Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #66

Jim Croce – Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

As much as I love listening to music, as well as talking and writing about it, I am bereft when it comes to creating it. Junior high school music classes included playing the ukelele and recorder, I once owned a keyboard (officially purchased for my children, but, sure, I had notions, too), and I have made several attempts to learn the guitar, but always lacked the staying power to see it through. It may be that my destiny was to end up exactly where I am.

My first glimpse of how I might not be up to swimming in the musical deep end came in the spring of 1976, when I was 11 years old. I had made some early attempts at songwriting by then, if you can call it that, since it consisted of lyrics with a melody, but not even rudimentary chords. I was not shy about promoting my efforts, so on a school trip to Ottawa I broke out some of my songs and sang them for classmates. I remember only positive responses, because of course I do, and I at a minimum felt bolstered in my delusions by that positivity.

Also on that trip was Robert Barrie, who was one of my closest friends. I expect I had heard him sing before that point, but have no firm memory of it. But on the train back to Nova Scotia, he sang for our group, and I remember that as clear as day. It was a lightning bolt through the heart, with their enthusiastic response letting me know just how far I had to go if I was serious about making a life in music. I had dreams, but Robert had actual talent, and all else being equal, you’re far better having the latter. Luckily for me, as the years since have proven, I wasn’t serious about making music; rather, it was one of many dreams (professional hockey player being one, film director another – aim high, right?) that I was trying on over the journey to whatever the heck you want to call what I’ve done with my working life. Robert, on the other hand, was serious, and he has continued to play music in one capacity or another to this day.

That trip came back to me a few weeks ago on a visit to Cape Breton to celebrate the lives of my recently passed mother and stepfather. Robert and I are still close, and when we learned he’d be playing a few solo shows during our visit, my wife and I made up our minds to see him. It turned out to be a fortuitous evening: he was playing at the very place (rebuilt after a fire) where my mother and stepfather first met over 40 years ago, and the evening included a surreptitious request by our future son-in-law for permission to ask our daughter to be his bride. (So old fashioned!) And one of the songs he played during a fantastic show was Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”: the very song that he sang on the train that had left me breathless with jealousy over his colossal talent. To add to the fortuity of it all, he had only recently added it to his set list.

Of course, you know the song: it was a number 1 hit in 1973, and will remain a staple of oldies radio stations as long as such things exist. Croce, tragically, never got to see this afterlife for his song, passing away just two months later and joining the far too long list of musical greats who died in an aviation-related incident. (There’s a Wikipedia entry for this, for God’s sake.)

It starts with a rollicking honky tonk piano, which is either inspired by or stolen from (depending on how generous you feel) the opening to Bobby Darin’s “Queen of the Hop”, and there’s a big “Woo!” before the opening verse kicks in. It isn’t a complicated song: the pace never really changes, and other than a bit of noodling on the guitar and piano starting with the second verse, nothing much happens in the background of the tune. As for the lyrics, Croce never says that Leroy is Black, but he certainly sounds like a character out of a blaxploitation flick: fancy clothes, big flashy cars, a penchant for criminal activities, certain linguistic clues. Leroy is not only the bad guy in the story: he loses the climactic battle. So, it’s basically the tale of an asshole who gets his comeuppance. Of such ingredients are chart topping hits cooked up.

When my father passed away in February 2007, I knew I wasn’t going to be getting any part of an estate, but there was something I wanted. After the funeral, I was trying to figure out how to ask my stepmother for his old Fender guitar, but she offered it to me unprompted. It followed me to a new home a year later when my first marriage broke up, staying in its case until my future wife bought me lessons as a Christmas present. I was working out how to play “Too Much” from the fantastic Elvis Presley compilation “Elvis 56” when I was accepted into law school, and back into the case it went. 15 years later, it’s still there.

In 2024, during one of my many visits that year to see my dying mother, my Uncle Jimmy, who was present when I was gifted that guitar, asked if I ever played it. I confessed that I did not. This was one of two times that year that I believe I disappointed him. I corrected one of those on this last trip, when I finally visited my father’s gravesite for the first time. I think it might be time to crack open the guitar case and get to work on the other. It’ll just be for me and my dad – and Jimmy, if he’s okay with me not sounding as good as Robert, or my father, for that matter. We can’t all have talent, but that’s no reason not to do the things we love.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #65

Ferlin Husky (probably) – Wings Of A Dove

The 1970s were boom years for promoting physical activity in Canada. A government study discovered that all that time spent eating poutine while watching “Hockey Night in Canada” on the CBC was putting us at risk of looking like crap as the world got to see us on their own television screens when the summer Olympics reached Montreal in 1976. The solution was ParticipACTION (which I was surprised to discover still exists), which sought to encourage exercise by such measures as shaming us when compared to a typical Swede twice our age, or later going the glitz route by recruiting national treasures Al Waxman and Jayne Eastwood to awkwardly shill for the cause. Around the same time, another wing of the government came up with the Canada Fitness Award Program, which enabled some school age children (me, for one) to confirm their tacit understanding of how woefully unfit they were compared to certain of their classmates. Yes, it was dystopian (but then so is elementary school); however, it was also, in the words of the legendary Oscar Leroy, possibly “the last great thing this country ever achieved”.

I have no way of knowing if they were connected, but it couldn’t have been a coincidence that the local school board added formal physical education to the curriculum when I reached Grade 5 in the fall of 1974. More importantly to me, during one of our elementary school winters, we began making regular (I’m thinking monthly, though it could have been more or less frequent) excursions during the school day to our local arena for ice skating. And that was a glorious thing.

