Jim’s Blog: How AT40 Remembered John Lennon
In December of 1980, John Lennon‘s comeback single, “(Just Like) Starting Over” was riding high on the charts. On December 8, 1980, a Monday, he was shot to death in New York City. This left the producers of American Top 40 with a dilemma. The show for the next weekend, December 13/14, had already been mailed to radio stations. With people around the world in mourning, it wouldn’t be right for Casey to play “Starting Over” without mentioning the event.
Today, a program like AT40 would simply re-record the program segment and make it available for stations to download. (That’s how we get AT40 each week.) But in 1980, the program was sent via the U.S. Mail as a box of four vinyl discs, one disc per hour of the show. So when the AT40 staff re-recorded the program segment containing “Starting Over,” it had to be pressed onto a disc to replace the hour containing “Starting Over,” and then mailed.
Ideally, the replacement would arrive in time. If it didn’t, stations could go ahead and broadcast the program as it had been produced before Lennon’s murder. AT40 executive producer Tom Rounds also suggested a third option—since “Starting Over” was the only song in that particular segment of the program, stations could simply skip the segment entirely and play their own copy of the song without an introduction or closing comment from Casey.
Nobody knows how many stations chose each option, although at least one major affiliate, WBBM-FM in Chicago, chose the third option. AT40 historian Pete Battistini says it was eerie to hear the song in the countdown without a word from Casey.
This Sunday’s retro broadcast of American Top 40 will be that historic show from the weekend of December 13, 1980. Its connection with the death of John Lennon makes it one of the most unusual editions in the show’s history. Hear it this Sunday between noon and 4 on Magic 98.
Jim’s Blog: Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday
I grew up in a musical house. One of the bedrooms is still known as the “piano room,” where my mother’s upright piano has sat since the day my parents moved in, before I was born. I started piano lessons when I was eight, and I learned how to read music a little bit, which helped with my abortive career as a middle-school saxophone player. One of my brothers played guitar, eventually took up the trombone, and played in the band all through high school.
But there was more music in my house than that. Mother and Dad bought records and sang in the church choir (despite Dad’s inability to carry a tune), and Mother frequently played the piano for fun, especially Christmas songs. We liked to put a big stack of Christmas records on the console stereo, filling the house with music while we put up the tree, or decorated Christmas cookies, or just for atmosphere. When I moved out on my own, I started buying Christmas records of my own. The Temptations Christmas Card was first, in 1982. I collected a few vinyl albums during the 80s, most notably the soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas and Phil Spector’s Christmas Album. Once the CD era began, I started buying more; in the download era, my Christmas library has exploded.
Although I am as irreligious as anybody you know, I like Christmas music, even religious Christmas music. I find no inconsistency in this, because I believe that even without Christianity, we would have something like the Christmas season anyhow—a time for expressing our love and appreciation to the people closest to us through acts of generosity and kindness. It would still be a season fired with magic, in which we’re showered with good things for the simple reason that we’re part of a human community. Because happiness has always moved human beings to song, we’d still have music that expresses those emotions. The symbols found in the songs might be different, but the joy would be the same.
What I believe about Christmas is this: the best “things” with which we are showered in this season are not material objects. The greatest gifts of the holiday season are not presents, but presence. That idea inspires a song that is always one of the first ones I want to hear every year: “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday.” There is no mightier version of it than the one Ross Bon and the Mighty Blue Kings, a Chicago band that used to play a little bit around Madison in the early 00s. Click here and turn it up.
Jim’s Blog: A Dissenting View
Lanette and Sara both posted recipes on their blogs this past week. Ginger says she’s been doing some fancy cooking at her house lately, too. But if you are waiting for me to post a recipe, you’ll be waiting a long time.
I don’t like to cook anymore, although I used to. When I was a kid, back when other pre-teen boys were learning how to operate power tools under the watchful eye of their fathers, my mother was teaching me how to do stuff in the kitchen. I’d frequently whip up a meal for the family when she was at work late. It was never gourmet fare, because that’s not what she was into, but it was good and serviceable family food. When Ann and I got married, we shared the cooking. She had her specialties and I had mine. But then came the years when we both had jobs that meant we didn’t get home until nearly 8:00 at night. We eventually made a deal: we both hated the idea of having to cook, so dinner would be made by whichever one of us hated the idea less.
Our working hours eventually changed, but my attitude toward cooking has not. It’s a necessary evil to me. I do it if I’m the one who wants to eat, or to give Ann a break if she’s done it a few nights in a row. But whatever I’m making isn’t going to be fancy. If I have to open more than two cans to create something, I feel like Emeril.
