21 – Video Killed the Radio Star – 1979

Video Killed the Radio Star - The Buggles

            I really can’t explain it, but his is one of my all time favorite pop songs. It’s one of the two or three songs that, when it comes up in my Zune, I have to play it 2, 3, or 4 times. It’s just a perfect, pick me up kind of song. It reminds me of the video (the first one played on MTV back in August 1981), which is cheesy, goofy, and everything I liked about early MTV, back when they actually played videos.

            What the song reminds me of is how I used to drive around the Northwest suburbs of Chicago back in the 70’s and early 80’s, in search of record stores with bargain and import bins that might contain an album from the band or individual I was currently listening to.

            I was living in Cary/Crystal Lake/Fox River Grove during that time period and I would drive to Skipper’s Music in Carpentersville, Apple Tree Records in Elgin, EJ Korvette’s in Des Plaines, Woodfield Mall with 2 or 3 record stores, FlipSide in Hoffman Estates, and Randhurst Mall in Mount Prospect

It reminds me of graduate school in Macomb, Illiinois, at Western Illinois University, when I drove up to Galesburg to go to Knox College to look in their library for information about a Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War from the 59^th Illinois (I can’t recall what info they had there to see, I guess a song can only bring back so much).

There was also a mall whose name escapes me now, with a record store with two albums that I could not afford at the time (I was making $210/month as a grad assistant, and $130 went to the rent). One was Circle Round the Sun by Leo Kottke, which I found 20 years later on Ebay, and the other was a Cat Stevens live album, an import from Japan, that I have not seen since.

It reminds me of a time when I got my music from the radio or MTV. That whole market is gone today. Radio, FM radio, is either oldies or classic rock, dominated. MTV/VH1 barely play videos, just dreck like Jersey Shore and Mafia Wives. I guess that’s why I don’t buy much music anymore. The last CD of music I bought was from Amazon.com, it was Roadsinger, by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and that was three years ago.

As I’ve noted before, I commute 2-3 hours a day now, but I only listen to the podcasts on the Steve Dahl Network, and I fall behind on some of them because there’s so much good stuff there. Steve does 5 shows a week, plus a Saturday “Blast from the Past”, best of Steve and Garry (Meier), which I listen to first. Then I listen to Matt Dahl and Brendan Greely’s weekly show, Dino Stamatopolous’ weekly show, James Van Osdol’s weekly show, and if I’ve caught up on all of them, I listen to the twice weekly Kevin Matthews podcast, fast forwarding through his political rants, which I find tiresome and intelligence-free. (I was a huge Kevin fan when he was on WLUP in Chicago, and was funny, but he’s turned into a faux libertarian, ain’t Ted Nugent a great guy, let’s get rid of all the politicians, sort of crank)

My music listening is rarely done in the car. During the summer I hook up the Zune to an amplifier in our garage that drives some outdoor speakers that we listen to when we’re out in the yard or at the community pool that abuts our property. (The pool was part of our property when the house was built in 1955, but the homeowners sold it to the Pool Club members in the mid-60s. Back then the pool had a diving board and underwater lighting, now pulled for liability’s sake in the litigious age. And parties were a weekly occurrence, to hear the folks who lived her back then talk.)

Why do things have to change so much, and not necessarily for the good?

20 - Walking on Broken Glass – Annie Lennox – 1992

            Walking on Broken Glass - 1992

             Wow, another guilty pleasure! A nugget ‘cause I dug it. I also enjoyed the video that went along with it. Starring Annie Lennox and John Malkovich, it also featured an actor I knew from “Blackadder”, who would later become fairly well known over here. It’s Hugh Laurie, “House”, in his sniveling fop mode that he does so well.

            Again, a reminder of Dynacircuits days in the early 90’s. I had a 90 minute cassette called Album Hits, that I listened to on my daily commute (about 1.5 hours round trip, Elgin to Franklin Park and back). This tape contained the single song from each album heard on the radio, usually, that led me to buy the album. I also had a tape called MTV Hits that contained the one song, typically, that had a video which moved me to buy the whole album or CD to get that one song. Many of these songs are now on my Zune playlist.

            Annie Lennox’s, Diva, from which this song came, was an exception. I had a separate cassette with Diva on side one and Lindsay Buckingham’s Out of the Cradle on the other side. I just realized I have no representative from this great album on the playlist (though the whole CD is on the Zune in its own folder).

            The only car with a cassette player is our family car, the 14 year old Camry Lynn drives the kids around in. My car, an eight year old Echo, only has an AM-FM radio, through which I play my Zune, with an FM transmitter.

