Tag: 1980s

The Bottom of the Top #22

John Winkelman

Memorial Day weekend never really meant much to me, as it was (in grade school) all about the parade through town and playing patriotic songs at the VFW and waiting for the National Guard howitzer to go boom, while in the back of my head I was simultaneously anticipating and dreading the school year being over. On the one hand, no more school for three month. On the other hand, three months of being even more isolated than usual on the farm. And once I was out of school and in the work force, during the years represented here I worked in restaurants or retail, so Memorial Day weekend was busier than usual, and full of entitled consumers taking out their frustrations on underpaid workers. As it always is.

1977: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, “Spirits in the Night”

This is a deeply groovy song, but I don’t remember when I first heard it. Probably sometime in junior high, because on first playing it while writing this post I had a definite hit of deja vu which put me in mind of sitting sullenly on a school bus buried under music instruments, athletic equipment, and homework. I mostly know Manfred Mann etc. from “Blinded by the Light” and “Quinn the Eskimo.” So this is another instance of the temporal shear made possible by and exacerbated by, oldies stations.

1982: Karla Bonoff, “Personally”

I might have heard “Personally” back when it was released. It has that early-eighties smooth vibe like the seventies have not quite been transcended, and were it released a few years earlier it would have fit right in. This is a pretty song, and Bonoff is a wonderful singer.

1987: T’Pau, “Heart and Soul”

This one made something of a splash when it was released, and I remember hearing it on the radio on my way to and from one of the worst jobs I have ever had in my life – working the belt at the Eaton Rapids pickle factory. Having fun music to listen to made things slightly less unbearable. To be fair, I only occasionally listened to the radio (Q106!); mostly I had David Bowie cassettes (Tonight, Never Let Me Down) on heavy rotation in the after-market tape deck in my 1977 Cutlass Supreme. Like every other song of the summer of 1987, this marked me treading water, counting the seconds until I left for college and put Springport permanently in my rearview mirror.

1992: Atlantic Starr, “Masterpiece”

I have probably heard “Masterpiece” more times at weddings than on the radio or on MTV, though it was on heavy rotation back in 1992. It doesn’t pull at any nostalgic threads, so I will say this is just one of those ubiquitous songs which seems to have always been around.

1997: Depeche Mode, “It’s No Good”

Depeche Mode keyboardist Andrew Fletcher died four days ago. Goddammit so much. I was never a DM superfan, but their songs and sound were the soundtrack of the 1990s, and “It’s No Good” was particularly popular among my group of friends, back in the day. 25 years ago I was at the cusp of a new relationship; I was hanging out with a group of renfaire types at Grand Valley practicing padded weapon fighting, and working at the low-paying bookstore and living in a crappy apartment and driving a crappy car and exhausting myself every day with kung fu and tai chi practice, as well as beginning the process of becoming a martial arts instructor. All of which is to say, for all the stress, it was a pretty good year.

Monday Morning Music: Walking In Your Footsteps

John Winkelman

This album was released the summer before my freshman year of high school, and the music herein accompanied me for the next four years. I owned Synchronicity on cassette, and played it on my boom box until the tape was almost transparent. Such were the Eighties.

In my freshman year at GVSU (GVSC at the time) in one of my writing classes, where we were tasked to find and read a poem, one of my classmates chose this song and did a dramatic reading. He must have done it well, because I still remember it.

Monday Music: Blue Öyster Cult

John Winkelman

A series of unexpected life events have me feeling nostalgic, so here is a story about the first rock concert I attended, and associated memories.

I had been aware of Blue Öyster Cult for some years before I attended the concert, but had never really paid attention to them, other than to appreciate whatever of their music made it onto the radio in my nowhere farm town in rural nowhere in southern Michigan — “Don’t Fear the Reaper“, “Burnin’ For You“, and so on.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Grand Valley State University (September 1988) I was in a mythology class, sitting next to a due with long hair, and out of nowhere he said “You like Blue Öyster Cult?” We got to talking, and suddenly I had a ticket to see BÖC in concert at Club Eastbrook (now The Orbit Room). December 4, 1988.

This was the “Bedtime Story for the Children of the Damned” tour in support of their album Imaginos. We stood in front of a bank of speakers, just left of center stage and behind a wall of big dudes in biker gear. The venue absolutely reeked of pot smoke, which was the first time I had smelled that smell and known what it was. In my defense, I was a sheltered (and isolated, socially, emotionally and geographically) child.

I don’t remember the opening band. I think they were regional, and in the dusty halls of my memory they seem to have been quite good.

After the concert I bought a tour t-shirt. Three years later, when the t-shirt was past its prime, I wore it to my job at the GVSU student cafeteria, and some of the more conservative students complained to the management that one of the employees was promoting Satanism. I had to round out my shift with the shirt turned inside-out. This incident says a lot more about the conservative teenagers of the early 1990s than it does about BÖC.

I saw BOC again at Club Eastbrook on October 1, 1989, and they were just as good. Again, I don’t remember the name of the opening band. Thirty years is a lot of time gone by. I still have the ticket for this one, safely tucked into a scrapbook.

Somewhere in here I discovered the Michael Moorcock / BÖC connection in their songs “Black Blade” and “Veteran of the Psychic Wars“, based on Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné novels. This inspired me to get the vanity plate “Stormbringer” for my car at the time, a gray 1977 Cutlass Supreme 2-door, with a 350 4-barrel and T-tops. I once beat a Porche out of a stoplight, which was amazing, because most of the time when I stomped hard on the gas, Stormbringer would sputter and stall.

And of course Blue Öyster Cult (“Black Blade and “Godzilla“, usually) often accompanied the many Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay sessions in my sophomore, junior and senior years.

All of which is to say, Blue Öyster Cult was a signifiant thread through my (still-ongoing) formative years, and my life is most definitely improved by their presence and influence.

And they still rock.