I’d be perfectly happy to eat in a restaurant every night of my life. Or at your house. What are you making tonight?
Jim’s Blog: Good Intentions Are Not Enough
You have probably seen some of your friends on social media posting #MeToo. This is a campaign that started last weekend, encouraging women who have suffered sexual assault or harassment to post the hashtag #MeToo. The goal is to make people visualize the scope of the problem—that victims are not just people who are famous or high-profile, like those mentioned in news accounts of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. That they are regular people. People we know.
I have been astounded by the number of my friends who have posted #MeToo.
Related to this are social media posts talking about the little things men do, unconsciously, that may not rise to the level of harassment, but which reinforce the mistaken idea that women and men are unequal in status. This is a thing that has me concerned about my own behavior.
I have long called myself a feminist. I have always considered myself to be open-minded, fair, and respectful in dealing with the women in my life, especially those in my workplaces. I have had to be: at my last corporate job, which I left in 2003, I was the lone man in a department with 17 women. I got invited to the baby showers and shoe-shopping excursions just like everyone else, and it was a point of pride for me. If they’re doing that, I thought, they must think I’m OK.
The ratio is not quite so extreme at Magic: of the 14 members of the Magic Crew, there are 10 women and four men. Based on my track record, I think to myself that I treat women in general, and those 10 women in particular, pretty well. But now I wonder: am I really treating them the way I think I’m treating them? What would they say about how I act toward them?
Maybe I should ask. Maybe things I think are wisecracks or compliments don’t come off that way to my female colleagues and other women I know.
Some men—not me—are pushing back against the idea of even thinking about this stuff. They claim that there’s no way to know what might be perceived as disrespectful by any given woman. “I can’t please them all. What am I supposed to do? Say nothing?” Except they don’t plan to say nothing. They plan to keep doing the same stuff they’ve been doing, even if it’s perceived as belittling or threatening or worse.
If you’re a man, throwing up your hands and doing nothing is a cop-out. The thing men should be learning from the #MeToo campaign and the various conversations around it is that thinking and change are no longer optional. Hard as they can be, they’re no longer optional.
I hope I really am the open-minded, fair, and respectful-toward-women man I believe I am. However: in this world, it’s no longer enough to have good intentions, and to hope that something you’d like to believe about yourself is true. Everybody has good intentions—but they’re not worth much unless you follow through on them.
I’d better work harder at being the man I want to be, so there won’t be a question anymore.
(If you have thoughts about this you would like to share with me, you can e-mail me. Copy my address into your e-mail program: jim.bartlett@magic98.com.)
Jim’s Blog: The Question
This past weekend, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I was hanging out in a brewery tap room when a woman came in. She was there to lead a yoga class (yoga in a brewery is a concept I can get behind). While she was waiting for her students to arrive, we started to visit.
It turned out that she was a refugee from Hurricane Irma, the one that struck the Florida Keys last month. She had family and friends in Kalamazoo, but she also said that since the hurricane, she had slept in her car and even in a storage cubicle now and then. “I’ve lost everything,” she said.
After we had been talking for a while, I asked her what I thought was an innocent question. “So, what are you going to do now?”
I never expected the response I got: “That’s actually the cruelest question you could ask me.”
I nearly fell off my barstool, and I immediately began apologizing.
She stopped me. “You’re not the only one who’s asked me that, and I know it comes from a place of concern, but it’s an impossible question. I still have PTSD from all that I’ve been through. The only thing I can do right now is roll out my yoga mat and breathe.”
We talked for only about 10 minutes, but it’s going to be a long time before I forget her.
I’ve got troubles. You’ve got troubles. Sometimes they seem like mountains, and we feel like we’re barely able to climb them. But some people’s mountains make ours seem like anthills. It’s a good idea to remember the difference.
Jim’s Blog: My Favorite Band
Through the middle of the 1970s, Steely Dan was merely a band I heard on the radio, although I liked whatever I heard. Under the right conditions, “Do It Again” can still transport me back to the winter I turned 13 and how I tried to figure out just what it was about—and not just the song, but everything else that was happening to me in that season. “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” reminds me of the summer of 1974, and how I spent it hanging out in the musty basement of our house after the fire in the upstairs that spring. In each of the next two summers, there were Steely Dan songs on the radio that I didn’t hear nearly often enough to suit me: “Black Friday” and “Kid Charlemagne.”
