with him. But when I say "hang out", I use that term loosely - in regards to decent bars/clubs/social amenities in close proximity to the ODU campus, the area was sorely lacking. Back then, there were three locales of any distinction close to the school - the 4400 Campus Club and another bar (whose name currently escapes me [addendum - was just informed that the other bar was called Friar Tuck's]) directly across the street from the main quad, and further up Hampton Boulevard, the King's Head, which showcased decent bands from time to time. That was it. Hell, even my alma mater, Navy, had a PUMPING nightlife just outside its gates, with the bars of downtown Annapolis a mere stagger away. The lameness of the area around ODU made Annapolis look like Las Vegas, comparatively.

Still, the ODU area had its attractions - mainly, the college girls who drank there most evenings. The 4400 Club also used to host a great DJ one night a week; the guy would play some pretty decent cuts - everything from Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and the Screaming Blue Messiahs to Madonna and the Cure. The guy also had little contests he ran during his set - trivia questions and "Name That Tune" sort of stuff. It was pretty enjoyable, and I usually ended up winning something on those evenings (due to my profound musical knowledge - ha ha), so I began making a point of going to the 4400 Club on nights this DJ worked,

One night, he was having a "Name That Tune" competition with random CD giveaways as prizes. He put the first song on, which I instantly recognized as Suidical Tendencies' "I Shot The Devil". My prize was a mixtape of various obscure songs and remixes the DJ had put together (it was actually pretty good - I still have it, all these years later) and a CD, Betty Boo's Boomania.

I listened to the Betty Boo CD the next afternoon, and initially I was convinced that the DJ was taking the mickey out of his audience (and me) by having this disc as a "prize". Englishwoman Betty Boo (real name: Alison Clarkson) was an eighteen-year-old sound engineering student in London in 1988 when she hooked up with a band of female rappers called the She Rockers. The group busked around London, and one day during one of their impromptu performances at a McDonald's in the city, were noticed by, of all people, Public Enemy's Professor Griff.  Professor Griff produced the group's first single, "Give It A Rest".

He also convinced Betty Boo to leave the group, as it appeared to be going nowhere; after little more than a year with the She Rockers, Boo went solo.

Betty's solo break came mere months later, when she guested on The Beatmaster's hit single "Hey DJ! (I Can't Dance to that Music You're Playing)", which went to #7 in the UK in late 1989.

She quickly followed up with a debut single of her own, "Doin' The Do", in early 1990. The song also went to #7 UK and topped the dance charts in the US. She spent the spring and summer of that year writing and recording songs in her bedroom for her first full-length release, which turned out to be Boomania. The album went to #4 in the UK, spawned two more UK chart hits ("Where Are You Baby?" and "24 Hours"), and at the BRIT Awards the next year (the British equivalent of the Grammys), it helped her earn the title of "Best British Breakthrough Artist". She was still only 20 years old.

The majority of the songs on Boomania are a strange hybrid of dance music and pop-rap, sort of a slightly 'harder', less trippy-dippy version of the stuff that Deee-Lite (whose album World Clique and lead single "Groove Is In The Heart" were big US/UK hits) was putting out during the same time period (Deee-Lite's album was released two months earlier, in August 1990). A lot of Boo's music sounds like the template the Spice Girls used to "create" their hateful pop-rap-dance sound ten years later - not a good thing (I'm sorry, but the British can't do rap to save their lives). Another analogy (I've got a million of 'em tonight) - Betty Boo was like Peaches with a lot less sass and a lot more accent. Which is why after that first listen, I thought the DJ gave out this disc as a joke.

However, once I delved deeper into the album, I found some gold there, once you got away from her formulaic "hits". "Valentine's Day" is an unheralded but superb tune, with Boo's voice exploring a more R&B direction. But the best song on the album in my opinion is "Shame", with Boo's excellent vocals backed by a nagging, incessant bass 'n' drum rhythm that drives the dancable groove along:

"Shame" should have been a huge club hit, but I don't think it even made the charts.

