Crosswalks to Nowhere

I was looking for something in my files and I ran across a whole bunch of other stuff that I think would be interesting to share. I decided to create a new category for this material called, "Dude, I Forgot About That!"

I will admit right here that this category is only a thin veneer for something other people might call "nostalgia," but this stuff is too cool and too recent (relatively speaking) to fall under the "n" word. Plus, let's face it: I don't want to admit to being that old.

Glenn Miller is "nostalgia." The Primitives are "Dude, I Forgot About That!"

The Primitives were a band from Coventry, England, that flashed across college and alternative radio stations in the late 1980s with a brand of jangly guitar-based pop that sounded like a cross between Blondie, The Ramones, and The Buzzcocks, with a dose of Beatles thrown in. Their trademark was a lot of ear-splitting buzzing guitars, a lot of drum bangin', and really cool chick vocals on top-- all smashed into 3-minute-and-under mini masterpieces.

The band at its peak consisted of Paul Court (guitar), Steve Dullaghan (bass), Tig Williams (drums), and a bleached-blonde lead vocalist named Tracy Tracy.

They released a couple of singles and EPs on their own before being signed to RCA in 1987. The album Lovely came out in 1988, and their first major hit, which you couldn't get away from between late 1988 and early 1989, was called "Crash." (This is the cover from their Japanese 3" CD single. Maybe 3" CDs would be an interesting topic for another "Dude.." entry.)

Now here's a cool thing about the Internet. Go to this site, choose "Interact" and then go to MP3. Many of the band's songs are right there, full versions, free for downloading. My suggestions are "Crash" (the Lovely version), "Dreamwalk Baby," and "Stop Killing Me," a really cool breakup song that carries the distinction of proving to me that you can blow out a set of headphones. Really nice ones, too.

Two of my favorite tracks, "Spacehead" and "Through The Flowers" are missing from the site, but they do appear on this collection. A recommended buy.

There was a remixed version of "Crash" on the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack, but whoever did it managed to pull any soul out of it, giving it a bad mid-1990s feel. Avoid that one.

The Primitives toured the world through 1991, including a double-bill with The Sugarcubes that I missed here in Chicago in March of '90. (A lady I worked with saw the show and gushed about it for months. She did bring me a cool Sugarcubes pin, though.) They released a couple more albums, but by the early 1990s they were pretty much done with their mission.

It was sort of neat to start the 1980s with The Pretenders and Blondie and end the decade with The Primitives.

p.s. The reason I wrote this in the first place was because I ran across a press release from the band's fan club, "Spacehead," from 1989. They had some cool T-shirts for sale, too.

Lyrics for a couple of the songs are on the next page.

I used to have a weekly radio show on WHCM, the radio station at Harper College. Thursday afternoons from 5:00-7:00 pm was my gig, often going until 9:00 'cause the guy who followed me didn't always show up.

When I joined in the fall of 1979, the station had a fairly loose format. The air staff could play just about anything they wanted, provided nobody listening (esp. faculty advisers) complained about it, and it fit within the guidelines of what was supposed to be played during your shift.

The guy before me played a lot of progressive rock-- he was heavy on the Pink Floyd, Rush, Genesis, and yes, Kraftwerk.

My shift included the dinner hour, so I was supposed to play "softer" material, as if hearing Yes' "Heart of the Sunrise" would cause indigestion to those listening in (who were mostly on-campus anyway, eating the school's food that, frankly, didn't need any help from Messrs. Anderson, et al in that department).

The challenge was to figure out what to play on the air that wouldn't sound, well, wussy. I was listening to a lot of different stuff at the time: progressive rock, SoCal country rock, Steely Dan, Beatles, Stones... and remember that this was 1979, so there was all this new stuff on my turntable like The Clash, The Ramones, Blondie, OMD, Siouxsie, and Elvis Costello. How would I pull this off?

One method was to carry notes with me, and when I thought of a song that might fit into the format I'd write it down and stick the little piece of paper back in my wallet. I ran across a bunch of these little scraps of paper, and I figured I'd share them here.