Then came “Peg,” at the end of 1977. I had never heard a sound like that sound—not from Steely Dan or anybody else—and it blew my mind. I got Aja for Christmas that year (after a couple of months of begging, no doubt), and I played it constantly for the next several months. I went out and bought every other Steely Dan album I could get my hands on, and by the summer of 1978 I had them all, and I got everything new that came out after. When I got my first CD player in the late 80s, one of the first discs I bought was a Steely Dan compilation. One of the most pleasing gifts I ever received was the Citizen Steely Dan box set. In the download era, I have acquired literally dozens of bootlegs. For 40 years this fall, Steely Dan has been my favorite band of them all.
I have been fortunate enough to see the band live three times: in 2000, in 2007, and again in 2013. At the 2013 show, it was clear that Walter Becker, who died last weekend at age 67, wasn’t moving particularly well—in fact, he didn’t move much at all, standing stiffly and sometimes looking uncomfortable, and I recall reading that in succeeding years, he would sometimes perform sitting down. He had missed shows earlier this summer, but all indications were that he would return to the band. Now, of course, he will not.
Steely Dan started in the early 70s as a conventional band, but eventually got down to Becker, Donald Fagen, and the best session players in New York and Los Angeles. Sometimes Becker was like a session cat himself—he’s not on “Peg” at all—and Steely Dan’s ever-shifting studio lineup was such that I couldn’t tell you if he played some famous solo, or if it was some other big-time player. (He never took a lead vocal until the band’s tours in the 1990s.) I was not too concerned with who played what. To me, Becker and Fagen were a hive-mind, architects of a sound that nobody else could hear. That sound—which eludes my ability to describe, although I know it when I hear it, words and music, cool and funky, dissonant and harmonious, funny and cynical and ominous and ultimately inscrutable—has been in my head and heart since I was a teenager. And it’s always going to be there, at least until I follow Walter Becker to wherever he went last weekend.
(Cross-posted from The Hits Just Keep on Comin’.)
Jim’s Blog: What I Saw at the Total Eclipse
“I feel weird,” Madea said.
“Me too,” I said.
It was three minutes until the total eclipse in Princeton, Kentucky. The sky was turning dark, and a 360-degree orange sunset was descending. The sun through our eclipse glasses was reduced to a tiny, shrinking sliver. But what was most notable at that moment was the weird feeling. It was more than just excitement over what we were about to see; it was an almost-woozy feeling of disorientation, as if our bodies, disconnected from the thinking part of our brains, were warning us that something was wrong.
Not wrong, but different. Every day of our lives, going back to Day One, has begun with a sunrise and ended with a sunset. But this—this darkness at 1:23 in the afternoon—was a disruption. We were, in those moments, not much different than the birds that stopped singing or the crickets that started chirping: creatures responding on a primal and physical level to the sun, as all living things do, birds or bugs or human beings.
But let me back up and tell the whole story.
Yesterday, I drove from Madison to Murray, Kentucky, where some old and dear friends of ours, Madea and Scott, live. Murray was getting 99.94 percent of totality, but I didn’t drive 10 hours not to go all the way. So we drove about an hour to Princeton this morning and staked out a spot in a city park. There were lots of people there, but it wasn’t crowded. They had come from all over. The folks next to us were from Indiana; behind us were two Wiccans who had come from New Hampshire.
The partial phase of the eclipse started at 11:50AM. Gradually the moon bit into the sun, from the 1:00 position, approximately. You could feel the temperature start to drop between a half-hour and 45 minutes from totality. The sunlight took on a silvery cast at about 10 minutes before totality, and the silver increased before darkness took over. (The weird quality of the light contributed to that woozy feeling, I think.) I had a talking app that counted down the time to totality and gave me things to look for. I did not see the “diamond ring” effect that’s supposed to occur just before totality, but when the app announced “glasses off,” we looked up into a dark sky and saw the dark circle of the moon, thinly illuminated around the edge by the silver corona of the sun. I tried to look at it with binoculars, but it was better to simply look up at it with the naked eye, straight overhead.
It was magnificent. Some people cheered, hooted, or laughed, especially in the first seconds of totality, but the overwhelming feeling in the crowd was one of awe and wonder.
We had two minutes and 36 seconds of totality before the app announced “glasses on,” and the sun emerged from behind the shadow. The silvery light returned for a moment but the day quickly brightened—faster, it seemed than it had darkened, although maybe that’s the difference between waiting for something and the something having happened, the way a sense of expectation decompresses into the feeling of “wasn’t that something?” It wasn’t long before we packed up the lawn chairs and hit the road. We arrived back in Murray at just about the same moment the partial phase ended and the eclipse, in this part of the country, was history.
