Dan’s a high school classmate of mine; we played in a band together (he played bass). For a variety of reasons, I’m going to withhold the last name; if you went to Jamestown High School back then, you know who I’m talking about.

Anyway – today is the ceremony marking his promotion to full bird Colonel in the USAF, part of a 22-year career that saw him flying fighters over and around all the world’s hot spots, first with the Navy and then, after 9/11, with the Air Force.  Talk about hot rod collectors – he’s flown F18s and F16s.

Anyway – best wishes, Dan!  Does this mean you’re giving F16 rides at the 30th reunion?

It was 25 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 Big Country” was, indeed, their only real entry into the Top40 in America, it’d be hard to overestimate what a blast of fresh air the album was about this time 25 years ago.

1983 was a great year in music; it was also the year that provided many of the decade’s musical punch lines; “Putting On The Ritz” by Taco, “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, Kajagoogoo and Culture Club and Asia and Naked Eyes and Laura Branigan and not one but two Jim Steinman bombast-fests (Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” and Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All”) duked it out with some of the great pop music of all time; “Little Red Corvette”, Michael Jacksons entire Thriller album back before he turned into a walking freak show.

Worse, some were declaring the guitar dead.  Articles in Rolling Stone said that the new wave (heh heh) of cheap electronic technology would finally euthanize the venerable analog stringed instrument.  It was the year Yamaha’s revolutionary DX7 synthesizer hit the market, bringing digital Frequency Modulation technology down to around $1,000 for the first time, making it possible for pretty much anyone (with $1,000) to create any sound they wanted, save it onto cassettes (or, for a few bucks more, floppy disks!), play it onto the first inexpensive digital sequencers and MIDI processors and “drum machines” and essentially run a “band” from ones’ keyboard. The future of music, said the wonks, was pasty-faced geeks with hundred dollar haircuts in flamboyant suits, pecking away at keyboards as masses of lobotomized droogs bobbed away in the audience.

Into this dismal future stepped Big Country – a band from Dunfermline, Scotland that mixed technical “wow” with actual fun (the Scottish football-hooligan atmosphere that accompanied their shows and appearances), they blew the knobs and faders off of the synth-wankers that glorious autumn.

The band wrapped itself in “Scotland” but, ironically, none of the band’s members were native Scots; bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Brzezicki were from London, guitarist Bruce Watson was Canadian, and guitarist and singer Stuart Adamson was from Manchester (although he grew up in Dunfermline, and acquired his impenetrable accent for real).

The “wow” came partly from technology (really cheap technology, like the MXR Pitch Transposer and the e-bow, basically a hand-held electromagnet that acts like an electronic violin bow, giving a guitar infinite sustain), great guitars (the lads favored Yamaha SG2000s and Fender Strats) and clever engineering to wrench amazing impersonations from their instruments; they loosely modeled bagpipes, Irish fiddles, and all manner of supercharged traditional instruments which, combined with the Gaelic-y arrangements, roused talk of a “Celtic revival” in that year that also brought U2, the Alarm and Simple Minds to the charts.

And of course, there was great musicianship; Butler and Brzezicki were superb session musicians before Big Country; Adamson and Watson were excellent in a more restrained, controlled way. They rarely played power chords, sticking to carefully-orchestrated one-and-two-note patterns over their carefully-built sound-setups to create a distinctive, loud, joyful noise.

Nearly every song on the album was a keeper:

1. “In a Big Country” – hardly needs explaining, right?
2. “Inwards” – like German techno, played on guitars. By humans.  Who are having fun and not praying for imminent nuclear war.
3. “Chance” – A hit single in the UK, unknown here, but a gorgeous song; spare, evocative guitars and vocal harmonies that, in Tony Butler’s career as a spectacular backup singer, are among his best. Actually one of my two favorite songs on the album.
4. “1000 Stars” – An infectiously danceable bit of Cold War paranoia.
5. “The Storm” – As Scots-Gaelic as the flat side of a claymore.
6. “Harvest Home” – An irresistably danceable song (in the “Sword Dance” vein, rather than “Dancing With The Stars”, or even “Dance Fever with Denny Terrio”), drawn from that bottomless well of Rock and Roll inspiration, the Jacobite Rebellion and the diaspora of Scots afterwards.
7. “Lost Patrol” – Never liked this one all that much; another one of those “Gaelo-Teutonic techno on guitars” things.
8. “Close Action” – My other favorite.
9. “Fields of Fire” – The other single in the US, and one of many great bagpipe impressions…
10. “Porrohman” – A fun bit of guitar-effect wizardry to try to pick apart, but it did in fact get tiresome and shrill after a while. Hey, one out of ten ain’t bad…

