Category: 1979

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 #59

The Doobie Brothers – What A Fool Believes

I don’t believe I was really aware of The Doobie Brothers until they turned up on the soundtrack to the film “FM”. I have never seen that movie (the plot summary on Wikipedia suggests a fairly pedestrian rebellion story that I probably would have loved when I was 14), but I did own the double album soundtrack, likely thanks to one of my memberships in Columbia House. Owning it was an easy way to get recent hits by a bunch of artists I liked – Steve Miller Band, Foreigner, Bob Seger – without buying the 45s, and it was absolutely the first place I ever encountered Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. And right in the mix, as the opening track to side four, were The Doobies and their 1976 top 40 tune “It Keeps You Runnin’”.

If you’ve been reading along at all, you would expect this to be the place where I say that a lifelong love of the band began then and there. But this is not that story. Truthfully, the song made very little impression on me: the band’s variant on boogie rock just wasn’t where my ears were in 1978. (See here, here and here, among others, for examples of what I favoured.) So, when they had a monster hit in 1979 with “What A Fool Believes”, it was just another decent pop song that I enjoyed but formed no great attachment to. That’s how music works: you can’t fall in love with everything. Even when the song took the major Grammy categories in early 1980, it didn’t lead to any reconsideration. The band had a few more lesser hits, then broke up in 1982. If it weren’t for former lead singer Michael McDonald being a constant chart presence over the next few years, I might have forgotten them entirely.

My first name is of Greek origin and means farmer. My last name is French and means pear tree. So it was something akin to nomenclatural destiny that I became – this is absolutely true – a pear farmer in the mid to late 1980s. From April 1986 to October 1988, I worked for a vineyard and orchard maintenance company, helping the farmers of the Niagara region of Ontario get their pears, apples, peaches, plums, grapes and other produce off the trees and vines and on to be processed or otherwise directed towards the marketplace. It was hard work that didn’t pay all that well, but I was incredibly fit – easily the closest I’ve ever come to being even remotely buff – and had a glorious year-round tan from working outdoors (winter wind burn counts, people). I spent hours of every day working on my own, listening to music and enjoying the outdoors. There were a lot of things that I was trying to work out in my life, but I was pretty satisfied – save for the pay – with my employment right then.

My employer was a man named Bernard, who was maybe 10 years older than me. When it came to listening to music, Bernard was a purist of a most unusual sort: everything he owned was stored on reel-to-reel tapes, which he played on a monstrously-sized yet surprisingly portable machine. He thought the sound was better, and since I typically listened to music on a cheap plastic stereo or some low cost Walkman variant I had picked up at Consumers Distributing, I was not in a position to argue the point. Bernard loved The Doobie Brothers. He did not love Michael McDonald. To his ears, The Doobies’ glory years ended in 1976, when McDonald started sharing lead vocals with Tom Johnston. “What A Fool Believes” might as well not even exist.

(Commercial reel-to-reel players are still a thing, and while I’ve seen new models going for over $12,000, there are lots of used versions on eBay and elsewhere. I could at this very moment walk into a store not a 10-minute drive away and trade some $1,600 for a used one from TEAC if I so desired, though why would I do that?)

Co-written by McDonald and Kenny Loggins, the song actually showed up first on Loggins’ 1978 album “Nightwatch”. The Doobies’ version was an anomaly, one of the few non-disco tracks to top the charts in 1978/79, and that it managed to pop and become a hit in that context says something about the record. It’s still unbearably catchy – from the first bar, the keyboard almost demands that you start humming along. We’re not reinventing the wheel here: that I can listen to it over and over to write this piece is because it’s a sort of musical wallpaper, comforting and unchallenging. And it never wavers – the backing track barely changes from start to finish. It’s a pretty conventional pop song – I won’t even call it pop/rock, since I can’t clearly hear anything that resembles an electric guitar, and while there is probably a real drum in there somewhere, I defy you to find it. It definitely qualifies as yacht rock, but it feels more like a sort of white guy funk, which is very low on the scale of genre coolness.

And what’s it about? I have to be honest here – I never cared, I just figured it was about a guy deceiving himself about his relationship with a woman. The lyrics are sort of vague (why is she apologizing?), and force you to pay attention to certain nuances, which I absolutely had not done, and it doesn’t help that McDonald sometimes sounds like he is singing with a few walnuts tucked away in his cheek pouches. I now see that it’s about two former lovers where one partner hopes to rekindle things while the other is merely being nice. Again, nothing earth-shattering.

