As I've noted in the past (probably not here, but I have blogs you've never seen, y'know?), when I was a freshman in high school (somewhere back around the Pleistocene Era), I was assigned for one nine-weeks term, to write every day in a journal. When I started it, I wrote in it every day -- that lasted a couple of weeks. I sat down and did the week's worth of entries every Saturday after that, for at least three or four weeks. The day before the journal was due to be turned in, I did the remainder of the entries all in one evening. Nobody was the wiser.
The teacher of my freshman comp class confessed all she'd done was count the pages. She didn't read them, she just wanted to know that we'd done the exercise.
Web journals (this isn't, strictly, a blog -- I don't always link outside the entry, and I think that's the qualification) ain't any dogdamned different than my freshman comp assignment. There's nobody posting, commenting or grading me, so this goes on the back-back-back burner most of the time.
Since, by and large, this particular journal has been devoted to music I like, I'll relate a few anecdotes about the crazy perimenopausal music habits of someone who was born just a RCH after Kennedy died.
As of this date, I have 1,082 individual cuts in my 'big' ITunes library. I have a second, more focused pop directory that contains just shy of 400 songs. Once you get past the Todd Rundgren/Utopia and the Cheap Trick, most of the stuff I've paid for from ITunes rests in the pop directory. Largely, they're songs I remember hearing on the radio by people whose catalogs weren't ever worth buying -- some of them are one-hit wonders, some well-respected bands who only had a song or two that appealed to me.
In recent days, I've been fetishizing a song by a band from Detroit called 707. I was perfectly willing to pay for their lone hit song, I Could Be Good For You. In context, it's probably mostly a forgettable song, but it was 707's biggest hit. It's kind of like The Kings' Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide, I guess -- they were probably a killer band, but a combination of professional and promotional missteps, and the quasi-depression in the music biz in the era (the song was originally released on their eponymous first album in 1980) rendered them more or less a one-hit wonder. Oh, they actually had another semi-hit with a song called Megaforce, which sounds like some kind of jingoistic pro-military anthem that would have slid in handily in any soundtrack to any Tom (Xenu) Cruise movie from the era, and may have been, for all I know. It didn't hold a candle to I Could Be Good For You, I know that much.
Probably not, though, since a lot of soundtrack albums for jingoistic pro-military Tom Cruise movies are available on ITunes. I don't know where you can actually pay a nominal fee to download ICBGFY. You see, the first album is totally out of print. The re-release that was done somewhat later, which includes the first two albums, is not available on ITunes. I tried searching a couple of other download services, but no dice.
There's another song from that era, released in (I think) 1982, from a Chicago band called The Kind. The song was called I Got You. It was a great tune; a real power pop gem. I had the album, for a while -- it was called 'Pain And Pleasure,' and the song with that title was good, too -- but regrettably, I sold it in a leaner time, during my first marriage, when I was freakin' lucky to get the $2 I got for it (I'd only paid about $6 for it new, it was a cutout at some Midwestern record store or other). The Kind have, apparently, disappeared from anything even resembling the event horizon in pop/mainstream rock music.
Hey, do you suppose The Kind was a marijuana reference? I honestly don't know -- that wasn't one of the euphemisms we used for it back in the early '80s, where I come from, and though I ain't from Chi (and honestly wasn't much of a pothead), I am ostensibly from a Midwestern state. Who can say?
This bugs me. The songs by both these bands are as good as the ones from bands I was able to go to ITunes and download in thirty seconds, for less than $2. They're no more obscure than some of the other stuff I've booted down (legitimately) from ITunes.
Now, I was one of those 'tweener pop kidz who bought 45 RPM singles back in 'the day,' because I wasn't willing (and, as tight as money was in the early eighties, able) to pony up for an album by a band who might have got lucky with one single and everything else they did sucked bilge. On occasion I did pay for an album by a band that wasn't as good as the single (I'm looking at you, David Diamond -- The Kings didn't really ever surpass Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide), but for the most part, I got at least two good songs out of any album I bought at Camelot Music back then. Even Glass Moon managed to get both Smoker At 17 and their not too bad cover of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill out of their one (doubtless disappointing) chance at stardom.
There was another single that floated in my head for months. Snatches, I mean -- lyrics, or a riff, they'd come back to me when I was drinking or on the edge of sleep, but I could not remember for the life of me who had recorded the song. This one almost hurt, because I bailed out on the band after the album the song was on, and was never sufficiently attached to them to buy anything much but a used vinyl copy of the first album. That's why after trolling lyrics on Google for freakin' ever, in a Napa-induced fit of inspiration one night I finally managed to shovel up the fact that the song I was looking for was Back Where You Belong, and the band who'd performed it was, of all people, Foreigner. It was from 'Double Vision,' an album I didn't deign to buy mostly because I was so freaking sick of the title single within mere weeks of the album's release, I couldn't have imagined wanting to own it.
There you go -- one of my fetish tunes wound up being a quasi-single (I had the luck in the early '80s of having been within the broadcast range of one of those small-market Midwestern radio experiences of hearing one of the dying FM-rock radio genre's best stations ever in existence, which would play off-approval singles) from one of the best known albums by one of the most universally known bands of all time. My sig other had never heard the song. I downloaded it (for the nominal $1.99 ITunes usually charges), and played it for him, and it was completely new to him. The SO being a year older by the skin of your teeth, it wasn't purely timing. The song just didn't get the exposure it deserved.
It's a bitchin' tune. So is the 707 song, but regrettably, it ain't available at ITunes. Neither is I Got You. And no, I'm not mistaking the artist on The Kind tune for Split Enz -- this is an entirely different snipe of a tune.
I guess at some point I'll have to break down and start haunting used record stores (or CD, since the re-release of 707's first and second albums is post-compact-disc-era). I will manage to insert that song in my uber-pop directory, by hook or by crook.
The Kind -- well, I don't hold on hope much for that one. The album was the only one they did, and it's out of print, and they didn't have a ginormous hit with either that or Pain And Pleasure, so that would be a worthless crusade.
I'm big on useful crusades, but useless ones? Nah.