I was never a particularly good skater, but I loved doing it, whether at an arena or on one of the many patches of ice in the tiny metropolis of Little Pond, Nova Scotia. When I played hockey, I was sufficiently inept to be the third best goalie in a community with – you guessed it – exactly three goalies. My skill set was at the “I can get around the ice without falling most of the time” level, and that was good enough. I avoided going too fast, tried to stay away from the kids who were much better than me, and therefore dangerous, and generally could get through an outing without being injured.

It wasn’t just about the skating: time at the arena was where romances could blossom (not for me, you understand, but I saw friends seize the chance to spend time on a hoped-for love match). Or grand schemes could be cooked up: it was on a break from the ice that I teamed with a few friends and came up with a plan to launch a school newspaper, and, amazingly, we went on to publish two glorious issues of the Elementary Herald that school year.

There was, of course, music playing to accompany our efforts in circling the ice. I have been assured by my friend Robert Barrie that lots of current pop hits were in rotation, but those aren’t the numbers that have stayed with me over the years. I was the child of two country music lovers, so that kind of music was almost like comfort food. Sure, by 1974-75 I was definitely trying to manifest my own musical destiny, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t still appreciate a finely honed country ballad. My relationship with the genre has been up and down, but I always seem to find my way back.

Two such songs stick in my memory from those skating days: “A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation)” by Marty Robbins and “Wings Of A Dove”, probably by Ferlin Husky. I say probably because I didn’t know then and because the Charley Pride and George Jones versions sure sound familiar, though both were also artists who got a fair bit of play in our house. The Husky version is closer in time to the Robbins tune, and I’m going to bet our DJ enjoyed this music during a narrow window in his life – just as I had – and indulged his yen for era-specific nostalgia. That’s all I’ve got since my ears aren’t reliable on this point, and it’s more interesting to me to write about Husky than the two bigger stars.

Ferlin wasn’t supposed to be his name, but there was a typo on the birth certificate so that’s what he became. Apparently, in those days you couldn’t complain about such a thing and get it fixed: “I guess you ain’t gonna be named after yer grampa after all.” (That’s how they speak in Missouri, right?) Before becoming a country music star, he’d served in the marines and his ship may (it’s weird that there aren’t better records of this) have participated in the D-Day invasion. His career peaked with “Wings of a Dove” – it topped the country charts for 10 weeks in 1960 – but he was a regular presence on the country top 40 from 1953 to 1975, and even made it to no. 4 on the pop chart with the mournful ballad “Gone” in 1957.

If you know “Wings of a Dove”, you may think me an idiot for not realizing how religious the song is. In my defence, I was 10 when I first heard it, and I honestly don’t think it made its way to my ears even once during the many years between the end of those skating trips and listening to it for this writeup. Look at the lyric sheet and you will see every “he” is capitalized, plus there is a whole verse about Noah and the end of the flood. I love the quiver in Husky’s voice when he sings “A sign from above” in the chorus, and the song uses a super efficient 2:19 to get its (alright, kind of preachy) point across. It’s pretty uptempo, and the beats hit at just the right moments, as if it were designed to accompany moving gracefully across a slick surface – and I sometimes get a weird muscle memory tingle in my legs when it plays, as if I’m about to clumsily go around the ice with my friends one more time, all of us healthy and carefree Canadian youth, living the ParticipACTION dream. That 60-year-old Swede had nothing on us.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #64

Murray Head or Carl Anderson – Superstar

Growing up Roman Catholic, the Easter season was defined by food. Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent and the time of deprivation (and, when I was younger, a good reason to get out of washing my face for a day or two), but it was immediately preceded by the pancakes of Shrove Tuesday. The season would end with Easter Sunday, and a bounty of chocolate and other sweet delights. Between these two high points, the lows of Lent forced you to make the significant sacrifice of denying yourself for a time certain things you loved to eat, such as pickled herring, blood pudding or head cheese. It was challenging, but I can say with absolute certainty that I never broke my Lenten vow to not eat any of these treats.

It was also marked by going to church a few extra times. My mother was pretty diligent about getting herself and her offspring to Sunday services most weeks, and there were even occasional sightings of my father at such times. Easter upped the tally, with Ash Wednesday and Good Friday added, and throughout Lent we got to hear in even more detail than usual about how Jesus died for our sins so we’d better get our acts together, and soon.

What I remember in particular about the services around Easter is the priest singing. The churches we attended often had a choir, so the man at the pulpit did not typically get involved with the musical portions of the show. At Easter, however, during the portion of the mass that covered the Passion (with Jesus’ words in red type in our little missals), the priest would sing intermittently, and this may have been my favourite part of the show. I have never been a fan of liturgical music – too turgid, utterly lacking in subtlety, and often performed by people whose ability does not come close to matching their faith – but something about listening to a priest give it that old college try because the Pope said he had to warmed my snotty little heart. The singing was usually, umm, uninspiring, but you had to respect the effort.

It might’ve been simpler if they had just played the entirety of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” for us, but it had been greeted on its arrival in the early 1970s with protests by both Christian and Jewish groups, a fairly impressive accomplishment on its own, and the Church was not of a mind to encourage us to pay it much attention. I never listened to the entire album until sometime in the last decade, though I did watch the movie late one night on our local CTV station when I was in high school. It was probably during Easter that it aired, though “Ben Hur” (a man who was not unfamiliar with Jesus) was always the movie that marked the season for me. As for religious adjacent music, my go-to was the same composers’ “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”, which I was introduced to by my junior high school music teacher and which still sounds pretty good today.