            The only tapes we listen to in the Camry are kid’s songs. There’s one called Tuneland, “starring” Howie Mandel singing in an irritating faux kid’s voice. But, we all sing along to keep everyone occupied.

19 – Beach Baby – First Class – 1974

Beach Baby - First Class - 1974 

            No reason, just pure guilty pleasure explains why this faux Beach Boys is on my Zune. The group, First Class, was a couple of English guys who were trying to get a Brian Wilson-type, wall of sound, effect. And I think it’s pretty good.

            I remember hearing it in 1974 when I was running a punch press at Accutronics. I started there making $2.63/ hour as the shear operator. Shearing laminate sheets into smaller process panels, 12x18, 16x18, etc. My job duties also included unloading trucks that delivered copper covered laminate, the base material of every circuit board, that came in 36x48 or 36x72 inch sheets on pallets of 100 sheets or more. Laminates came from numerous suppliers, most of which no longer make laminate, e.g. GE, Westinghouse, Norplex, Cincinnati Milacron, Glassteel, and Dynamit Nobel.

            Another part of my job was to unload 15-20 55-gallon drums of ferric chloride acid, the etchant used to remove the copper from the laminate in the areas without traces. After removing the barrels of fresh acid, I moved the barrels of spent acid and copper-contaminated rinse water back onto the truck for disposal. Several years later we became part of a lawsuit after it turned out the guy we were using to dispose of this toxic waste was dumping it in a site that was not up to code and was leaching into the ground water.

            After 3 months of doing this I signed a posting and became a punch press operator at $3.05/hour. Several months later I became the punch press supervisor and then, just after my first anniversary, I was made first shift supervisor. I had just turned 20.

            Running a punch press is why I now have tinitus and permanent hearing loss in the upper register. In 1974, OSHA regulations had not been fully implemented at Accutronics and the punch press operators wore no hearing protection and, indeed, most of us had radio/tape players blaring next to us while we ran the press.  Placing the circuit board into the press opening, onto registration pins, then pulling both hands out to hit the two switches to start the punch cycle.

            Much like the place in Indiana I was almost employed at in 1983 (see song #3), we did not have pull-backs either. In fact, to show our quickness, we would trip the press (which would initiate a cycle of the ram that would not stop until it came down with 38 or 65 tons of pressure and cut the outside of the board and punch all the holes into the part) touching the ram as it was in its downward movement, before it bottomed out and returned to the top of the cycle.

750 times an hour on the 38-ton press, 500 times an hour on the 65-ton press.  (We didn’t touch it that many times, just when we wanted to impress the girls who walked by to other areas of the plant).

We were idiots.

In a future posting (at my current rate of posting about a year, but hopefully, not) I will write about how, 34 years later, I came to be running and setting up a punch press again in the same building (and maybe even post a video of me doing both, if I can figure out how to get a video onto this blog).

18 – Sleepwalk – Leo Kottke – 1981

            Sleepwalk - Leo Kottke

           This is Leo Kottke’s take on the Santo and Johnny instrumental from 1959. (Man, I didn’t remember Leo’s was from so long ago, 1981, it’s closer in years to the original than to today!). My folks had the Santo and Johnny album and I remember it being played in our house in Algonquin.

            It brings back memories of playing albums and 45s on our “Hi-Fi”, a blond wood box that predated our Monkey Wards stereo in the “antique” trunk. (See: Here Am I) I especially remember the thick, black and red plastic tube spindle that you placed over the thin metal LP spindle to play 45s.

            Novelty 45s and instrumentals, such as “Please Mr. Custer” by Larry Verne (“I don’t wanna go!” “Forward, Ho!” “Nooo!”) from 1960, “The Epic Ride of John H. Glenn” by Walter Brennan from 1962, the “B” side to “Old Rivers”, “Ringo” by Lorne Greene (1964), “the Stripper” (1958) and the theme to “Bonanza” by David Rose.

            We played LPs like “Bonanza,” a soundtrack album from 1961 with each of the stars singing (I could be wrong about this, I may need to get it from my mom to verify), and a group of comedy albums such as “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (1960), “The First Family” (1962) with Vaughn Meader as JFK, “Inside Shelly Berman” (1959), and “My Son, the Folk Singer” (1962) with Allan Sherman.