Although Loggins got there first, the tune is a rather slight confection in Ken’s (as he went by on the record’s credits) hands, and not a recording that would give the slightest impression of glory ahead. I would blame it on Loggins’ lack of funk were it not for Complex ranking him as the 25th funkiest white boy in music history in a 2013 article. (McDonald was not ranked.) Let’s just call it an honest misstep. When Aretha Franklin covered it brilliantly in 1980, she followed the Doobies’ template, but with the funk dialled up to 10.

I last spoke to Bernard a short time after I left his employ in 1988: he was my boss, not my friend, and I was at the time also running away from his faith, which I had realized I didn’t share. His firstborn, still a toddler when I knew him, is staring down his 40th birthday, which makes me feel unbearably old. Googling Bernard this past weekend was not a satisfying experience, as I learned that he passed away in September 2019. (I have got to stop turning over these old rocks.) He and wife were together 38 years, and ultimately had five children together. And he continued to work in vineyard and orchard maintenance until, it seems, ill health took that away. Bernard loved being outdoors, loved the sun and the fresh air, and even the blast of a January wind across a wide open field of barren grape vines couldn’t break him. He was a very spiritual man, and I expect he was disappointed when I turned out not to be, or at least not his type of spiritual. He wouldn’t have forgiven me for that choice, and I never expected him or anyone else to: I knew that was a consequence of walking away. I do hope, however, that he forgave Michael McDonald for ruining his favourite band: as redemptive acts go, I think “What A Fool Believes” is a pretty good listen.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #56

Sister Sledge – We Are Family

There are lots of good reasons to dislike a song. I don’t need to list any of them here, especially since there are more good reasons than songs, as two people can dislike a song for equally valid and entirely personal bases. I am firmly in the “there is no bad music” camp if someone – anyone – likes it, so I stand just as firmly with you when you don’t like something. Without being guided by our own taste, what’s the point of art?

But I do know one objectively dumb reason to dislike a song: Because of a baseball team.

Let me explain. I first started following baseball in 1972, which was the year I turned 8. My team was Canada’s one major league entry, the Montreal Expos, and I was soon religiously watching their nationally televised Wednesday night matches. This was not a good time to be an Expos fan: it was their fourth year in existence and the team was not very good. After a brief flash of relevance in 1973, they took a step back, and by 1976 were again the worst team in baseball. 

But in this mess, there was hope for the future. That 1976 team included a bunch of youngsters – most notably future Hall of Famers Gary Carter and Andre Dawson – who would be among the leaders of the organization’s first great team in 1979. And when that day came, I was even more glued to my television. When they entered September in the hunt for a playoff spot, our local FM radio station started broadcasting all their games, and I ended up watching or listening to 34 games in 30 days – basically, four days of my life spent drinking tea, eating buttered popcorn (yes, I had rituals) and keeping my own box scores. The Expos ended up being the third best team in all of baseball that year. Unfortunately, the best team was in the same division, so they fell short of the postseason. And I hated that other team. The team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, and they had a theme song: “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge. So, naturally, I had to hate the song. That’s just how these things work.

I had nothing against Sister Sledge before this. Earlier that year, “He’s the Greatest Dancer” had been a disco hit for the four Sledge siblings, and while I have no specific recall of how I felt about the song at the time, hearing it now causes no bad vibes to resurface from my subconscious. It’s actually the opposite, since a pre-cuckolded, Chris-Rock-slapping Will Smith built the verse of “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It” around a sample from the sisters’ first hit, and who wouldn’t be happy to get jiggy?

But “We Are Family” causes a form of PTSD, as I remember one of my first truly intense sports fandom disappointments. Sports was incredibly important to me at the time, and my sense of self worth was ridiculously tethered to some degree to the success or failure of the teams I rooted for. (It was absolutely my father’s fault that this was going on, and I’m not going to let him off the hook just because he isn’t here to defend himself.) Any threat to my team’s winning was an existential threat to myself, and if our rivals drew inspiration from a song, then that song was on my no-play list. It was that simple.