My wife, however, loves “Jesus Christ Superstar”. She has seen it on stage, watched the movie at least five times, and listened to the soundtrack many more times than that. Our local repertory movie theatre is hosting a sing-along showing this Easter Sunday, and she would fit right in with that crowd. I would probably recognize – but not know well enough to fully participate – maybe five of the tracks. On the other hand, I put “Joseph . . .” (which I had once owned on vinyl) on this weekend for the first time in at least 20 years and it instantly came back to me.

But even casual appreciators of the entire opus know “Superstar”. Originally sung by Murray Head (the casts of the earliest stage productions and the 1973 film were loaded with future pop hitmakers – Yvonne Elliman, Paul Nicholas, Paul Jabara, Carl Anderson – but Head got there first), it starts with a booming orchestral flourish, stirring up your blood, then detours to become a funk rock jam. I like Anderson’s version from the film over Head’s: it’s a lot less yelly to my ears, more subtle and consistent with the music. But it was Murray who made the charts.

Judas – who has recently taken his own life after betraying Jesus (yet seems to be coming down from heaven in the film) – questions his former friend and leader about his choices and how they lead him to his current unfortunate circumstances (that is, incredible pain as he dies on a cross). The lyrics have a humour that might be unexpected in view of the subject matter and for fans of later overwrought works from Webber, with Judas wondering why Jesus chose to show up at a time when there was no “mass communication” or asking if the stories about Mohammed’s miracles are just hype. For such weighty material, it’s an awfully peppy song: I think you’d be hard pressed (fans of Christian rock may dispute this) to find another song that makes the Crucifixion seem like a good ole time. And it does a great job of restoring Judas’ humanity after almost two millennia of being painted primarily as a villain, when any honest consideration of Scripture can only lead to the conclusion that he was playing a part that had been foreordained and without which there could be no salvation for man. If you believe all that stuff.

Whether you consider the Bible to be absolute truth, total malarkey or a mishmash of fact and fiction, its staying power – like all the classic documents of faith – is impressive. That doesn’t mean it is above reinterpretation: Christians may claim otherwise, but it is in the end a book written by frail humans, whether they were inspired by a higher power or not. “Jesus Christ Superstar”, a controversial work in its time, seems not to bother people much anymore. We certainly haven’t become more tolerant of differences in others, and a less cynical person might say it’s thanks to the power of music to bring people together. Whatever your faith, or lack thereof, we can all agree that when a song rocks, it rocks, and “Superstar” does indeed rock. For roughly four minutes, we can focus on that, and put the rest aside.

Back on Team Bruno

Every year, my Spotify Wrapped lands and reminds me how out of touch I am with contemporary pop music. I’m not usually bothered by this – songs like “Just What I Needed” and “What I Like About You” and “In the Air Tonight” are great tunes, and it shouldn’t really matter that they are all 40-plus years old. And it isn’t like I don’t listen to a lot of current music; in fact, I go out of my way to do this, and have been rewarded for my effort with younger artists who I love, like Sobs and Lily Konigsberg and BLACKSTARKIDS. But the nostalgia train definitely takes up a disproportionate share of my listening space, a situation not made any better by my commitment to farming the music of the past for content.

Since I don’t really listen to Top 40-style music, I was late to Sabrina Carpenter, despite the ubiquity of (and my absolute love for) “Espresso”, and I let my (old person alert here) irritation with Chappell Roan’s public persona delay my checking out her gobsmackingly delightful album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”. As I contemplated my stick-in-the-mudness and considered my listening future, I resolved to pay closer attention to pop – as in popular – music over the year to come. And that’s when Bruno Mars popped up.

I used to love Bruno Mars. His first two albums were magnificent blends of old school Motown, modern pop and gentle hiphop, and his guest vocal on a tune was a guarantee of musical bliss. But at some point – maybe it was the over-saturation of “Uptown Funk”, but more likely it was the utter sameness of his third album, “24K Magic” – I lost interest, and even at times felt actively hostile towards his records. His Silk Sonic collaboration with Anderson .Paak did not move the needle for me.

So, here we are at the beginning of 2025, and I am solidly back on Team Bruno. Just at the moment I start paying attention to this kind of music again, he hits with the double whammy of a pair of Top 10 hits with female partners. His team-up with K-Pop superstar Rosé on “APT.” is demented fun, a completely non-intellectual and, frankly, often unintelligible mess of noise that is irresistible and guaranteed to get people dancing, though also about 99% likely to wear out its welcome long before it makes enough of a dent to land on my 2025 Wrapped.

On the other hand, I’m calling it right now that it will be a completely unexpected event if “Die With A Smile”, his duet with Lady Gaga, doesn’t make the cut for Wrapped.

I don’t remember how I felt the first time I heard this song, or even why I heard it, but somehow it stuck in my head, so when it showed up on a random Spotify playlist, my wife wondered how I knew it well enough already to start singing along. All I know is that almost from the opening lines I feel chills, and while I have no understanding of the science that leads to such a physiological response, I do know enough not to ignore it. The lyrics aren’t subtle – “If the world was ending, I’d wanna be next to you” – but how many love songs are? Love songs shouldn’t be subtle, the way falling in love isn’t subtle: they should be a punch to the gut, a wind-sucking assault on your soul that makes you question everything you ever believed. Any song that hits all the buttons to make me feel even a smidgen of that sensation is going into heavy rotation. I have no idea what my great pop experiment of 2025 will bring, but Bruno and Gaga (and Sabrina and Chappell) have set a high bar.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #63

Thurl Ravenscroft – You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch

I can’t remember a time when I liked Christmas music, though surely as a child I couldn’t have felt the antipathy that I later developed towards the genre. Growing up in Cape Breton, with limited radio stations to choose from, it was never a good thing to find the airwaves dominated by old white guys like Bing Crosby, Burl Ives or Andy Williams for most of December each year. CJCB was less in thrall to such a takeover than CHER, the other main local station, so it got even more of my listening time in December than other months, when I thought CHER sucked generally, and not just because it played “The Little Drummer Boy” too many times for my liking.