Tomorrow I will return to Wisconsin. By the time I get home, I will have spent more than 20 hours in the car to experience those two minutes and 36 seconds of totality.
Even at twice the price, it would still be a bargain.
Jim’s Blog: New Favorite Hangout
A couple of Saturdays ago, Ann and I visited a spot that zoomed up our list of favorite Madison hangouts after a single visit. The Biergarten at Olbrich Park opened at the end of June. Milwaukee has had public beer gardens in parks for the last several summers, but Olbrich is the first one in Madison. It’s right on the shore of Lake Monona, with picnic tables, space to spread a blanket, and lots of room for your kids to run around. (There’s even a sandbox for them to play in.) The Biergarten serves a half-dozen Wisconsin beers plus cheese curds—of course—pretzels, and mini-brats. Or, you can bring a picnic if you want.
It was a lengthy process for the company running the Biergarten to get the proper permits. Neighbors were rightfully concerned about noise, safety, and selling beer in a park, but it looked to us as though the owners are doing a good job with security. I’d like to think that the kind of people who would hang out in such a setting are not the kind who go out with the intention of getting mindlessly loaded and stupid as a result. I hope they’re people like us, and you: people who simply want to enjoy two of our favorite things—Wisconsin craft beer and the great Madison outdoors.
Chances that you’ll run into Ann and me at Olbrich before the summer is over: approximately 100 percent.
Jim’s Blog: Farewell to Brennan’s
The announcement this morning that Brennan’s Markets are closing at the end of September is a shock to everybody—especially to those of us from Monroe. Brennan’s was established in Monroe in 1942, so almost none of us can remember when they weren’t part of our town.
If my memory is faulty the following details, I won’t be a bit surprised: I believe Brennan’s had a brick-and-mortar store in Monroe that was demolished in the 1965 Palm Sunday tornado. Not long after, it started operating out of a plywood building nearby, and it seems to me that the plywood building served as the main location in Monroe for a number of years.
While some of the fruit and vegetables we ate came from other places, Brennan’s was the only place to get certain things my mother wanted for canning and freezing: giant boxes of peaches, giant tins of frozen cherries, that sort of thing. One thing we rarely got from there was cheese, at least when I was a boy: the milk from my father’s cows went for cheese, so we bought it from the factory that took his milk. But after the cheese factory closed, Brennan’s became a go-to spot. When Ann and I lived in Illinois and Iowa, we often made a Brennan’s stop on our way out of town. If you were serious about cheese, the stuff from the grocery store just wouldn’t do.
When we moved home to the Madison area in 2000, we got reacquainted with Brennan’s. There’s no place quite like it, all that fruit, open to the outdoors on the nicest days, and all that cheese to sample. (Because I am a civilized person, I never eat as many samples as I want.) For a beer geek such as I, browsing the coolers is great entertainment. Not enough people know how great a source Brennan’s can be for baked goods.
And now, this morning, I’m feeling a little bit guilty that we haven’t shopped there more often.
Jim’s Blog: Kid Vacations
Every summer, from the time I was six or seven until I was 16, I got to spend a few days with my cousin Rob in Brodhead (and later in Madison), and he would spend a few days on the farm with us. These vacations became the kind of thing a kid looks forward to with a degree of anticipation that can never be matched by reality.
The biggest thrill would come on the spur of the moment when we’d all be at Grandma’s for some family gathering with all the cousins, and we’d hatch the plan while fooling around during the afternoon: “Mom, can Rob come home with us?” Now and then, Mom would get together with my aunt—her sister—and the answer would be, “Yes.” It was like hitting the kid-fun lottery.
When we were little, we flooded our sandbox canal systems with water from the garden hose, camped in the back yard, and messed around in our kiddie swimming pools. When we were older, Madison probably had a greater allure for me than the farm had for Rob. My aunt eventually gave us permission to go almost anywhere we wanted on the Metro bus, and so we did plenty of exploring. In the summer of 1975, we came downtown one afternoon to stand in line outside the Esquire Theater to see Jaws. I was already a denizen of State Street by then, especially the record stores.
These cousin-vacations ended when we all got to be teenagers, got driver’s licenses, and got too dangerously mobile. Rob has been gone for many years now, but I always think of him during the summer.