But I did it: I listened to “We Are Family”, and then I listened to it again, and again. It was more than needed for the music, as it isn’t a very complex song, but it may have been good as exposure therapy. Written and produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, it’s like a less interesting Chic record. A syncopated disco beat underlain with metallic piano and a subtle bass line from Edwards, with equally unobtrusive drumming from his bandmate Tony Thompson. It’s a pretty relaxed beat for a dance hit, but that was not unusual for disco tunes: Chic’s own “Good Times” has a drugged-out sluggishness. Yet, despite there being nothing particularly unique about this recording, music critics have regularly ranked it among the best songs of its year (#4 on the Pazz and Jop), decade (some guy named Steve Crawford has it at 101) and all-time (currently ranked at 967 at Acclaimed Music). I don’t hear it, and it can’t just be leftover petulance from 15-year-old me. There’s nothing wrong with the record, and it’s even sort of grown on me since starting to write this post: I just don’t hear greatness anywhere.

My Expos remained a good team for a few years but never managed to win a championship before falling apart over drugs and money, and the stars fell away one by one. After a decade of mostly average and occasionally bad play, they were the best team in baseball in 1994, but a players’ strike ended those hopes, and the franchise never recovered, relocating to Washington after the 2004 season. I remained a loyal fan to the end, but I couldn’t follow them to their new home: my heart had been broken too many times. I had also learned long before then not to get too tied up in things I had no control over, like sports, and to let go of those grudges. That reckoning had come at the hands of a New York Yankees catcher named Butch Wynegar, whose team didn’t have an obnoxious theme song, so that’s all I’m going to say here about that son of a bitch.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #55

Rupert Holmes – Escape (The Pina Colada Song)

I don’t have a personal story about “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”. I just want to talk about how completely bonkers this song is.

Not that writing bonkers songs was new to Rupert Holmes: in 1971, he made the Top 20 (and the Top 10 in Canada, because we are more comfortable with weirdness than our American cousins) with a song about cannibalism. After reaching the Top 40 for the first time in 1969 as part of The Street People with the very catchy “Jennifer Tomkins”, Holmes moved on to a band called The Buoys, for which he wrote the aforementioned song, called “Timothy”. The tale of three men (or two men and a duck, according to one sketchy theory) trapped in a mine, we aren’t told exactly how Timothy became an entree. (Peking duck, anyone?) We hear that Joe “would sell his soul / For just a piece of meat” and that there is only enough water for two. When Joe and the narrator are finally rescued, the narrator notes that his “stomach was full as it could be”, and poor Timothy was never found. The song was banned by some radio stations, of course, and it didn’t matter, because the popular will wanted to hear it on their airwaves.

It would be eight years before the public at large paid much attention to another Holmes song, though he kept busy in the interim, writing and producing for others (including Barbra Streisand) and releasing four barely noticed albums under his own name. Then came September 1979 and the release of “Escape”, which became the final song of the decade.

You know the broad strokes of the story: the narrator is bored in his relationship, goes looking for some side action in the personal ads, and discovers his partner (Wife? Girlfriend? He never really defines the nature of their connection.) has the same plan. In fact, she had the idea first: the personal ad that he answers was placed by her. Hilarity ensues. It could be the plot of a particularly weak episode of “Three’s Company”: You just need to work in a character misunderstanding a conversation on the other side of a closed door.

I trust my memory that when the song first came out, people for the most part thought it was adorable. (Later, when it was everywhere, it became annoying, but that’s true of many hit songs eventually.) How sweet: they don’t realize that they’re perfect for each other. 

But hold on. Both of them were ready to cheat on the other. (Holmes has said the narrator is supposed to be the bad guy in this story, since at least the woman is trying to do something. Yeah, “something”.) How do you come back from that? “Oh, hi, honey. Fancy meeting you here at the place of my planned infidelity.” And they both immediately admit what they’re up to. I know that neither has any reason to be upset with the other at this point – they’re both cheaters – but people aren’t always rational. Did either consider the possibility of pretending it was coincidental that they both went to O’Malley’s at the same date and time? Of not owning up to what was going on, thus leaving the other wondering if this boring old ball and chain was screwing up their chance at finding true love with an exciting new partner? “How do you know O’Malley’s?” “Oh, I just saw it mentioned in the newspaper and thought it would be worth checking out.” We’re talking 3D chess level mindfuckery.