I did, however, love watching Christmas specials on television. I may be remembering this wrong, but it seemed that the arrival each year of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was evidence that the holiday season was upon us. This would be followed over the next few weeks by the likes of “Frosty the Snowman”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” and the way too preachy adventures of Davey and his stoned-sounding dog Goliath. And right near the top of that list was the, somewhat unexpectedly, most Christmasy of them all, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, the tale of the ultimate curmudgeon who learns the true meaning of the holiday and finally gets out of his own way to have a good life experience.

The special’s theme song was written by Albert Hague, and maybe that name doesn’t mean anything to you, but I jumped up (well, I would have if it wasn’t feeling so comfortable in my chair) when I read that. Hague, you see, was very much a part of my later teen years as the grumpy but supportive music teacher Mr. Shorofsky in the film and related television show “Fame”, a cultural experience which, coupled with appearing (partly in blackface!!!) in my high school’s musical production of “Finian’s Rainbow” (a non-singing part – no one needed to suffer through my warbling), drove me toward a misbegotten and in many ways life-altering decision to study theatre at an Ontario university instead of English at a school located in New Brunswick. Hague wrote a lot of other songs, mostly for musical theatre, and none of them rang even the tiniest bell with me. But “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” is eternal.

The version that my generation grew up with was sung by Thurl Ravenscroft, whose lengthy resume included roughly five decades as the voice of Tony the Tiger. I’ve seen it described as a dis song, and you can’t really argue with that: among the unpleasant things that the Grinch is compared to (usually unfavourably) are eels, rotting banana peels, termites, nauseous reptiles, skunks, arsenic and unwashed socks. Kendrick calling Drake a white slaver seems almost quaint in this context. The song is three minutes of attacks on his character, sung in a throaty bass over a bouncy orchestral track.

I haven’t watched the original show in many years – the Whos just leave me gritting my teeth with their unnatural sweetness – and I found the Jim Carrey-starring live action version too awful to even consider revisiting, but I am a big fan of the 2018 animated remake, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular character. My wife and I rewatched it on Christmas Day, and I enjoyed the movie as much as ever. I love physical comedy, and animation can absolutely brutalize characters with zero consequences for their overall well being (see: Wile E. Coyote, Scratchy, etc.), which, truthfully, makes things a whole lot funnier. But my favourite bit by far is the goat that shows up a few times and makes the most God awful sound that’s ever come out of one of its species. Just anticipating the goat’s arrival on the screen makes me giddy.

The song, though, remains a reliable bit of snark in the unabashed positivity of the most frequently played Christmas songs. There are a lot of cover versions, though most don’t really make much effort to mix things up. To my surprise, the lighter than air approach of the usually (to my ears) painful Pentatonix is a perfect match for the song. RuPaul’s version is almost sultry, a kittenish croon over a glossy synth backing track with soulful backup singers, like she’s flirting with a bad boy, not insulting a monster, before turning into a giant kiss off. And then there is violinist Lindsey Stirling (why has she been all over my Facebook feed the past few weeks?), who successfully enlisted a pre-superstardom Sabrina Carpenter to add some vixenish sass to her usual high-energy brand.

I have a 15-hour playlist of holiday/winter tunes that don’t suck, and there are lots of dark tracks on there, but you aren’t going to hear them on your local radio station nestled in between Dean Martin and Mariah Carey. You may, however, experience that juxtaposition with the Grinch. It isn’t my favourite holiday tune – that remains, for the fourth consecutive year, Carrie Underwood’s “Stretchy Pants” – but it is one of the few classics that doesn’t make me feel like canceling my Spotify account and throwing my Sonos system in the garbage. That’s no mean accomplishment this time of year.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #62

Cheap Trick – I Want You To Want Me

Bands are always evolving, often due to personnel changes (there are at least three clearly distinct versions of Fleetwood Mac (the Peter Green, Bob Welch and Nicks/Buckingham eras), a solid case can be made for two others, and there are arguably several more beyond those, and Pink Floyd’s sound has been likewise defined by the three men who took turns fronting the group) but sometimes due to the existing group maturing together or becoming interested in new sounds. This can be difficult for listeners to accept – music fans are notorious for becoming attached to a version of the artist that they first fell in love with and refusing to follow them as they veer in new directions. I have a friend who seems to always prefer a band’s first record: I’m not sure there’s any artist I can say that about.

One such band that evolved in an unexpected direction was Cheap Trick, and about the only explanation for this is money. Between February 1977 and April 1978, the band released three albums of original material, with negligible sales figures as the last of these peaked at number 48 on the albums chart. Singles success was similarly evasive: only one release – the all-time great tune “Surrender” – made the charts, stalling at number 62. Critics, on the other hand, loved Cheap Trick: 1977’s “In Color” ranked 10th in that year’s Pazz and Jop poll, and “Heaven Tonight” was number 22 the following year. Some critics went so far as to compare them to The Beatles, which is a simply awful thing to do to a young band (except Klaatu – those guys were asking for it). This acclaim was one of the more unexpected discoveries for me when looking over old Pazz and Jop lists, because my contemporaneous experience of Cheap Trick was of a band that no one took seriously, including the band members themselves, which was a big part of their charm.