Betty Boo's fall was just as rapid as her rise. She began a world tour on Boomania, but during a concert in Australia in 1991, the audience discovered her lip syncing over taped vocals, and mass derision ensued. She cancelled the rest of the tour and stayed quiet for the rest of the year. Betty also left Rhythm King for Warner Music Group in 1991, and the next year Warner released

her sophomore LP, Grrr! It's Betty Boo. The album charted in the UK, but nowhere near the heights of her first album. In 1993, she left Warner and took time away from music to care for her terminally ill mother for the next several years; this effectively ended her singing career. In the past fifteen years or so, Betty Boo regrouped, and has carved out a niche for herself as a songwriter, writing tunes for British teen pop groups and the like.

As for the "scene" around the Old Dominion campus, the block containing the 4400 Campus Club was completely demolished at the end of the '90s. The area is now the site of the Ted Constant Convocation Center, the university's multi-purpose arena. I have no idea where the students go to hang out now - I guess they have to drive into the downtown area. Oh well.

Anyway, here, for your listening pleasure, is Betty Boo's Boomania, released in October 1990 by Rhythm King, and distributed by Sire Records. Have a listen to the cuts I mentioned above, and as always, let me know what you think:

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The Fleshtones - American Beat '84 EP

I was browsing through the online version of The New York Times back in late May, and came across an obituary notice concerning the passing of actress Barbara Stuart. Ms. Stuart had a long and varied career, for over fifty years appearing frequently on the big and small screen, but mostly in supporting roles on television. For all of her longevity, she never quite made it big. It seemed that she lived out her career as one of those "oh yeah" faces, someone who you've seen before on TV without quite remembering where, or what her name was. According to the article, her big claim to fame was appearing as Miss Bunny, Sgt. Carter's girlfriend on "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.", which really didn't ring any bells with me. There was also a picture of her - she looked semi-familiar, but still not wholly recognizable.

I kept reading through her list of obscure TV series appearances, such as "I Led Three Lives", "T.H.E. Cat", "The McLean Stevenson Show", and forgettable B-movie roles in stinkers like Marines, Let's Go! and The Pterodactyl Woman From Beverly Hills (no, I'm not shitting you - that was a ACTUAL movie). The penny finally dropped for me with these words at the end of one paragraph: "She was Tom Hanks’s future mother-in-law in Bachelor Party (1984)."

YES! Of course! Bachelor Party! Tawny Kitaen's mother! She was the one who grabbed Nick The Dick's 'foot-long' ("and then some", as he quipped) in the strip club scene, a comedy classic!

I've always loved Bachelor Party. Yeah, I know - the thing was no Oscar winner; critics have called it "vulgar" and "sophomoric", descriptions I really can't argue with. And I'm sure that if you ask Tom Hanks (who appeared in an early-career leading role), I'll bet he wishes he never starred in this admittedly juvenile farce. But for a flick filled with bad acting (this movie killed dead any hopes Adrian Zmed had for a substantial movie career, dooming him to supporting roles on TV forever and anon), generic '80s movie cliches (Exhibit A: the blond Aryan preppy antagonist (a "Zabka-ite", if you will)), and a warmed-over plot line (i.e., the nerdy/weird/unacceptable guy wooing and winning the girl of his dreams - gee, they've never used THAT before . . .), Bachelor Party has shown surprising resilience over the years. The movie resists being ignored, or relegated to the dustbin of forgotten '80s 'junk' films of its genre like Just One Of The Guys, Better Off Dead or Hot Dog: The Movie.

In a way, Bachelor Party is like a minor-league Caddyshack, in terms of funny scenes and quotable lines that guys remember fondly. The "Nick The Dick" scene is a stand out (heh - so to speak); along with scenes and lines like:

- Rick (Hank's character) is enticed by his naked ex-girlfriend Tracey (played by the brick shithousedly-built Penthouse Pet Monique Gabrielle), and has a guilt trip about it (complete with the faces of a nun, his fiancee, and his friends appearing on Tracey's shoulders and counseling him);
- Gary (the nerdy guy) making a bad deal with a sinister pimp when arranging for hookers to attend the party, walking away and mumbling to himself, "I just bet my balls - and shook on it."
- "Pain . . . is SUCH a rush!"