            A couple years later I used this stand alone RCA player to listen to my first albums, “This Diamond Ring” and “Everybody Loves a Clown” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, “A Hard Days’ Night,” “Help!” “Revolver”, and “Rubber Soul” by the Beatles, and my first comedy albums by the great Bill Cosby, “Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow, Right!” (1963), “Wonderfulness” with the classic “Chicken Heart” bit (1966), “Revenge” (1967), and “To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With” (1968).

            I did seem to have bent towards comedy in my early listening that matured into Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer, The Firesign Theatre, Monty Python, Albert Brooks, Martin Mull, and the National Lampoon albums in the 1970s. I don’t think I’ve bought a comedy album since Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album, though I now subscribe to the Steve Dahl Podcast Network, which gets me great comedy from Steve, Kevin Matthews (when he gets his head out of his “Libertarian” ass), Dino Stamatopolous, and the Matt and Brendan Show,

            Musically, in the late 60’s I was into Paul Muriat and Mason Williams (after the early infatuation with the Beatles and Gary Lewis), but I also recall buying all the Chicago albums, especially the hugely awaited “Chicago at Carnegie Hall” LP set from 1971. At $10, it was quite a purchase for a 16 year old with no income besides lawn mowing, etc., but it came with 4 self-indulgent albums, plus two large posters of the band, a poster of Carnegie Hall (on my wall at home, I was/am an architecture geek, I wanted to write my master’s thesis about the White City, the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but could not find a topic that an advisor at WIU would buy into, since I had no architectural history background), a voter info booklet, and a 20-page booklet about the group.

            Reminds me of another story…at Blackburn College there was a guy who lived in my dorm who was a bit of a neat freak, his colognes had to be arranged on his dresser just so, His clothes were all neatly folded and placed in the drawers, and he had a huge poster of Chicago (not the one from the album, but one he had bought at a concert) and had it on his wall. My friends came into his room one time to move things around, just a little, then had the bright idea to sign the poster. Tom W. signed it “To BJ, All the Best, Love, Chicago” in black magic marker. When BJ came back to the room and saw this he went ballistic and we never goofed with his stuff again.

Rich Mankiewicz- RIP

           I work with an engineer whose husband works for the same company my friend Rich Mankiewicz did. Rich had relocated to India to oversee a board shop there. Making conversation several weeks ago I asked whether she had ever met or heard stories about Rich, one of the great characters I’ve had the pleasure to work with in my career in printed circuit boards. She had not, but a couple days later she came in and said, “You know, I asked Bob (her husband) about Rich and he said he died just last week in India.”

            I was stunned. I had heard nothing! Evidently he had suffered a heart attack and died, at 55, which is 2 years younger than me. They had videotaped his funeral pyre and shown the tape to employees at the plant here in Rolling Meadows.

            My last contact with Rich was a little over two years ago when I had emailed him photos of our daughter, who we had just adopted. He sent back two photos, one of a very pretty Indian woman, who he said he planned to marry, and the second of the motorcycle that was his main mode of transportation. H also stated he did not plan on ever returning to live in “Amerika”, as he called it.

            Over the next week or so I called several people ho had worked with Rich, to see if they had heard anything and only one had, probably because he still worked in the PCB industry, for another Indian-owned shop.

            You have to have known Rich to understand his “Amerika” comment. He claimed he was a fascist, but I think he just had an authoritarian streak. His comment, whenever we discussed the lack of commitment we found in most workers was, “What we need are some heads on stakes!” It has remained a running joke since then (the mid-90s) between Oscar Salazar and me.

            He had walked away, or been fired form, most of his positions over the years. He was a self-described Eagle Scout- Mexican gun runner- heroin addict, and the latter caused him issues with several companies as would be expected. He was fired once, from Dynacircuits, I think it was the 3^rd or 4^th time he had worked there, because he slapped the union steward’s husband for smoking on company property. A smoker himself, Rich didn’t like other people doing what he couldn’t, and he could be very caustic in his comments.

            But I must admit I had more on-the–job fun with him than almost anytime in my career. When he was promoted to Quality manager at Dynacircuits, after Lar, the Dancing bear, was asked to leave, Oscar Salazar, Rich, and I would sit in his nice big office (it had been the office for one of the original owners. it was connected to another large office by a bathroom with a phone next to the commode: real classy!) and play trivia games. Rich was one of the few people who had as much trivial knowledge as me, and Oscar would just sit back and laugh as Rich and I tried to stump each other with pop culture questions.

            When he left Dynacircuits the 2^nd time, for Tingstol, his main goal there was to become a VP so that he would get a company car. I have never known Rich to own a car in the 20 years I knew him. He drove a Jeep at Dyna, but he made the payments to the girl he was living with at the time, and when they broke up, she kept the car.