Another funny thing was happening across the Pacific Ocean. While North American listeners mostly shrugged at hearing these punkish power poppers, young folks in Japan went nuts: their 1978 tour was greeted with paroxysms of Beatlesesque proportions. A few of the shows at the Budokan arena were recorded for what was initially intended to be a Japan only release. Pressure mounted to share it with the band’s home audience, and in April 1979, “I Want You to Want Me” exploded onto our radios.

Some context, for those who either don’t remember or are too young to have been there. The first few months of 1979 were still the heyday of disco, and a glimpse at the songs that made Billboard’s top 10 singles list over the first third of the year shows a lot of this genre paired with a plethora of soft poppy tunes. About the closest thing to a song that really rocked during that period had been “Hold the Line” from Toto – never a good sign for a rock fan. (I will explain elsewhere why songs like “Sultans of Swing” and “Heart of Glass” don’t count.) Matters were so dire that Frank Mills’ “Music Box Dancer” reached number 3. It was indeed a very dark timeline.

So, a song like “I Want You to Want Me” was musical Viagra to all the hormone-drenched teen wannabes sweating away their bewildered frustrations with a musical ecosystem that didn’t seem to have a place for them. It blasted out of the speakers with the confidence you would expect from a much more successful band – it’s hard to argue with 15,000 screaming Japanese girls as an ego boost. And it was made to be played loud, with Rick Neilsen’s swirling guitar and Bun E. Carlos pounding the living shit out of his drum kit. But these were the (not conventionally attractive) faces on the back of the record’s jacket: on the front were the more adorable faces and flowing locks of lead singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson. The combination of cutie pies and loud noise made for a four quadrant blockbuster, with the album going on to eventually sell over 3.5 million copies in North America.

After Zander emphatically states the song’s title, Carlos goes a bit nuts on the drums, then the guitars jump in with a riff that I will recognize long after my inevitable dementia sets in. While Zander sings, Carlos thumps away as little swirls of fuzzy guitar slide up and down. On the original release in Japan, the song topped the charts, so the audience knows when to sing along: you can hear them in the break between each of Zander’s “Didn’t I, didn’t I” lines, and it’s kind of awesome. Nielsen finally gets a moment at 2:11, but it feels like a cheat when the singer jumps back in before he can really get rolling. Worry not: his real moment to shine comes at 2:29, and the bedroom rock stars are given 10 seconds of dreamy air guitar inspiration. The pace is brisk for three minutes, followed by a brief respite to bask in their fans’ love (though the audience is unusually muted at this point – were they dazed after all the screaming?), before winding down in a squall of guitars and drums. Perfection.

The original version is ranked the 1372nd best song of all time on Acclaimed Music, which may not seem that impressive until you look just below that and see greats like Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” (1374), The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” (1379) and “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince and the Revolution (1380). While the band went on to have other hits, including a number one with the 1988 power ballad “The Flame”, they were by then a more conventional rock band, and none of these received the kind of love from critics that the early records got. Carlos left the band in the early 2010s in a nasty breakup, but the other three carry on, occasionally with Zander’s son helping out, with their most recent album (an often catchy collection – I was especially taken with “Boys & Girls & Rock N Roll”) being released in 2021. Their next scheduled show is at Soaring Eagle Casino in Mount Pleasant, Michigan on December 6, and based on recent set lists, there’s a near 100% chance that “I Want You To Want Me” will be played. Screaming Japanese teenagers are probably not included, of course. Probably.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #61

Benny Mardones – Into the Night

In the glorious history of pop music, there may be no more unsettling collection of songs than those that are dedicated to exploring the wonders found by males aged 21 and (often much) older in the arms of females who are, umm, not yet 21. Like, a fair bit not 21. Okay – sixteen-year-old girls.

There is no question it’s creepy, yet somehow not nearly as creepy as a song about a fifteen-year-old girl would be. The age of consent in Canada and 60% of the United States – where most of these tunes originate – is 16, so there is nothing legally wrong in these jurisdictions with, for example, 27-year-old Gene Simmons observing that “Christine Sixteen” is “hot every day and night”, or for 33-year-old Ringo Starr to know what his beloved’s more-than-half-as-old-as-his lips tasted like. Disturbing, yes, but neither of these gents were at risk of doing hard time for these predilections.

A defence can be made out for certain songs, like Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen”, which is clearly from the perspective of someone of a similar age (although the Dr. Hook version still makes me feel a tiny bit off). But then you get into the leather-booted fantasies of Iggy Pop, and you know there’s a good chance the singer is going to hell. However, if you crawl far enough down the “sixteen” musical rabbit hole you’ll also encounter the droll delights of the table-turning Ayesha Erotica, so the journey is definitely worth the trouble.

Among these anthems we also find “Into the Night”, Benny Mardones’ top 20 hit from 1980. The song itself leaves open the possibility that these are just a pair of star-crossed teens, a Bronx or Brooklyn Romeo and Juliet. Sure, the opening line says “She’s just 16 years old / leave her alone, they said”, but it’s not outside the realm of plausibility that this could just be a protective parent trying to chase away a local ne’er do well of similar age, like Sandy’s dad would’ve felt about Danny, or Virginia’s about Billy Joel. The video, unfortunately, removes all doubt.