This particular note, from what I can figure, dates from around the fall of 1981 when faculty came down on the air staff for playing "material that's too wild for our audience." They took on the philosophy (and slogan) that we were there to provide "Something For Everyone" so we really had to tone it down.

Here's one side of the note, and here's the other. I deciphered my handwriting and offered some explanations on the next page.

One of these days I'll pull the playlists off one of the tapes of one of my shows.

As I mentioned in Sunday's blog entry, the soundtrack in my head covered a lot of territory while I was riding my bike through the woods.

At one point, I thought of XTC's brilliant Skylarking, because that album was practically glued inside my Walkman during the summer of 1987. It is, as the band's Andy Partridge described it, "a summer's day cooked into one cake."

Then my thoughts turned to the perfect counterpart to Skylarking: Shriekback's Big Night Music. If Skylarking is a summer's day, Big Night Music is the space between dusk and dawn, when all the creatures who have been asleep during the day come out to play. And haunt.

Interesting factoids: (1) both albums were released around the same time; and (2) one of the key players in Shriekback is Barry Andrews, who was XTC's keyboard player from 1977 to 1979. (1) is probably a coincidence, but when you hear the two albums together you can definitely hear the thematic complements.

The liner notes from the band on the album read as follows:

Big Night Music - songs to sing in your sleep. Shriekback celebrate the blessed dark the place where they were always most at home... Big Night Music is the shape and rhythm of two different kinds of nights: nights of heat and weirdness in which we alone are awake, humming with forbidden energy, nights into which we would not send our dogs wild sea and wet forest and eyes and teeth or those other nights fragrant with blossom, incandescent with moonlight and dreams, possessed by a cool beauty which evaporates with the dew.

It is, perhaps, worth mentioning that Big Night Music is entirely free of drum machines, sequencers, Fairlight Page R's - digital heartbeats of every kind. Seductive though they are, Shriekback have opted to make a different kind of music - one which exalts human frailty and the harmonious mess of nature over the simplistic reductions of our crude computers.

We Shrieks are well pleased with our record, (this side of smugness and occasionally the other) and we obviously hope you will buy it voraciously. But we also want to leave you with an intimation that the universe, all its horrors notwithstanding, is strange and marvellous; that love is the law and the drug and the pull and the push of all we do; that the pursuit of beauty is useful, honourable and healing; and that our actions in this time, in choosing forgiveness over vendetta, brilliance over mediocrity, the clean difficult way over the dubious easy option, will determine whether or not we will realise the wealth of possibilities implicit in our existence.

As for Shriekback, we have a suspicion that it's all going to be fine, just fine. With this in mind, here is Shriekback's fifth album - Big Night Music - and it's as good as we could make it. Now it's all yours...

Awesome. Not only are these the most accurate liner notes I've ever read, but probably among the most inspiring.

On to the music:

The album opens with a blast of horns and rhythms in the song "Black Light Trap". The lyrics are a stream-of-consciousness that reminds me of one of those dreams where everything happens so fast that you just go along for the ride, watching the images fly past.

From there, we're on to a less frenetic adventure with two guys who could be CIA operatives or just plain old hitmen. Or maybe neither of the above. "Gunning For The Buddha" also has the distinction of having the prettiest background vocals I've ever heard on a rock record.

"The Shining Path" and "The Reptiles and I" take us on moonlit walks through the jungle.

A little later, there's the underwater dream sequence "Underwaterboys", where all sorts of creatures and characters float through the song.

My favorite track on the album is "Exquisite." I'm immediately placed on the sand under the trees, near the bay of some steamy tropical jungle, in the relaxed pursuit of complete pleasure. The guitars, pianos, chimes, and percussion all flow together in a perfectly smooth mix of leisure and urgency. (This is a dangerous one to listen to while you're commuting to work. :-)

The album closes off with the very pretty lullaby "Cradle Song" which tells you that in spite of all the monsters and other critters who've invaded your dreams for the previous 40 minutes, everything is okay.

The CD has been out of print for a while, but there are copies to be found on ebay. It's definitely worth seeking out.

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to Bow Wow Wow's "C30 C60 C90 Go" and realized how appropriate the song is today, 20-some years after its release.

It's a tribute to portable cassette players and the beauty of being able to record what you want and carry it with you. The song also promotes the element of being a modern-day pirate.