            Rich finally got his company car, a Taurus station wagon, but several months later he walked out of Tingstol after getting into an argument with the owner. It was a cold, rainy November day and Rich had to walk to a bus stop in Elk Grove Village and ride a bus back to his hovel (I never saw it, but he shared a house with another addict) in Oak Park.

            Rich was also one of the few co-workers my wife has met over the years, as I wrote in an earlier posting. We got together socially with co-workers at Dyna, but he scared her with his intensity. At the time, about 3-4 years into our marriage, I had expressed a whim of mine to establish a “Randyland”, a man cave, as the kids today say, in our 105-year-old Victorian in Elgin.

At one get together, Rich took this and ran with it. He came up to Lynn several times that night and kept going on about coming over the next weekend to begin construction of “Randyland”. Lynn looked at me with a frozen smile, “Yeah, sounds good.”  I knew it was the alcohol talking (another Rich weakness) and the “Randyland” never came to fruition.

Anyway, I always kind of felt that I had Rich to thank for the set-up I eventually got in the house we moved to in 1998. A really nice video/stereo room with ample storage for my books, albums, VCR tapes, and DVDs.

            Vaya con dios, Rich, and thanks.

17 – If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out – Cat Stevens 1971

 If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out

            This song is one of two Cat Stevens wrote for “Harold and Maude.” I was late getting to that movie, I didn’t see it until 1978 and it had come out in 1971. I guess it was the description, “death-obsessed 20 year old falls for 80 year old woman” that kept me away for so long.

            It’s played twice during the film, once, sung by Ruth Gordon’s Maude, and again….SPOILER ALERT…. after Harold has run his Jaguar hearse off a cliff following Maude’s suicide. The camera pulls back and pans up from the crumpled wreckage to the top of the cliff where a lone figure, Harold, is plucking the song on a banjo given to him by Maude, then Cat’s voice comes in and the song ends the movie on a glorious, life-affirming note.

            If you’ve never seen it, go out and buy it or get it from Netflix (I just got my Blu-Ray, Criterion Collection edition, that came out on the 12^th). Don’t let the thumbnail description put you off. It’s full of funny stuff and it has a great selection of Cat Stevens’ songs. There’s seven songs from “Mona Bone Jakon” and “Tea for the Tillerman”, plus two written specifically for the film.

            I saw it on HBO in 1978 (more on that coming up on “Kaffred’s Zune”), but did not get the full impact until I saw it at the Parkway theater in Chicago several years later in a double feature with “Where’s Poppa”, another black comedy starring Ruth Gordon, that, though very funny, pales in comparison with “Harold and Maude.”

            When I saw it on a full sized screen, for the first time I saw what Harold saw on Maude’s arm as they sat overlooking a harbor. It’s a number tattooed on her forearm from a concentration camp. Nowhere else in the film is it mentioned she is a Holocaust survivor. Up to that point, you see Maude as a sprite (AKA “Manic Pixie Dream girl” in a Wikipedia entry, "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."), teaching Harold the ways of the world with humor and insight, but that shot brought a gasp from me. On TV, you can’t see the tattoo (on my 19” anyway).

            Harold, being death obsessed, goes to funerals (it's where he meets Maude, she does the same for other reasons). At the first funeral in the film there is a close-up of the casket as it is going into the hearse and until I saw it on a big screen, I didn't see the brand of casket, an Elgin!  At one time Elgin was a hub of manufacturing: watches, bikes, street sweepers and caskets. Now we make burritos and lattes.

            In the late 70s and early 80s there were two theaters in the area that ran older films. The Parkway in Chicago changed its double feature daily, while the Varsity, in Evanston, changed their double feature every 2-4 days.

            I would get the flyer for each and make my plans to see the films each had. I enjoyed Francois Truffaut films and Werner Herzog films (that final shot in “Aguirre, Wrath of God” with the monkeys chittering around Klaus Kinski on a raft in the middle of a South American river still haunts me). The Parkway would have a Worst Film Festival every year and it was great to see the horrible movies with a full house.

There’s nothing like an audience to make the experience, I almost wet myself laughing at the trilogy of “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (lovingly re-created by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp in “Ed Wood”), “Robot Monster” (the director couldn’t afford a real costume so his “robot” was a guy in a gorilla suit with a space helmet on his head), and “Reefer Madness” (just plain funny, unintentionally).