It starts with 33-year old Benny, looking maybe a decade older (fighting in Vietnam will age a guy), rolling down the street in his prison-issue tee shirt and jacket with pushed up sleeves the way all the cool guys wore them back then. After his beloved’s Amish dad turns him away at the front door to her house, Benny offers up a diva eye roll, then slides around to her bedroom window in best stalker fashion and watches as she morosely contemplates her inexplicable attraction to a guy who thinks a wife beater is a good fashion choice. The two-shot leaves no doubt about how really, really young this girl is, all fresh-faced innocence, compared to smoker Benny’s under-hydrated countenance. Following a fairly static shot where Benny sings to her over a pay phone (strategic misstep by her dad in not taking her phone privileges away) and another shot where he’s still on the phone but with weird blue-tinged stock footage of a cityscape in the background, he makes his big move. He sneaks in through her window (Amish dad, can we talk about why your teen daughter has a room on the ground floor?), rolls out a tiny carpet, then Aladdins her into a flight around nighttime New York City against the best green screen effects that can be pulled together on a budget of $1.75. And, of course, they kiss, and if that doesn’t make your skin crawl even a little while wishing for an officer of the law to be waiting when they land, then you and I are not watching the same video.

And yet, as awful as the video is – and it is really, really awful – and the pure ick factor at the song’s core, I will never stop loving “Into the Night”. Take away the sleaze, and you’re left with a bombastic declaration of love, which hit my hormone-flooded 16-year-old body hard back in 1980. The key lyrics – “If I could fly / I’d pick you up / I’d take you into the night / And show you a love” – are simple, yet touch on that universal feeling of wanting to escape from the world’s restrictions with the person who touches your heart most deeply. The music is deep and bold with subtly booming drums offset by delicate piano and twinkling synth notes. Benny occasionally slips into a limp falsetto that is perfect for capturing the desperation that he feels over the efforts being made to keep him from his true love. It’s a powerful vocal, passionate and tortured, melodramatic, yes, but it’s an earned melodrama. Like all the best love songs, it can feel personal to anyone who sings it. Try singing along – really singing, like when you’re alone in your home and no one else can hear you – and not have a catch in your throat, and maybe a bit of eye sweat. I’ll wait.

Like a lot of artists, Mardones didn’t stop making music just because most of us stopped paying attention. Over the next 35 years, he released another 10 albums, and even had a second run into the top 20 with the same song in 1989. Despite a Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2000, he remained active until at least 2017, with the disease finally claiming him in 2020. His hands were very shaky in December 2017 when he performed the song for what he claimed would be the last time in a New York casino. He asks the crowd to help him sing, and they meet the challenge. When the camera pans across the audience, what you see is not only oldsters like me, but also a number of people who wouldn’t have been around to hear “Into the Night” on their radios in 1980, or probably even 1989. Somehow, in this fragmented musical ecosphere, where you can listen to almost anything whenever you choose, the song found its way to them, and they fell in love with it just like I did 44 years ago. I suspect it will continue to make new fans as long as they exist to discover it.

Quick Takes – July 30, 2024

I listen to a lot of new (to me) music, and sometimes I feel like telling people about things I like in case they might like them, too. That’s all this is. Every time I have four records I want to share, one of these is going up. Consider it my own mini version of Robert Christgau’s consumer guide.

Wilson Pickett – Hey Jude (1968)

Damn. I came to this for the title track: I have always disliked The Beatles’ original, and hoped that Pickett might convert me. He did not. But, god, what a glorious howl is this album. Backed by stellar session players, including a pre-fame Duane Allman, the album is one soulful banger after another. His “Hey Jude” is fine, if a tad histrionic, and his take on “Born to Be Wild” is sort of embarrassing, but pretty much every other track (my favourites include the opener “Save Me”, the desperate howl of desire that is “Back in Your Arms”, and the back-to-back boasting of “My Own Style of Loving” and “A Man and A Half) will get your blood pumping hard and make you wish you were at the edges of the crowd in a dark sweaty bar at 11:35 on a Muscle Shoals Saturday night in 1968, watching Wilson own the moment.

Childish Gambino – “Atavista” (2024)

Donald Glover has long been a favourite as an actor (especially on “Community”), where his style is a mix of effortless cool and awkward nerd, and standup comic, but other than the odd tune – especially “Heartbeat” – his music has never struck me in the same way. (“This is America” is a lot more enjoyable when part of its video is paired with “Call Me Maybe”.) But I loved this album from the first listen. My initial impression was that parts of it (“Sweet Thang” stands out) feel like a lost Prince album (of which there are likely multitudes), but if you’re more hearing folks like Sly Stone or less schmaltzy phases of Stevie Wonder, I won’t argue with you. The overall vibe is quite mellow (his duet with Ariana Grande, “Time”, furthers my reassessment of her place in the musical firmament), but this is pushed up against the chaotic dance-floor funk of a track like “Algorhythm” or the sly disco-lite bedroom eyes heat of “To Be Hunted” or an eccentric toe-tapper like “Little Foot Big Foot” or the heart-in-your-throat ecstasy of “Human Sacrifice”. Just stellar from needle drop to fade out.