Anyway, that’s not what happens. Over a gussied up tropical beat (the whole album that it came from, “Partners in Crime”, is classic late 1970s AOR, with elements of light disco, blue-eyed soul and piano bar), they laugh at how little they know each other, and – I guess – start down a path of rediscovery of what drew them together in the first place. (Let’s assume that both can set aside the sour truth that neither can be trusted.) Or – hear me out – nothing changes. Oh, they try. But he finds piña coladas too sweet and they give him monstrous hangovers, so he goes back to champagne. They both catch pneumonia after being caught in the rain, and neither cares much for the scratchy feel of sand against their genitalia when they make love “in the dunes on the cape”. Eventually, they understand that what was wrong with their relationship wasn’t how they spent their time together, it was who they were spending that time with. And they part over one last drink at O’Malley’s, which they very civilly agree is “his place” going forward since he discovered it.

Though this was the bigger hit, my favourite song from “Partners in Crime” was the second single, “Him”, which also made the Top 10. This is another song about infidelity, and I love how the narrator learns he’s being cheated on: a package of cigarettes that aren’t his lover’s brand. It’s a sweetly melancholy song about being part of a triangle and wanting no part of it, even if the cost is losing the one you love. 

Holmes hasn’t charted a song as a recording artist since 1982, but he’s never stopped working. He’s released more albums, wrote hits for other folks, created a television show and wrote its music, and wrote a novel, but mostly he’s worked in musical theatre, even winning a pair of Tony Awards in 1986. “Escape” is a bit inescapable – Holmes figures, likely correctly, that it will be the lead line in his obituary no matter what else he might do in life – and it had a nice nostalgia boost in 2014 from the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie. My guess is that there are still an awful lot of people who love hearing this song. I recognized how ridiculous it was a long time ago, but when that opening drum kicks in, I know I’m in for four minutes worth of comfort food. Just like Timothy was for his friends.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #46

The Romantics – What I Like About You

It’s easy to forget this now, in our world of Shazam and asking Siri about pretty much everything, but not so long ago, it could sometimes be a challenge to find anything out about a random song that you heard. One of the things that drew me to listen to Mike Viola’s music was this line from his Spotify profile: “I’ve spent a lifetime chasing a secret AM radio hit coming out of my mom’s kitchen radio balanced on the windowsill in the summer of 1973.” If you’re part of my generation, you know that feeling. Even in early 1998, when in a feverish haze I heard Fastball do an acoustic version of “The Way” during a radio station visit and thought, “Well, I’ll never hear whatever that was again”. I was happily wrong: by June, it was the song in Canada.

For years, I danced to “What I Like About You” at weddings and bars having no idea who the performer was. I don’t even remember now if I wondered about that at the time. How it ended up on Canadian disc jockey playlists is a mystery, since as best I can tell the song never even charted in this country, and only reached #49 in the U.S. (though it was a massive hit in Australia). 

When I learned it was by The Romantics, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance trying to match this song that I loved with the guys in this video. Not that I didn’t like “Talking in Your Sleep”, which was a Canadian . But the video is just, umm, weird: the first appearance of the band, floating up into the viewfinder like glossy big-haired aliens, is chuckle worthy. And while you can hear the similarities in the two songs once you know it’s the same band, I don’t think you would make that connection unguided. I certainly didn’t.

I don’t think my failure to appreciate that this was a 1979 release is all that odd since the song sounds like something out of the 1960s. The Wikipedia page for the tune lists such influences as The Yardbirds, Chuck Berry and Neil Diamond (!) – you know, acts from the ‘60s. Bob Seger’s 1969 “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” could be this song’s hungover uncle. There is a certain timelessness to the tune, with jangly garage band guitars, hand claps, “Hey!”s and “Uh-huh-huh”s and “Ahhhhhh”s. Pounding but unobtrusive drums provide a steady backbeat, and while there is a guitar solo, it is then immediately upstaged by a harmonica solo, which is so incredibly rock and roll. At one point, it seems to be heading into the fade out, before revving up again, then suddenly ending on one last “Hey!” The song jumps in, does its job, then slips back out in a nifty 2:54.

AllMusic has this great feature that links a record to thematically similar works. The album this tune came from is categorised under Guys Night Out, Late Night and Hanging Out, all of which feel pretty appropriate. Guys Night Out is by far the best match, with tunes that include Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town”, Joe Walsh’s “All Night Long”, Kiss’ “Rock and Roll All Nite”, The Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman”, “I Wanna Be Sedated” from The Ramones, and “Louie Louie” by The Kingsmen. “What I Like About You” fits quite nicely, albeit with a slightly more bubblegum finish. AllMusic missed out though by not having Community Hall Wedding Reception as a theme. What else would be on there? “Don’t Stop Believin’”? “Livin’ on a Prayer”? “Shout” (Isley Brothers, not Tears for Fears)?