(The lyrics are on the next page. I couldn't find them anywhere on the internet, so I transcribed them from listening to it. Now the lyrics are on the internet. :-)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the recording industry was whining about how home taping is killing the music business. Their position was that taping a song off the radio or from your friends' collections meant one less record sold. In fact, if you run across a major-label UK LP from that era, you'll likely see a little logo in the corner showing a cassette with crossbones underneath and the words "Home Taping is Killing Music." This led to a tax being levied on all blank tapes sold in the UK (and maybe in the US, too-- my memory is hazy on this).

Malcolm McLaren (BWW's manager) wrote this song in an attempt to get people to tape more: Be Pirates! Bow Wow Wow's label, EMI, wasn't even aware that this song promoted home taping until someone in the British Phonographic Industry (equivalent to our beloved RIAA) brought it to the attention of corporate executives.

What's interesting is that we've been in the same spot for the past few years with digital music players. If you subsititute "the internet" for "radio" and "iPod" for "cassette" in the lyrics the song suddenly becomes topical. Now the record companies are busting kids for downloading and offering their libraries through KaZaa and similar peer-to-peers.

I'm not advocating piracy on any level. I believe that people should be paid for what they do, whether it's recording an album or brewing a grande soy mocha (don't get me started on tip jars). And usually, when I want to share music with a friend, I will actually buy the CD and give it to them.

My position is that the business model the recording companies have operated under since the industry's beginning (two centuries ago-- well, in the late 1800s) has long since become obsolete. It used to be you'd stick a cylinder or shellac disc on your windup record player so you could hear songs and words from important and/or popular performers of the day. Unless he came to your town, you had no other way of hearing Caruso.

When radio appeared in the 1920s, all sorts of tumult came about because the artists now had another way of getting their work out there. Record companies started failing, and the only way the big ones survived were by being bought out by the companies now established in broadcasting (e.g. RCA, owner of NBC, bought Victor and the Columbia Broadcasting System bought the similarly-named but totally separate Columbia Phonograph Company).

Things were relatively calm until the 1970s when quality home taping equipment suddenly became affordable. The whining which McLaren took as opportunity started.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and you'll find Napster, KaZaa, WinMX, LimeWire, etc. etc. Guess whose collective undies are in a bunch again?

It would seem to me that if I were fighting the same battles every 20-30 years I would look at a different way of doing business.

Enter iTunes and the legal Napster.

According to the Wall Street Journal, iTunes has sold over 70 million downloads since its inception. The jury is out as to whether the venture has been successful, but the general sentiment is that financially it hasn't. From my experience as a consumer, 99 cents a song isn't so bad. I have to say, though, that for every 5 times I go to iTunes or Napster to download a song, 3 of those attempts are unsuccesful because they don't have the song I'm looking for. I usually get the dreaded "partial album" response or no listing for the artist at all.

I like CDs. I like having something tangible with artwork, liner notes, and lyrics that I can put on my table when it's playing and then on my shelf. I may rip the songs to my PC and load them on my iPod, but I like having a complete package that the artist presents as their work. That's something you don't get with a directory full of MP3s. Going all-digital is not the answer.

What should the industry do? I dunno. Hire me, pay me a few million dollars a year, and I'm sure I'll come up with something that's better than what's already there.

25 years ago today, the old Comiskey Park saw its biggest crowd in a long time when Disco Demolition took place in between games at a Sox-Tigers doubleheader.

Anti-disco music sentiment had been building for a while, and Chicago DJ Steve Dahl built an army of anti-Disco followers (The Insane Coho Lips) who enjoyed listening to him "blow up" disco records on his morning show. As teenagers, some of us were looking for a cause, and this was the closest thing we could find.

The whole event wasn't supposed to be a big deal: we'd watch the Sox most likely lose the first game, then we'd have the mid-game show where Dahl came out to blow up the disco records people brought into the park as part of their admission. I was there, along with my friend Craig and his girlfriend Tracy, wearing our Loop shirts.

Rather than retell the story, click on the link above or here for the story.