As for the movie soundtrack, New Wave is well represented, with cuts by Wang Chung ("Dance Hall Days"), The Police ("Rehumanize Yourself") and Oingo Boingo ("Who Do You Want To Be" and the movie theme song) featured prominently. Bachelor Party does make some musical mistakes, in my opinion - the producers were obviously featuring/pushing two songs for radio airplay and chart recognition, Adrian Zmed's "Little Demon" and Angel & The Reruns' "Why Do Good Girls Like Bad Boys?". But both songs were annoying, for different reasons: Zmed's song, because it sucked REALLY badly, and the Reruns' tune because they just played it too long/too many times in the film, and after a while you just got sick of it.

The best song in the movie came early on, in the scene in the jeans shop that introduces Debbie, the main female character, played by Tawny Kitaen. In this part of the movie, the entire store (clerks and customers alike) is jamming out to a great horn-and-snare-driven Hi-NRG tune.

The whole setup is hokey and contrived, a Hollywood version of what a 'cool' New Wave clothing store is supposed to look like . . . but the song is still amazing, so much so that the first time I saw the movie, I stayed for the closing credits so I could find out the name of the song. I discovered that it was "American Beat '84", by a band called The Fleshtones.

The Fleshtones were formed in 1976 in Queens, New York when two roommates renting a house in the neighborhood, Keith Streng and Marek Pakulski, came across some musical instruments that a previous tenant had abandoned in the basement. The two recruited a couple of local friends, Manny Calderon (on drums) and Peter Zaramba (on keyboards and vocals) to fill out their new band, with Streng taking up the guitar and Pakulski on bass. Although the Ramones formed two years earlier in the same neighborhood as the Fleshtones, there wasn't much cross-pollination between the two bands - probably because the members of the Ramones were significantly older than Streng et al., and their music styles were totally different. While the Ramones pursued a purely punk path, the Fleshtones mined a sound that was more rock and power pop than anything else.

Whatever their differences to the Ramones, the Fleshtones also quickly found success on the New York club scene. They made their first appearance at CBGB's in May 1976, and became regulars at the top local clubs of that era: the Irving Plaza, Max's Kansas City and Danceteria in NYC, and Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ. The band built up a strong local following, and expanded that fan base with club visits up and down the East Coast, making stops at places like The Ratskeller in Boston and the 9:30 Club in DC (in fact, they were the first band ever booked at 9:30).

In 1978, the Fleshtones signed with Red Star Records, recording an album's worth of material and releasing their first single, "American Beat b/w Critical List" the following year. But Red Star dicked around with the band, never releasing the album and only giving token support to the single. So in 1980, the Fleshtones left the label and signed with New Wave giant I.R.S. Records. As opposed to their previous label, head honcho Miles Copeland put the full weight of I.R.S. behind the band. He teamed them with the label's best producers (Richard Mazda and Richard Gottehrer, among others), featured them in I.R.S.'s signature concert film from that era (Urgh! A Music War), and even got the band a gig on American Bandstand in 1982. Copeland also had them rerecord their debut single, which was rereleased as "American Beat '84". Overall, this new version crushes the first one, in terms of beat, energy and overall coolness.

But for all of that support, all of their gigging and despite their large following, the Fleshtones couldn't find a national audience. None of the band's four albums I.R.S. released between 1982 and 1985 were hits; only the first one, Roman Gods, managed to scrape the bottom of the Billboard 200 chart. They were dropped by I.R.S. when their final label album, Speed Connection II, tanked in 1985. Since then, they have soldiered on, gigging constantly and releasing a series of albums either independently or through small labels. After 35 years, Streng and Zaramba are the remaining original members, but even with their lack of mainstream success, the Fleshtones refuse to give in. They're like the poor man's Dramarama - a band that had lots of talent, but never quite got over the hump.

Still, I'm glad they have at least one great song like "American Beat '84" in their discography. Here are the American Beat '84 EPs (both the U.S. and European versions, with similar "A" sides but different songs on the flip), released by I.R.S. Records in 1984. This tune made a movie that should have been forgettable that much more memorable (for me, at least). As always, let me know what you think.

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