30 years ago, there was a vibrant local rock scene in the Triangle area of North Carolina, with a number of artists that went on to national acclaim and big MTV appearances. They were helped along by the fact that several local flagship rock stations – among them the incomparable (original!) WRDU 106.1 – had no problem putting local artists in heavy rotation, even though no one outside the area cared. These guys were one of those artists.
It’s an effect-heavy riff with a lot of treble in the mix, and classic Connells harmony vocals. The drummer gets a moment to shine with a couple of different fills, and the whole band are clearly having a good time. These guys made a much bigger dent in the charts with their wistful high school reunion song 74-75, but around Raleigh, as soon as this riff comes out of the speaker, you’ve got the attention of all of the locals.
You would think that a roots-rock Americana band, with the combination of rich acoustic guitars, and a bass player who knows exactly when to come in, would be way up there on my favorite artist list, but this is really the only song by these guys I like.
And I really like it.
It’s a nice mixture of harmonized vocals, and a bass player that pops in exactly when he needs to and disappears exactly when he needs to. The organ complements the chorus right where it’s needed. And the lead lines don’t overwhelm the song with the guitarist’s ego.
The lyrics are clearly a solid story of loss, longing, and regret. The guy can’t wait to hit the road, and then he can’t wait to get home. Yes, he’s schizophrenic, but find me a musician that isn’t. The drummer knows when to fill and pump up the rest of the band, and he knows when it’s time to just hold the beat and let everyone else do their thing. Overall, it’s a master work of production and performance, and you wish they had more tunes like this.
I’ve been thinking about songs that would make good cover tunes. Let’s face it, no one really expected The English Beat to cover Tears of a Clown by Smokey Robinson, but it works.
However, I’ve come up with a twist – the artists have to trade songs. So here are a few suggestions:
Van Morrison covers Thorn in My Pride by The Black Crowes. The Black Crowes cover Cleaning Windows by Van Morrison
Mindi Abair covers Righteous by Eric Johnson. He covers Come As You Are by her
Train performs Not Even The Trees from Hootie & The Blowfish’s debut. Hootie covers Calling All Angels
Bryan Adams takes a crack at Daylight Fading from Counting Crows. They turn around and cover She’s Only Happy When She’s Dancing
Whitesnake does Jealous Lover; Rainbow does Fool For Your Loving. Roger Glover gets totally confused.
Sheryl Crow sings Keep the Faith by Bon Jovi. He belts out If It Makes You Happy.
A recurring theme of mine through all of these songs is the idea of “groove” – give me a good rhythm and a nice flow over top of it and I’ll happily settle in for a multi-hour road trip of music. The driving rhythm of the bridge lead-ins giving way to a sliding arpeggio is just technical brilliance, but not in a sanitized, sterile, guitar-clinic way. The muted riff underneath the verse is tougher to play than you realize and the fact that the guitars are mimicking the rhythm section is just insane. It’s the kind of thing you find on a hip-hop inspired album, not a Seattle groove from the forefathers of grunge.
Andy Wood’s lyrical genius is still off the charts, 25 years after his death. The pictures he paints are incredible, and the turns of phrase are unmatched these days except possibly by Pete Wentz.
My brother’s drowning / like a star baby / like a slower suicide / Me, I gave / Mine away
You feel the pain and he’s not letting it control him. You feel the sadness but he’s exulting in it. You feel the groove and he’s living in it.
Matthew Sweet got famous for his one MTV hit, “Girlfriend,” with the anime video back before anime was cool. If “Girlfriend” shows up 6 months later, he probably doesn’t get invited to play on this benefit album, but thank goodness he did. The whole album is covers of Victoria Williams songs as a charity fundraiser for her medical condition. This was back when almost no musicians had any kind of medical insurance and GoFundMe wasn’t going to exist for another 20 years.
What we get is a heavily-strummed guitar-driven love song with his vocals just washing over us and an arpeggiated banjo line plucking its way underneath the verse. Despite the heavy country music elements of the production, this is clearly a mid-90s alt-rock radio tune that should have been a much bigger hit than it was ever going to be on a relief album where he’s only about the 8th most famous name, even if he had one of the two or three best songs on it
~ There’s a certain California sound to these guys ~
A lot of bands suffer from a sophomore slump because they have several years of accumulated material to put on their first album, so they are essentially picking their greatest hits from 5 years of gigging in clubs. And then they struggle to write a second album because they burned thru all their best material for the first one.
There have been a handful of artists that have avoided that trap: Sheryl Crow and Tesla both spring immediately to mind. Counting Crows are definitely on that list.
Their first album was a clinic in great songwriting with any number of complex personal themes mixed in with some lush instrumentation. But unfortunately too many of the songs started to blend together, almost like a janglier and more angst-filled Soundgarden album. They didn’t suffer from that problem on their follow-up. Not only are the lyrical themes more varied, but the music is as well. This simple slice of pop-rock goodness is an excellently-constructed tune with a beat that drives along, a chorus that you can easily hum along with, and Adam’s signature sound more exulting than whiny. There’s clearly a personal story behind it all, and no he’s not going to tell you who he’s singing about.
There have been occasional movies or TV shows that featured army brats, or military brats in general, every now and then. Most of them aren’t very flattering towards the lifestyle. The Great Santini showed the dad as abusive and the kids as traumatized as a result. There was a really cheesy twist on the mid-80s POW rescue movie genre in which a bunch of kids went into North Korea to rescue their parents, ignoring the fact that if you had parents in the Korean War, you were in your mid-thirties in the ’80s. The short-lived Call to Glory TV show was built around military bases also, but around the parents.
None of those shows really focused on military kids in any sort of believable way. And it’s hard to believe that previous sentence actually describes the movie Iron Eagle given that it revolves around a high school kid stealing an F16 to rescue his dad who was shot down over Libya.
But the kids are written like normal kids just with an overabundance of information based on paying attention to what their parents did. They act like normal kids act, hanging out at a drive-in, and having each other’s backs when someone’s in trouble. The kids in Iron Eagle are only a few years older than me and my friends when the movie came out and it was one of the first times we saw ourselves on screen. We saw kids whose parents were in uniform, serving the country, and sacrificing for the country, while the kids went about their lives because that’s what we did. It’s interesting that even though our parents weren’t really called to the same sort of lifetime of war that our generation is, you can almost feel a better kinship with the kids of today’s soldiers than you can with some of your peers from “your generation” because of that shared experience of being in the military.
It’s funny how easy it is for people to dismiss the idea of representation in media when they don’t have to go very far to find themselves on screen. I didn’t have much in common with the kids in Footloose or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but I did with the kids in Iron Eagle. So when your gay friend or your Latino friend makes a comment about not really being reflected in media at all, keep in mind that those on-screen representations matter to all sorts of people, even the ones you wouldn’t expect.
The song itself doesn’t really speak too much of Army brat life, even though it does talk about traveling around a bit. But it’s the song that’s featured the most in Iron Eagle as Jason Gedrick plays it multiple places throughout the movie. That’s why it’s so heavily associated with those of us that grew up in APO, NY.
