24 - Mr. Blue Sky – ELO – 1977

Mr. Blue Sky - ELO

Here’s another song that takes me to a specific time and place. Fall of 1977, Macomb, Illinois, where I’m starting my first year of Graduate school in History at Western Illinois University. I’m a grad assistant making the staggering amount of $210 per month for 15 hours of work a week (of course it also is paying all tuition and fees as well). It works out to about $3.50 an hour, but History assistants had very little to do, we didn’t teach 100 level courses like some of the other department’s assistants, like Math. We basically sat in on the 100 level courses and took notes, then made ourselves available for tutoring. I fantasized about an 18 year old coed asking for help but I never was called on to tutor. I also worked for the department chairman and had two major projects: organizing the map room and manually indexing the back issues of the journal published at WIU.

The album, Out of the Blue, was the double album follow-up to New World Record of 1975, which we played the living crap out of at Blackburn. The album also included a cardboard cut out of the UFO on the cover that you folded and placed on a cardboard stand.  Man, I miss albums!

You don’t get anything so cool today, especially if you’re only downloading from itunes or some such vendor.

I was living in Lamoine Village, the Graduate/Married Student housing complex just over the Lamoine River near the WIU campus. Rent was $130 a month, so my $210/month salary left me $80 a month to live on. I learned to make several different dinners based on Spam, or boxes of Mac and Cheese, or Rice-a-Roni (“The San Francisco treat!”) If I was flush and wanted to splurge I would add some ground beef to my Rice-a-Roni.

I even tried making a meal based on salt pork. In doing research on the American Civil War you can’t avoid the numerous descriptions, in almost all the works, of the basic diet of Johnny Reb or Billy Yank of hardtack and salt pork. Hardtack was a biscuit-like substance that sounds like trying to eat a brick. The soldiers tried everything to soften it up, soaking it in their “coffee” or “soup”. It still sounds ghastly.

Salt pork, on the other hand, could be made somewhat edible and so I bought a hunk to see what I could do with it. I first tried cutting it up into smaller chunks and put it in the pea soup my Grandma gave me on one of my trips home. Not bad, chewy, and pretty salty, obviously. The best recipe I found had me dredging it in flour, and then baking it in the oven. What I ended up with was a very juicy pork rind.

I played a lot of Out of the Blue, and New World Record, at WIU. With only $80 to last a month for food and entertainment I rarely went out, other than to movies on campus and a concert with Leo Kottke. Actually, he appeared there twice during my 1.5 years on campus. The first, he opened for Firefall, and I had a class that night and by the time I got to the gym (not a great venue for an acoustic guitar god), he had only 2 or 3 songs left. When he was done so was I.

The next fall he came back as a solo and I saw the complete concert. It was the 3^rd time I had seen him (he played Blackburn College my senior year). He played a smaller venue in the student center and I seem to recall he had some pedals on the floor that he used for bass counterpoint notes, somewhat like the pedals on a church organ. I have never heard or seen Leo or anyone else write about this, and I sometimes think I may have been hallucinating due to lack of food (that’s never been a problem, if you saw me then at 6’5”, 230 lbs, you know that’s not likely.)

In fact, one of my professors referred to me on the day I wore white farmer’s overalls (I had a real look going, no?) as the Pillsbury Dough boy.

This song also reminds me of the several trips home to research the Civil War regiment I was writing about for my Master’s Thesis. I typically traveled down Rt 47 to I-55 to Rt 136 (Home of the Dixie Truck Stop, you couldn’t miss the signs back then) to Macomb. The trip was about 4.75 hours in my 1968 Mustang and I had a tape deck to listen to tapes.

It was a god-awful drive of seemingly unending flatness and I remember one time I was following a pickup towing a horse trailer. It was going slower than the 55 mph speed limit on Rt 136 and I passed it. As I looked in the rearview mirror I saw the truck start swerving back and forth (the driver had been drowsing and when I passed him, it jarred him awake) and I watched in horror as the horse trailer broke free and roll over several times ending up in a ditch.

I stopped and backed up and got there as a young girl got out of the truck hysterically crying about her horse, which was in the trailer, and her father tried to restrain her. We went to the trailer, which I think was on it’s side (this was 35 years ago) and when he opened the door, the horse crawled out and seemed unhurt, other than an eye that was slightly bleeding.

I’m sure he had the ride of is life, and I continued on to Western a little shaken myself.