There is something about “What I Like About You” that has kept it in the airwaves for over 40 years. It’s the kind of tune that a kid in his bedroom hears and thinks, “I could play that”, and that kid isn’t wrong. I have danced to this song with male and female friends, with a girl I was (secretly) in love with, even with my mother at my stepbrother’s wedding reception. I have soberly danced in my kitchen to this tune, and tapped my toes while sitting on my couch drinking coffee, but it works best when you’re just a little drunk, in a room where there are a few too many people, so that everyone is a bit too warm and starting to run out of steam. It’s at that moment that those opening bars kick in, and everyone feels energised again, ready to take on the night. That might be the key to its longevity: hearing it just makes you, well, happy. And what’s not to like about that?

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #30

Donna Summer – Dim All the Lights

I will never not be annoyed by people who make mistakes when writing about Disco Demolition Night. It happened again recently in a most unexpected place: an article about 1970s hockey superstar Guy Lafleur (who, I shit you not, put out a disco record in 1979).

To recap: in 1979, either Steve Dahl, a dumbass disc jockey from Chicago, or his handlers convinced Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck, who never missed out on a chance at pulling off an oddball promotional stunt (see Gaedel, Eddie if you doubt me), to let him blow up a bunch of disco records between games of a baseball double header at Comiskey Park on July 12. The results were predictable to anyone with the first clue about explosions and human behaviour: the field was left a mess and the fans ran wild, leading to the second game being cancelled and Veeck’s White Sox having to forfeit.

What always annoys me is the idea that this event arose out of some sort of populist revolt against disco for taking over our radio airwaves. There is no doubt disco was running out of steam, as all massively popular cultural movements inevitably do, usually from a mix of consumer fatigue and the appeal of the new. But it was still immensely popular in 1979. Other than two ballads and the soft rock of the Doobie Brothers’ “What A Fool Believes”, every Billboard number one song so far that year had been a disco or disco-adjacent tune. At the very moment fans were streaming into Comiskey, Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” was atop the charts. It would be followed by a five-week run from Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” before The Knack took control of the charts, and soon faced their own backlash. Clearly, disco wasn’t the problem – idiots were.

And those idiots? A lot of racists, most likely. Fans showed up at the game with records by such artists as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. Definitely not disco. But Black, which a lot of White folks either seemed to think made them disco, or they just didn’t care about the reason for the protest, just its target. (Homophobia likely played a part as well.)

But let’s talk about Donna Summer. I owned a few disco albums (and a lot of singles), but Summer’s “Bad Girls” is the only album that I played repeatedly when it came out and still enjoy listening to today. It’s unfair to call a lot of this disco: there’s soul and pop and rock and something called hi-NRG and a bunch of other stuff, and all of it is lethal. I particularly love the banner along the bottom of the front jacket cover: “Over 70 minutes of music”. The volume isn’t that big of a deal in the oversized streaming age: it’s that every one of those 71 (to be exact) minutes earns its place, unlike the often unlistenable bloat of something like Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy”.

Though not the biggest hit, “Dim All the Lights” was, even then, my favourite of the album’s singles. It doesn’t turn up much on playlists, which is too bad, because it is still great. It’s a song about sex, of course (“You can use me all up / Take me bottom to top” and “Turn my brown body white” – how did that line get onto 1979 radio?), but there are also old-fashioned notions of love and commitment, with the reference to a Victrola a lovely signalling device. It starts out sultry and languid, a slow jam before such things had a name, but with a buzzing energy underneath and a vocal from Donna that lets you know this won’t be a ballad. She draws you in, then, as the disco beat kicks up, holds a note for an impossibly long time. After that, it’s just breathless, the beat never letting up, with even the changes hanging onto the thumping backdrop. It’s a song built for extended forays to the dance floor, and there has got to be a great 12-minute remix out there somewhere. (There is an official seven-minute version that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to understand what makes the song great.) I particularly love the little bits that sound like a worn-out steel drum during the instrumental break from 2:49 to 3:21. And after the processed vocals that follow that break, it’s chilling when Donna’s pure voice kicks in again at 3:54, and takes you home (blending into “Journey to the Centre of Your Heart” on the album).