Paint Fumes – Real Romancer (2023)

I read a lot of music blogs looking for unfamiliar bands to check out, and, man, did that ever pay off with these guys. It’s a sort of dirty power pop, mixing gritty garage band elements with the kind of hooks you’d expect to find on a Cheap Trick record, with a Ramones-lite guitar sound. Listening to this, you just know that Paint Fumes is a band that absolutely kills live, but the slightly cleaned-up version found here is still a potent force, a jump up and shake your ass in the kitchen, backyard, shopping mall, wherever you happen to be when the wave hits you. “Holding My Heart”, “Starting Over” and “Can’t Stand It” are among the standouts to my ears. If you have a hankering for something new that feels like it was recorded on third-hand equipment in your best friend’s weird uncle’s shed in 1977, this is the record for you. (Band leader Elijah con Cramon is also anti-Trump, so you know he’s a good egg.)

Charm School – Charm School (2021)

So, one day I was thinking about the Elvis Costello song “Charm School” and began wondering if there was a band with that name. There are in fact two such bands, and they couldn’t sound more different from each other if that was their intention. I liked both, but I’m going to pick the quirky electro female over the four quirky pop-punk males (though the maybe sideways reference to David Foster Wallace with their song “Finite Jest” completely endears them to me). The female version – a self-described side project of one Joanna Katcher, whose claim on her Spotify bio to love “plump cats” told me we were kindred spirits (sorry, Merry!) – is a bouncy, often danceable collection of glittery tinker toy pop that hits a whole bunch of my sweet spots: music that sometimes sounds like it was made on a Fisher Price toy, jittery beats, weird tempo shifts, white girl rap. Opener “Precious” sets the tone when the self-infatuated narrator sings “I love myself, I’m into me”, and she should. Quirk usually has a short lifespan with me, but the second and third plays were just as entrancingly oddball without becoming annoying.

Pazz and Jop 1974 #16 (tie)

Average White Band – Average White Band

Isaac Newton – a pop idol of sorts among the smarter set when he was in his early 20s – famously tweeted that “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton was of course referring to how his work built on the work of those worthies who came before him. Pablo Picasso added his own thoughts (more or less – the exact quote and its originator are contested) to the nature of that behaviour when he blogged that good artists borrow from others, but great artists steal. This wasn’t about plagiarism: it was about taking inspiration from the world, including its art, and making it into something distinctly your own. The challenge for the critic (which I guess I sort of am in this scenario, for lack of a word that more accurately describes whatever the hell it is I’m doing here) is deciding how good a job they think the artist is doing in managing that relationship between their influences and their own creations.

(Let me jump in here – basically to interrupt myself – to say that I seem to have an ulterior motive of slipping in bits of the most half-assed liberal arts education ever into my music posts. Citing Newton and Picasso in a piece about the Average White Band? What a poser, right?) (If I spared you from having to formulate that notion on your own, then you are welcome.)

The above seems like a lot of intellectual baggage to be hauling around when considering an act as slight as Average White Band, but they might be the perfect lab experiment for this exercise. They were the real life Scottish version of The Commitments: a bunch of white British Empire kids besotted with Black American musical forms. Whereas the cinematic Irish musicians did covers of soul and R’n’B classics, AWB filtered that love through their sensibility to come up with their own thing. But was that thing worthy of a spot on the Pazz and Jop when so many of the other acts on their AllMusic similars page didn’t get the same level – brief though it was – of acclaim?

First, let’s consider the band’s name. It was reportedly suggested by another white person, Bonnie Bramlett, whose music I’ve never listened to out of loyalty to Elvis Costello, even though he absolutely deserved the punch in the face that she gifted him. It feels problematic these days, and the album cover’s sexualized drawing doesn’t make it more welcoming. The name is sort of clever, a knowing wink that they are kind of an oddity, since there was nothing average about this group of people playing this type of music in this particular era.

But what really matters is what’s in the grooves. The album is a nice listen, so long as you keep your expectations at a reasonable level. It is definitely funk adjacent, but what we really end up with, for all their love of funk, is blue-eyed soul. They try, oh they do try, but the overall feel is as funky as a Pablo Cruise record. (This is two Pazz and Jop posts in a row where I reference Pablo Cruise; clearly, that band had a lot more impact on me than even I knew.) And as much as I loved Pablo Cruise in the late 1970s, it’s safe to say that if you are making records that sound even slightly like theirs, you are on the borrowing side of Picasso’s dictum, not the stealing. It’s what I think of as wallpaper music: a pleasing bit of background noise that you don’t have to work too hard to appreciate. And that’s okay: not every record needs to melt your brain. It’s the kind of record that will work for pretty much any audience, and every song succeeds in fulfilling its ambitions. “You Got It” and “Keepin’ It To Myself” feel like peppier Michael McDonald era Doobie Brothers tracks (the vocal on the chorus to the latter tune might be my favourite thing on the record). “Work To Do” (my favourite song overall) is legitimately soulful, and there are in fact some funky (if not actual funk) gems: “Got the Love” feels like something that a real funk act might play on one of their lazier days, and “Person to Person” is a kind of sexy disjointed grind up.