They never really had much impact in the US after this; they only charted with one more single (“Wonderland“, from the next year, one of my favorites) which peaked at #86, while Steeltown, my favorite Big Country album, barely dented the album charts in the US (it debuted at #1 in the UK), while the marquee single, the spectacular “Where The Rose Is Sown“, a Falklands War protest of sorts, didn’t show up at all.
I think I spent sixty hours over my “interim” period in 2004 (my college was on a 4-1-4 system – January was spent on one, all-day class for the whole month) learning how to play and imitate every single song on the album. I had the bagpipe thing figured out, anyway…

Adamson, after years of fighting alcoholism,  committed suicide in December of 2001.  Watson, after years of knocking around in various projects, works as a tester in a shipyard (and appears in various revival bands, including re-formed versions of Adamson’s old classic Scots punk band The Skids).  Butler is a college music teacher; Brzezicki is still a session drummer.  The band attempted a reunion last year – but it got hung up in court.

I’m gonna down a Newcastle and break out the SG in honor of the anniversary.

Via Pianomomsicle:

1. Of television programs that aired before you were born, what’s your favorite? “Victory at Sea”, the NBC miniseries on World War Two.
   
2. What person of historical significance was from your neighborhood or city? Colonel William Dupuy was on General MacArthur’s staff, and was with him on the deck of the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered.  MacArthur gave the colonel the ceremonial flag that the Japanese emissary handed over.  I found it in my city’s museum when I volunteered there, back when I was 12 or 13.  All the old ladies and my family said “oh, that’s nice, Mitch.  Take out the garbage, please”.  Then, about ten years ago, it was on the front page of the Jamestown Sun; a HUGE DISCOVERY!  The VERY FLAG that the Japanese had handed over on the Missouri!  Anyway; other than Louis LaMoure, Peggy Lee, Shadoe Stevens and Darin Erstad, that’s about it.
   
3. What’s a story that’s often been told about someone in your family in the years before you came along? My family wasn’t big on stories.  I have very little idea about my parents before I was born.  Maybe this story here counts.
4. Which of previous generations’ dumb mistakes (in deed or thought) baffles you the most? Slavery?
5. What aspect of life in the good old days would you love to see a return to? I think schools should be able, in cases of gross misbehavior, to paddle the crap out of kids.

That’s a start.

I’m trying to imagine what life’d be like if Saint Paul had “won” the Democrat rather than GOP National Convention.

One thing I don’t see ever happening:  Republicans making up snotty, stupid lawn signs to parade their elitism, bigotry, and exaggerated sense of moral and intellectual entitlement.

Of course, they’ll be contributing to the city’s light (and moral, aesthetic and intellectual pollution) with “True Blue Minnesota”‘s jumbotron on Cathedral Hill; we an exclusive preview of True Blue Minnesota’s video event right here:

And here, True Blue in their uniforms:

But thanks to more lefties with deep pockets, it’ll extend to the neighborhoods as well!

The top vote-getter, receiving 130 votes, was Teri Kwant’s sign, “I’m for preemptive peace. Others making the cut: “Give a shit” by “Liza Minelli” (or, perchance, Liza Minelli?); David Brynestad’s “My redneck, sexist, gun-toting, racist brother-in-law is voting” (“Are you?”); and Joseph Hughes’ simple sign that shows a checkbox with the first of two options marked: hope and fear.

Oh, and as if property values in the Twin Cities’ blighted neighborhoods weren’t crappy enough already:

The 50 designs will be distributed in yards in St. Paul’s Dayton’s Bluff, St. Paul’s West Side and Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhoods. But if you don’t live in those communities, you can still plant one in your yard: $20 gets one delivered to your door.

Twin Cities liberals; happy to pay to make themselves look like smug, blinkered, self-satisfied prigs!