So, yes, I love this song, and the whole album. It was Summer’s peak, commercially and artistically, and although she didn’t have a pop hit after 1989, she continued to top the dance charts regularly almost up to her passing in 2012. Even now, this music seems fresh and timeless, and I am happy to get into the trenches with anyone dumb enough to try and argue that all disco was intended to be disposable. Although it was much maligned in its time, there were genuine artists working in the genre, with all-time great albums from the likes of Chic, and even better singles, like Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. Of course, there were hacks just churning out records to fit demand, but every genre has its version of Stock, Aitken & Waterman. I was too young to participate in the disco era, but I’m pretty sure I can conjure what it must have felt like to be a young urban adult in 1977 by cranking up “I Feel Love” and letting the beat take over. That’s art, my friends.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #12

The Knack – My Sharona

If you turned on your radio for even an hour in the summer and fall of 1979, you could not avoid hearing “My Sharona” by The Knack at least once. It was the biggest song of the year, and I don’t remember anything else being particularly close in the way it took over our airwaves.

That kind of dominance almostly certainly means that we’re going to get sick of the thing we once loved, and this was no exception. The backlash against The Knack, when it came, was particularly vicious. Some of this, I think now, was due to category confusion. The Knack were marketed as a new wave band, and this probably contributed strongly to general denigration of the band. New wave, to my mind at least, meant more melodic and smarter punks, like Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Blondie, The Police. Stacking The Knack up against those bands made them seem like lightweights.

Replaying their first album, “Get the Knack!”, I saw how faulty this label was. No, The Knack were not a weakass new wave band: they were a holy-shit-this-is-fucking-awesome power pop band. Their antecedents weren’t the punks that evolved into new wave – they were Todd Rundgren, and Big Star, and (fuck you, Eric Carmen and the Trump-loving train you rode in on) Raspberries. They made big, melodic, energetic blasts of joy that had you – well, me – jumping around your bedroom like the demented hormone monster that you really were.

So, let’s get this out of the way off the top – this is an incredibly pervy song. This is obvious even if you didn’t know that there actually was a Sharona, who was 17 years old, while frontman Doug Fieger was, umm, not. I probably at 15 wouldn’t have gotten the point had I even been paying close attention to a line like “I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind”. So let’s just set aside for a moment this ode to ephebophilia (don’t worry – Sharona seems to have turned out fine), and focus on the song itself.

Actually, one other thing needs to be mentioned: The Knack were NOT a one-hit wonder. “Good Girls Don’t” also did well, and even hit in some markets.

It opens with pounding drums, then a throbbing bass joins in to lay the foundation. And this just keeps repeating, with guitar flourishes added, and occasionally a sped-up tempo. It’s an insistent, pulsating beat, and the song feels much shorter than its 4:55 length (the single release was about half a minute less). There isn’t a lot of variety – they aren’t trying to impress you with their songwriting virtuosity, they just want to rock. The guitar solo is serviceable, but nothing that wasn’t being matched by reams of bedroom rockstar teenagers – more noise than finesse. But that’s what makes it so great – you might’ve wanted to be Keith Richards, but you couldn’t see it happening. But The Knack? They seemed so normal, and that was some­thing you could be. Well, maybe not entirely normal: Fieger looks like a creepy uncle in the jacket photo, and the faces he makes in this video do not lower the cringe factor. Drummer Bruce Gary had model-quality cheekbones – I could see him flashing Magnum, or at least Blue Steel – but the others are just normal-looking guys.

After their second album tanked (don’t blame me – I owned a copy), I never gave much thought to The Knack. About a decade later, in the thrall of Was (Not Was)’s “What Up Dog?”, I plucked their 1983 album “Born to Laugh at Tornadoes” from a vinyl discount bin and found Fieger singing on a few tracks. The Knack ultimately released six albums, trying over and over to recapture glory, without success. Cancer took Gary in 2006, and then Fieger in 2010. 

I don’t think this song has ever really stopped being played, and it had a bit of a bump from “Reality Bites” in 1999. (The world can probably be divided into Ethan Hawke, and everyone else.) It’s still a great song, and a great album, too. Rediscovering The Knack has been one of the true joys of writing this series.