Tag: Grease

Mom-and-Pop Music

Flip through the chapters of my life and you’ll find a bookmark at 1975. It was the year I became a teenager. It was the year I started middle school. But most importantly, 1975 was my first foray into Top 40 music. In those days, punk, funk, disco, and metal were just getting started; all too progressive for a kid taking his first dip into the pool of radio rock. Instead, my preference was to chew on something a little sweeter. Like bubble gum.

In the 1970s, I was way too young to witness the birth of rock and roll.  I also missed the advent of pop music.  But I was right on time for a musical genre known as bubblegum.  Bubblegum siphoned off pop music’s more catchy, upbeat tunes and marketed them to children and adolescents.  And what better way to market theses songs than kid TV?  Anyone who ever watched The Partridge Family, The Monkees, or the cartoon rock of The Archies on Saturday mornings enjoyed bubblegum music.

As for 1970s Top 40, it’s easy to look back on those weekly lists and find bubblegum.  “Love Will Keep Us Together” (Captain & Tennille), “Laughter In The Rain” (Neil Sedaka), and “He Don’t Love You, Like I Love You” (Tony Orlando and Dawn) are just a few examples from fifty years ago.  Like most things back then, music was more innocent.

Having said that, bubblegum wasn’t even specific enough to define my own tastes.  The industry standard Billboard Magazine generates a Hot 100 list at the end of every year based on sales and radio plays.  It’s fun to go through the 1975 list and recognize just about every song.  But I was looking for three names in particular and – no surprise – all of them made the list with multiple entries.  Hello again, John, Olivia, and Barry.

John Denver was only 53 when he was tragically killed piloting a single-engine plane above California’s Monterey Bay, yet he managed to create over twenty-five years of gentle hits before that.  When I first heard his voice he’d already landed top-ten’s like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (from the movie Armageddon for you younger readers), “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, and “Rocky Mountain High”.  One of Denver’s biggest hits, “Annie’s Song”, was a love song to his first wife.  Another, “Calypso”, paid tribute to the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.  I purchased most of Denver’s albums (cassette tapes!) with a good chunk of my meager teenage savings.

I was an Olivia Newton-John fan well before 1978’s Grease became a Hollywood phenomenon.  Newton-John and her sweet Australian accent were an instant teenage crush, with songs like “If You Love Me, Let Me Know”, “Have You Never Been Mellow”, and “I Honestly Love You”.  Then Grease came along and good-girl-turned-bad Olivia turned my teenage heat up several notches.  A testament to Newton-John’s popularity came in the form of 100 million records sold, fifteen top-ten singles, and four Grammy awards.  To this day, the soundtrack to Grease remains one of the world’s best-selling albums.

Barry Manilow and his music are more of a confession than the two we’ve already visited with.  It wasn’t at all cool to admit to liking Manilow’s “adult contemporary” music back then.  His hits were better suited for your parents, like “Mandy”, “This One’s For You”, and “Even Now”.  “Copacabana” was a dance number you couldn’t get out of your head.  “I Write the Songs” spoke to my inner-musician wannabe.  Manilow’s talents on the keyboard certainly captured my attention as I pursued the piano myself.  Unlike Denver and Newton-John, I purchased every Barry Manilow album as soon as it hit the shelves.  Somewhere in my attic I still have a boxed CD collection of his best work.

Like him or not, what is remarkable about Manilow is his enduring popularity.  He has been ensconced in Las Vegas for years now.  He just completed his 600th performance at Westgate’s Resort & Casino (an achievement which prompted this post), breaking a record held by Elvis Presley.  The one time I saw him in concert – at an outdoor venue in the Bay Area – I knew every song he performed.  Sure, almost all of his audience members are now graying at the temples, and his popular music is from five decades ago (!) but you still have to give him props.  The man has staying power.

Do I still listen to John, Olivia, or Barry?  No, but I can sing entire songs from memory.  There’s nothing like the music of those three to take me back to my teenage years.  Call it adult contemporary if you want, but this guy will always think of it as “Pop” music.

Some content sourced from The Atlantic article, “It’s Okay to Like Barry Manilow”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Lifeless Buds

I have a Venus flytrap named Frankie. He lives alone in a plastic cup on the patio table, happy in the humid air as he nabs the occasional bug. My wife’s nearby garden is boasting fruit, vegetables, and colorful blooms but I’m content to just watch my little tabletop carnivore do his thing. I’ll get to why I named my bud “Frankie” in a minute but let me just say this: At least he’s a live little bud. That’s more than a lot of people can say about their more imaginary friends.

“Frankie”

Here’s a morsel of self-discovery for you, extracted from my several years of blog posts.  I have a habit of referring to inanimate objects with terms of endearment.  My most recent example: two weeks ago when I discovered the SpaceX satellites launching into outer space.  I referred to those technological marvels as “little guys who talk to one another”, and, “when their time is done they’ll return home for a proper burial”.  Whether this is just cheap entertainment or an effort to elicit empathy from you readers, I regularly inject life into the lifeless (or in this case, a soul into the metal and mechanical).

“Little Caesar”

I didn’t have to scroll back very far to find other examples.  My post a week before the satellites, Hail, Caesium, endeared of all things, a lost capsule of nuclear waste.  First, I nicknamed the capsule “Little Caesar”.  Then I re-nicknamed it “LC” and noted how detection equipment ultimately “…led the search team right to our little friend”.  Were you more relieved to know the waste had been contained or that our little lost friend had finally been found?

Pine cone “sororities”

Conifer Confetti, a post from last fall, lamented the hours I sacrifice to contain the untold number of pine cones on our property.  I referred to the cones as “females” (because biologically, they really are) and in one frustrated burst of endearment, said “It’s like having the world’s biggest sorority row above my backyard, and every house is about to disgorge its girls for a giant party on the ground”.  So which is it Dave, a whole lot of “yard waste” or thousands of “little ladies”?

The “poor” leftover pieces from the LEGO Grand Piano

Finally, my series of posts on building the LEGO Grand Piano and LEGO Fallingwater were rife with terms of endearment.  All those plastic pieces were like little families bagged up in a single box; couples waiting to be married.  At times I thought I lost “one of the little guys”, and I felt sorry for the leftovers who’d never realize their destiny of being a part of the completed model.

“Cassini” (image courtesy of NASA/JPL)

This topic was inspired by an article in The Atlantic about the spacecraft Cassini.  Six years ago, Cassini completed a 13-year data-gathering cruise around Saturn and its moons.  Utterly alone and running out of fuel, Cassini turned towards the planet, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.  As NASA described the final moments, Cassini “fought to keep its antenna pointed at Earth as it transmitted its farewell”.  An entire room of scientists at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory fell into tears.  Cassini is the perfect example of – big word here  – anthropomorphism.  In simpler terms, the more “alive” a machine appears to be, the more empathetic the response from humans.  Some robots are deliberately anthropomorphic, a subtopic we just don’t have enough words for today.

As I watch Frankie ingest another insect, it’s time to reveal the genesis of his name.  Maybe you don’t remember Frankie Avalon in his prime but you do remember the 1970s movie Grease.  Avalon showed up in a memorable scene, descending a staircase dressed in white while singing “Beauty School Dropout” to Didi Conn’s “Frenchy”.  Guess what?  Avalon had an even bigger hit: Venus.  That song is a plea to the goddess of love to bring him romance; someone pretty and very much alive.  Okay, so my Frankie isn’t pretty, but at least he’s alive.  That’s more than I can say about all those other little buds who keep showing up in my blog posts.

Some content sourced from The Atlantic article, “How to Mourn a Space Robot”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.