I have to say that it was one of the most surreal things I've ever experienced: a bonfire in center field, burnout kids playing "running bases" between second and third, and a couple making out on home plate with the crowd cheering them on. And on the scoreboard above everything were the words "Please return to your seats."

Something to tell the grandkids at some point, maybe.

I saw on the 'net today that the BBC's CeeFax videotext service is turning 30 years old today. Unless you've spent time in the UK (or Europe, where the television broadcasters there have similar services), you probably aren't familiar with CeeFax or videotext services.

In the days before the internet, there was a lot of talk about being able to get news, weather, sports, movie times, etc. through your TV. In the early 1970s, some British engineers discovered they could put pages of text on part of a station's TV signal which could be decoded at the user's end with the use of a special decoder box. This service would not be seen by people who didn't have the box, nor would it interfere with any of the station's regular programming.

Videotext services offer the user lots of information, presented in text and very rudimentary graphics (think Commodore 64), which could come in quite handy if there's no internet-connected computer nearby. I've used the videotext services on the German, Swiss, and Dutch TV networks while traveling in those countries, primarily for weather information (a picture of a cloud with raindrops coming out of it is universal).

Field Communications, the company that owned WFLD-TV Channel 32 here in Chicago, started a subscription-based videotext service in mid-1981 called Keyfax, where you could rent the decoder box and have all the services I described above. The company they set up to provide this service was called Keycom Electronic Publishing.

To get people interested in Keyfax, Channel 32 used to run the service "in the clear" from midnight to 6:00 am, meaning that you could watch the service (but not choose the pages that would be displayed) on your TV without being a subscriber. They called this program "Nite-Owl," and from what I read at the time it was very popular with insomniacs, third-shift people, and late-nighters who were just coming in.

Nite-Owl ran in 20-minute "orbits" of programming, with 20 minutes of news, sports, and weather, followed by 20 minutes of "leisure," then back for 20 more minutes of news. The video would refresh and give a new picture every 40 seconds or so, and the audio portion was a music bed of soft-rock.

It was actually pretty cool, having a service on your TV that would run a constant rotating stream of news, weather, business, and sports. In between the "main" segments, they would run trivia quizzes and contests, and they had a "Bulls-Eye Club" that you could join. They even had a "Viewer Mail" segment.

Keyfax was shut down in early 1983. Field Communications was being dismantled, and they sold their TV stations to Metromedia. These were the days when there were over-the-air pay TV services in Chicago, each of which required its own box to be attached to your set. And on top of all this, cable television was finally arriving in Chicago and the suburbs. Put all of this together, and the consumer was faced with many options as to how their TV dollars could be spent. There just wasn't enough interest to keep Keyfax going.

So, what began as a fairly powerful service on one part of the globe is barely a footnote here. It was pretty cool, though.

Following up on my Keyfax post of a few weeks ago, I found this page by David E. Carlson which discusses Keycom and Keyfax.

His Online Timeline is pretty interesting, too.

Thanks to Gizmodo for these links:

Here's a link to a site that celebrates cool, Japanese-designed gadgets from the 70s and 80s. I even owned a couple of these things.

In the early 1960s, some French guys invented a machine called a Scopitone, which was a sort of video jukebox. Follow the link to see some of the films that were made for the Scopitone (the "Whiter Shade of Pale" film is great in an acid-induced-60s kind of way) and more about the machine itself.

Finally, I swear I thought this was a joke at first, but our bestest buddy Steve found a new way to make money off the iPod juggernaut: iPod Socks.

Years before The Beatles released their Anthology, the best movie about the band's history was a 1984 movie called The Compleat Beatles. This was the first truly comprehensive documentary on the band, covering their earliest days all the way through their breakup.

There's the archival footage we've all seen before, but the people who made this movie also found a lot of stuff that, at least in 1984, was rarely if ever seen. One real achievement was their combining the old silent Cavern Club film with the scratchy audio track of the song "Some Other Guy" to create one of the band's first video-and-sound performances. There are lots of interviews with producer George Martin and some of the folks who were there with The Beatles during their lifetime, which offers a nice perspective on what these guys were up to (and against). There are clips of the group's first concerts in Washington and elsewhere, as well as black-and-white film of the Our World performance of "All You Need is Love," which hadn't been widely seen in the US. Notably missing, though, are their performances on The Ed Sullivan show (although Ed's introduction is included from a kinescope), Shea Stadium, The Hollywood Bowl, and other important appearances.

