Category: The Year That Was
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You Have No Thought Of Answers, Only Questions To Be Filled
It was thirty years ago today that Steeltown by Big Country was released. Of course, people who were of music-listening age in 1984 might, might, remember Big Country for its single real American hit, “In A Big Country”, from their debut album The Crossing. The follow-up passed with nary a whisper, but for maybe a few…
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I Will Carry You Home While The Westerlies Sigh
This is an update of a piece I wrote five years ago. It was 30 years ago today that Big Country’s The Crossing was released. In America, Big Country has that “one-hit wonder” patina about them, which only goes to show that when it comes to music, too many Americans are ignorant clods. While The Crossing‘s “In A…
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To Claim The Victory Jesus Won
Mention Irish rock megastars U2 to people, and the reactions you get will span the gamut. To kids today, a generation after they first came out, it’s probably all about Bono – the peripatetic, bombastic lead singer who’s parlayed a magnificent singing voice and a global pop following into a second career as a global…
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I Take The Punches I Can’t Slip, And I Give ‘Em Right Back
It was thirty years ago today that Men Without Women by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul was released. “What? By who and the whaaa?” Shaddap, siddown and listen. ———- If there was a place in America that was hermetically sealed against the influence of rhythm and blues music, it was rural North Dakota in the…
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Tonight I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 30 Years Ago
I’ve been doing this series of “Thirty Years Ago Today” anniversary posts about great music of the eighties for quite a while now. Here’s the thing I’ve discovered in writing this series; for many of the records I’ve covered – The RIver, Shoot Out The Lights – it hardly seems like it’s been thirty years, since…
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The Fork Taken
It was thirty years ago today that Bruce Springsteen released Nebraska. In many ways it foretold the future not only of Bruce Springsteen, but of the business of popular music – and in both cases, it was a mixed blessing.
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It’s Just The Motion
I first started this series, “The Real Eighties”, at a time when I was getting fed up with my kids’ schools throwing “Eighties”-themed parties that went as deep as “Flock of Seagulls”, Members Only jackets, and “Walking On Sunshine”. And I’ve written about an absolute ton of music in this past three years. Check it…
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People Call Me Rude
It was thirty years ago today that Controversy by Prince was released. We’ll come back to that. ———- Rhythm and Blues – R’nB – music had been through several phases over the decades, intertwining with “white” pop music on and off (on in the fifties through the late sixties, off in the seventies). And in…
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It’s Anything Goes, Whatever It Takes
It was thirty years ago today that Warren Zevon released one of the five greatest live albums of the rock and roll era – and perhaps the best summary of his own career that he’s ever managed. The album was Stand In The Fire. Zevon, of course, died a few years ago, after a long…
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It Was Not…
…one of the pivotal albums released thirty years ago this month that I’ve been showcasing in my “The Year That Was” series… …but I’ve loved this song since it came out, on October 14, 1980. I missed the thirtieth anniversary… …but who cares. It’s Switchin’ To Glide, baby.
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You Better Run, You Little Wild Heart
It was sometime in early November, 1980. It was my senior year of high school. I was visiting friends in Watson Hall at Jamestown College – which, in a few years, would be my own home for three years. I was keenly aware of a bunch of things; that I was on the brink of…
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I Was Lost, I Am Found
The teenage years are huge, raw and dramatic. Hormones drive all that rawness to the surface and beyond, making (it comes as no surprise to parents with teenagers) everything – discipline, moralism, sex, food, music – immediate, dramatic and skin deep in way that’s both intensely powerful and utterly trite. Boy by U2 was the…
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Toro Toro, Taxi
Dire Straits was, to me, the unlikeliest bunch of megastars of the Eighties. And they were among the most interesting. And it was thirty years ago today that the album that, to me, defined them as either “the most interesting megastars” or “the biggest interesting group” (*) was released. Today is the thirtieth anniversary of Making…
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Everybody Just A’-Freakin’, Good Times Were Rolling
We didn’t grow up with a lot of “black” music in North Dakota. Part of it was that North Dakota is, well, about the whitest place in America. It was even moreso back in 1980. So one just didn’t run across a lot of R and B in North Dakota back then. Still, every once…
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Zenyatta Mondatta
Given the stupendous success The Police achieved by the mid-eighties, it’s hard to remember that they started out as a very fringe-y band. Outlandos D’Amour in 1978 was a hoot – a demented lashup of punky reggae or reggae-y punk, infectious and madcap fun and impossible not to dance to. Reggatta De Blanc was more…
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Going Off The Rails
I’ve never cared about Ozzy Ozbourne. Black Sabbath? Zzzzzz. Ozbourne’s nasal yawp combined with Tony Iommi’s guitar playing (he sounds he’s fingering notes with his nose) has always bored me stiff. Who cares? The superannuated, drug-addled caricature on “The Osbournes?” I’ve seen maybe twenty minutes of the show. I regretted every one of them: And…
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On His Grave I Laid A Rose
In the summer of 1982, I was 19, and the economy for teenagers wasn’t a whole lot better than it is today. But I lucked out, and got a job – a full-time (48 hour a week) gig at a radio station in Carrington, North Dakota – a little town of about 2,000 people about forty…
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Noise Pollution
There are so many entries in the “it just doesn’t seem possible” file in realizing that today is the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Back In Black by AC/DC. B The album – the first after the death of Bon Scott barely 17 months earlier – was a gloriously snotty blues-rock romp, the kind…
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You Better Learn Something, Boy, While You Still Can
I’ve written it before; the Iron City Houserockers are the greatest band you’ve never heard of. And it was thirty years ago today they released their definining – but not quite definitive – album, Have a Good Time (but Get out Alive)! The Houserockers were led by Joe Grushecky, a high school special education teacher…
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My Life’s A Mess, I Wait For You To Pass
Music has changed for me over the years. It does for everyone. It’s a fact – or at least, it’s as close to fact as three generations of marketers have been able to determine – and since a lot of them got very rich, they must have known something. When I was in music radio,…
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Mystery Achievement
Don’t feel sorry for music-magazine “editors”. Oh, sure, they have to keep up with the latest trends and whatnot. And that, to be sure, is a gruelling job. It takes a huge nasal sinus cavity to even hold all the cocaine that it takes to get to the bottom of that kind of story. But…
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I Believe In This, And It’s Been Tested By Research
It was thirty years ago today that London Calling by The Clash came out. If you get 100 people off the street to free-associate what “punk rock” means, I suspect the answers you get will depend on the subjects’ ages and whatever social label they wear on their sleeves (or through their noses). People under…
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Even The Losers Get Lucky Sometimes
A program director at a radio station I used to work at let me in on the great secret of music radio – which let me in on an even greater secret of psychology. People tend to be most attached to whatever music they were listening to when they were going through or immediately after puberty. …
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This Was The Year That Was
A little background: As I wrote some time ago, the question “which decade was the best” in pop music of the Rock and Roll era is a misleading one. Popular music in the rock and roll era has really been divided into ten distinct eras (see the linked article above for explanations). Pre-Rock and Roll…