I went through a phase in the early 1980s where I wanted to purchase or run a movie theater like these two, even going so far as driving down to Auburn, Illinois (about 4.5 hours south of Chicago) to look at a theater/coffee shop building. I did some research and found there were 4-5 small colleges within a 50-mile radius or so form Auburn that I could draw from, I thought.

However, the owner wanted $80,000 dollars for the building (I was working at Accutronics at the time after getting my MA from Western Illinois, making about $22,000/year) and I knew nothing about how to go about procuring older films or running a projector and I also knew that VCRs were becoming more popular and more and more obscure movies were becoming available. In fact, I think that building became a video store; it never reopened as a theater.

I think it was one of my better decisions to not purchase that albatross, though if I won the lottery tomorrow, and didn’t have to worry about running out of money, I’d seriously consider buying an old movie palace and fixing it up and running the movies I’d like to see on the big screen again. Movies like “Days of Heaven”, “Close Encounters”,  “Day for Night”, my favorite Truffaut film, “Apocalypse Now”, “Heaven’s Gate” (I know, but I liked it), Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” (I was lucky enough to see it at the Chicago Theater with a full orchestra in 1980(?)), ”Blade Runner”, “The Music Man” (guilty pleasure!), “Help!” (first saw it at the StarView Drive-in, in Elgin, long gone), and, of course, the Star Wars and “Lord of the Rings” films.

So, until that day arrives, if anyone out there would like to sponsor me….

16 – Margarita – Steve Dahl – 1992

            Margarita - Steve Dahl and the Dahlfins

            This is my favorite song from Steve Dahl. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since it came out. It’s the best of his non-parody songs and benefits, I feel, from a great production by Joe Thomas, who was a friend of Steve’s in the 90’s. Joe Thomas also produced Brian Wilson’s 329^th comeback album a few years later named “Your Imagination”, with a title song with lyrics co-written by S.R. Dahl.

            The only lyrics of Steve’s left in the song are the lines,

“Another bucket of sand
Another wave and the pier
I miss the way that I used
To call the shots around here”

Over the years since, Steve has played a version of the song with him singing all his lyrics. He has a way with words, obviously (30+ years in broadcasting), and many of his are better.

            The CD of  “Your Imagination,” when purchased at Best Buy, also included a bonus CD with an interview of Brian by Sean Lennon and also included a glorious version of “In My Room” from a concert he did in St. Charles, Illinois, when Brian lived there in the 90’s next door to (or across the street from) Joe Thomas. On it, Brian harmonizes with Bruce Johnston (once and future Beach Boy), Timothy B. Schmit (Eagles), Christopher Cross, and Jim Peterik (Ides of March).

            “Margarita” is Steve’s story song about the invention of the margarita (duh!).

            As I wrote earlier I have been a fan of the Stever (and Garry Meier and Bruce Wolf) since the early days of his “Rude Awakening “ show on the Loop in 1979. I have been a subscriber to his podcast ($9.95/month for Steve’s daily podcast and twice weekly podcasts form Kevin Matthews, cheap!) from its start. I enjoy his take on everything pop culture and family related.

            He is the quickest witted broadcaster and I am one of the few who look back on his post-Garry days with Bruce Wolf with fond memories. Bruce Wolf was the second quickest wit in broadcasting (don’t care for him as much today in his right wing nutball incarnation) and it was a joy to listen to them as they riffed off each other, rushing to be the first with the best hilarious comment on some news story.

            No one challenged Steve for quickness, though his current co-host/sidekick, Dag Juhlin, shows a lot of promise. There are times when things are flying so fast and furious that Steve doesn’t even hear Dag’s funny asides.

            Just the other day, in their bashing of Jim Belushi’s recent column in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Bullsh-t”, Dag said in response to Steve’s claim that Belushi had filed a copyright on the term “Pillanoid” from his column, Dag said, “ He should trademark “Belush-t”. That’s pretty funny, but Steve never acknowledged it as he and Brendan Greely bounced comments and laughs off each other.

            It reminds me of one of my funniest lines that no one ever heard. When I was in my second year of community college, I was taking a night class in Western Civilization and one night we heard a loud “Whoooo!” from down the hall. The teacher said, “Oh that’s Mr. Clark (or whatever his name was, it was 38 years ago), I saw him wheeling a toilet into his class. I don’t know what that’s all about.”

            Now in 1974 I hadn’t been exposed to Steve Dahl or David Letterman, so I didn’t have the wiseacre in me, to say anything out loud, but in my mind I said,  “Cold seat.”