There are also interviews with Allan Williams, the band's first manager, and Tony Sheridan, with whom the group recorded a rockin' version of "My Bonnie." We also get a little too much of Gerry Marsden (of Brian Epstein's other Merseybeat band, Gerry and The Pacemakers), who shares his views on what happened back in the early days.

The movie was released at a time when Beatles fans had grown weary of waiting for the long-rumored The Long and Winding Road, a movie the band was supposedly assembling themselves to tell their own story. Compleat filled the gap very nicely for the next decade.

The Compleat Beatles was rendered obsolete by the release of Anthology, the latter being far more expansive with better footage, a lot more detail, and of course interviews with and the endorsement of The Beatles themselves. What makes Compleat really nice, though, is that it tells the story in the space of about 90 minutes. If you don't have 10 hours to watch the entire Anthology, this is an excellent way to get the story in a much more compact form.

My reason for writing this mini-review comes from the fact that Lisa and I started watching The Rutles last night, and we realized there were a lot of inside Beatles jokes that she wasn't picking up. So it was my opportunity to present an educational experience to her. :-)

Coming up: a review of The Rutles. Tonight: Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard at The Auditorium.

I've started converting some of my old VHS tapes to DVD, which means I'm running across stuff I haven't seen since I recorded it years ago.

So far, I've run across several episodes of Chico and The Man, The Two Ronnies, Monty Python, lots of SCTV, and a bunch of random stuff that I taped once cable TV came to Mt. Prospect.

In some cases, I'm not exactly sure why I recorded them, so I wrote it off to the fact that I was just playing with a new toy.

(Unfortunately, I did not save any episodes of "Morrie's Markdown Mart," a weekly half-hour infomercial on the long-gone Modern Satellite Network, featuring products from the also-long-gone C.O.M.B. closeout distributors. The crown jewel of their product line was the Commodore SX-64, billed as "the portable version of the most popular personal computer in the world!!")

I also ran across some great MTV clips, including XTC's Andy Partridge hosting "Post-Modern" in 1989, and XTC's appearance on Late Night With David Letterman that same week.

The final episodes of Cheers, Newhart, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson also made it to tape. What makes some of these recordings interesting are the commercials that are still intact.

Chicago radio host Steve Dahl makes a few appearances here, with his Greetings From Graceland, An Extremely Low Budget Show, It's Too Early, and a couple episodes of his cable-access Steve Dahl Show, the highlight of which was Garry Meier riding a Chia Pet through the magic of Chroma-Key.

As I discover more things I find interesting, I'll mention them here, perhaps with vidcaps.

Not only is this an opportunity to archive the stuff I want to keep, but it's also creating a nice stack of videos which may find their way to eBay as I weed out my collection.

One item that will certainly be for sale soon is the complete 13-part series Hollywood: A Celebration of The American Silent Film by David Gill and Kenneth Brownlow. This is a must-have for anyone who's interested in the history of silent movies, and features hours of clips and interviews with the people who were there.

We watched Sunset Boulevard the other night on TCM, and thanks to the Hollywood series we were able to catch all the "inside" movie references (such as DeMille calling Norma Desmond "young fellow," which is what the real-life DeMille called Gloria Swanson when he directed her in the silent days).

Watch for my stuff on eBay and elsewhere. Commercial over.

One of my hopes is to digitize some of the material that I've converted and post it here. A couple people have written asking for copies of my Nite-Owl tape, and perhaps I'll get a few minutes ripped down for your viewing.

Now, all I need is the time to get through all this tape...

Last week, I hooked up my cassette deck and ripped MP3s from some of my old tapes that have been tucked away for a while. You can see the results if you click on "What's Playing on jtl's iPod?" in the column on the right. I didn't realize I had a lot of this stuff...

Probably the best find I've had so far is under the playlist called "12 Tracks From 525 Lines." This was a tape I started once I got my first HiFi VCR (a Mitsubishi HS-U50, for you video geeks in the crowd), where I would record musical acts on TV and transfer them to audio cassette with pretty sweet results.