Even considering the above, let’s just not pretend that anything particularly original is happening here. I have a hard time believing that anyone could listen to this trifle as many times as I have and still come away thinking it was one of the best things released in any year. It certainly hasn’t maintained its place in the musical firmament: only the chart topping instrumental “Pick Up the Pieces” is likely to have reached your ears serendipitously over the last three or four decades. But maybe I’m being unfair: the problem with a retrospective approach to art is that it’s hard to place something in its original context. Maybe this sounded incredibly fresh and unique in 1974, but I highly doubt it: more likely it was because this music appealed to a bunch of white guys of a certain age, while more adventurous work by such artists as Robert Wyatt, Kraftwerk, Richard and Linda Thompson, Sparks, King Crimson, Tangerine Dream and (surprisingly) David Bowie just didn’t seem as sweet as the comforting sounds of men just like them living out their rockstar dreams. There was a lot of that happening in the Pazz and Jop in 1974, and I regret to advise that more of it is coming up. Things got better in 1975 (Patti Smith! Springsteen! Willie Nelson! Fleetwood Mac!), and started going nuts (in the best possible sense of the word) in 1976 before reaching peak craziness in 1977 and 1978. Let’s just get through the next few records together: I promise that the future is going to be a lot more fun for me as a writer, for you as a reader and for all of us as lovers of great pop music.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #60

Barry Manilow – Copacabana (At the Copa)

There may not be any more dangerous combination of inspiration and idiocy than that which can be found in the soul of a 14-year-old boy. Put two of them together, and the rise in these elements is exponential. I offer this as a warning note about the misogyny and homophobia that Kirk Boutilier and I got up to in the summer of 1978.

Let’s first step back a bit further. In 1974, in a fit of jealousy after my father complimented something that my brother Stephen wrote, I wrote a play. Called “The Magic Key”, it was as good as you might expect something written by a 10-year-old to be. Amazingly, I had open-minded and encouraging teachers, and very game classmates, and soon we were mounting said play in a travelling road show for the dozen or so classrooms of students at my elementary school. It remains the commercial peak of my artistic efforts.

In fall 1977, “Soap” made its television debut, and despite protests in the U.S. about its content, including a prominent gay character, and the late hour at which it aired (pre-home recording, I must add), it was a very popular show among the junior high set. Kirk got the idea to rewrite my little play in the style of “Soap” – basically by making my king character a misogynist and my prince character a barely closeted queen – and we were off. Thankfully, we ran out of steam a few pages in, but soon Barry Manilow came along with a song that was ripe for adolescent parody.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I liked a lot of Manilow’s songs while growing up, and I frequently revisit his 1984 album of soft piano faux jazz, “2:00 AM Paradise Cafe”. (The graceful lead single, “When October Goes”, was a top 10 adult contemporary hit.) He is truly part of the tradition of great showmen, and his knack for conjuring up a catchy melody (before pop success, he wrote jingles for commercials) – despite having many of his biggest hits with songs written by and for others – doesn’t get enough credit. He was always a punchline for people who took music seriously, regardless of genre, though other artists seemed to appreciate him: his work with Mel Torme inspired a bit on “Night Court”, and the Australian indie pop band Smudge named their (quite awesome) 1994 debut album “Manilow” because, and this is a direct quote from their frontman Tom Morgan, “he’s really cool”. (Words spoken by exactly zero other people.) And he was successful: between 1974 and 1980, he had eleven top 10 singles and seven top 10 albums, while winning three-quarters of an EGOT.

“Copacabana (At the Copa)” is the rare song where I know with reasonable certainty when and where I first heard it. It was released as a single in June 1978, but on February 24 of that year, the song made its broadcast debut on “The Second Barry Manilow Special”, which I watched while sitting – likely on the floor with legs in the lotus position – in our living room. I’m only reasonably certain because I can’t confirm that it aired on CBC or CTV (whichever Canadian network picked it up) as a simulcast with its American originator. I only know that I saw it and heard it at the same time, and I was wowed. (If you have the patience for a longer clip, you can see the breathtaking shirt that he wore on the special.)

Manilow was mostly known for ballads (“Weekend in New England” was the first of his 45s that I owned), so an up tempo tune with a Latin beat – a sort of tropical disco – was not what listeners were expecting from him, though it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise to anyone familiar with his earlier time spent as Bette Midler’s accompanist at a gay bathhouse. (I was not one of those people: remember, I was 14 and this was before the internet.) It’s super fun to listen to – you can find lots of folks dancing to it at varying skill levels on TikTok – opening with a sort of bongo drum that is then matched with a metallic beat, followed by swirling strings and syncopated disco-esque wah-wah sounds. The joyful music hides the sad tale of the young love between Lola and Tony that reaches its tragic end when Tony falls to a bullet fired by or on behalf of douchebag Rico, leaving Lola to age gracelessly, returning to her old haunt for a reminder of the life that could have been. There are pseudo horns along the way, layered female backup singers and callbacks to the sound of classic Hollywood musicals (Gene Kelly would’ve danced the stuffing out of this song). There is not a single second of the song that isn’t completely in love with the idea of itself, and it’s an infatuation that is earned with every melodramatic note.

As for our play, Kirk is gone now and can’t defend himself, and I’m here and have no defence beyond immaturity. It was awful, and I am reasonably certain (subject to digging through the Poirier family archives at my mother’s house) that the single copy long ago met its richly deserved ending in a Nova Scotia landfill and has passed the point of complete and utter decay. Our Manilow parody was similarly puerile and idiotic, with references to marijuana, sex and other matters about which I at least – I won’t speak for Kirk – had only theoretical knowledge. Although my old brain is tragically still using up badly needed memory real estate for every last line that Kirk and I came up with, I will not share them here.

Manilow is 81, and while the voice has naturally faded from the Grammy-winning high of “Copacabana”, he’s still performing, and is even touring the United States this summer for what he claims are going to be his final visits to a lot of cities. For a man who has repeatedly said he never wanted to be a singer, he turned out to be one of the most charismatic and enduringly beloved performers of his generation. And while “Copacabana” was never as successful in its time as other Manilow songs like “Mandy” and “I Write the Songs”, it’s the tune that always feels to me to be the one that shows Barry’s true essence: a man who throws every bit of himself into entertaining his audience. As fans, we can ask for no more.