Many of the songs were recorded from the late, lamented NBC's Sunday Night, hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn, which begat Night Music, hosted only by Sanborn. These shows ran from 1988 to 1990. This show was awesome: it featured many different acts, from Dr. John to Branford Marsalis to Leonard Cohen, all playing with the house band, led by the host(s) of the show. This was the first place I heard Debbie Harry's version of "Calmarie," a haunting Brazilian number written by Nana Vasconselos. They also gave airtime to one of the most underrated bands of all time, the latin/jazz/funk/art rock/you-figure-it-out fusion band Ambitious Lovers. Hearing their performances of "Copy Me" and "Admit It" drove me to the record store the next day to buy the LP. (I managed to get a copy of the CD from someone on eBay last year.)

Technically, the process went okay. I used my desktop PC with Cool Edit 2000 (which later became the bloated Adobe Audition) to bring the tracks over, and it worked okay despite some problems with the audio inputs on my computer, primarily with levels.

I decided during the week to pick up a Griffin iMic which connects through the USB port. I hooked it up to my PC and did some more transfers this weekend, and at first pass it seems to work pretty well. I've not been able to get it to work with my iBook, though, so there's a little more work in store.

One track that I've wanted for a long time on MP3 is Third World's "Try Jah Love," which they performed on SCTV in 1982. This version is a little livelier than the version that was officially released that year. I also ripped the entire "Great White North" album, which is still funny in its own way after all these years. So take off, eh?

More transfers to follow.. if anything else of interest comes up, you'll hear about it here.

I admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for pop music-- good pop music. It probably stems from growing up listening to my older siblings' Beatles records as well as the stuff we used to hear on WLS and WCFL.

In the summer of 1979, there was a two-page ad in Billboard magazine for a UK-based music label which had finally struck a major distribution deal with a huge American company. The ad talked about the history of the label, and how its sole reason for existence was for its owner to spend his huge inheritance as quickly as possible. The ad also had descriptions of the label's four initial releases under the new joint venture.

The label was Virgin Records. One of the releases was a self-titled album called The Records. The description in the ad described a guitar-based pop band who were destined for great things.

Okay, it was an ad. They're allowed to say that kind of thing.

I picked up a copy of The Records based solely on the description of the ad and the sale price of $4.99 at my local Laury's Records store in Des Plaines, Illinois. It was, and still is, one of the best $5 purchases I've ever made. The album contained some of the most catchy, hook-laden, and jangly (pre-dating even REM) power pop tunes I'd ever heard. For weeks, this was what you'd hear coming from my bedroom or '74 VW Super Beetle.

The album featured the band's biggest hit, "Starry Eyes," which made the Billboard Hot 100 (lyrics on the next page). The better retro-80s radio shows usually play this song, so you may have heard it. Their second, less-big hit from the album was a song called "Teenarama."

The Records was a "US-ified" version of the band's original UK album, Shades in Bed. (US Record companies used to do this: they'd take a UK release and re-order the songs and change versions for release in the US market.) A few months after buying The Records a local shop (Record City in Skokie, where I spent many many hours and a lot of money) had an import of Shades in Bed, so I got to hear the album in its original form.

The Records also released a few EPs, including am infectious cover of "Rock 'n' Roll Love Letter." In fact, they recorded that song twice, with two different producers-- one being Mutt Lange (that's "Mr. Shania Twain" to you).

In the summer of 1980, the band released its followup, Crashes (shown above). There had been a couple of personnel changes and the band didn't repeat the chart success of their first time out, but the new album retained its power-pop sound. They even toured the US that year, and I got to see them at Chicagofest in August of 1980.

Band founder John Wicks still performs and records with a new version of The Records, and his web site is here. You can also check out the band's Wikipedia page here. Cofounder/drummer Will Birch has a web site at this link and has written a book about the 1970s Pub Rock scene called No Sleep Till Canvey Island which is currently on my wish list.

On the next page, you'll find the lyrics to two of my favorite Records tracks: "Hearts in Her Eyes" from Crash, and "Starry Eyes."

(Side note: One of the other albums in the ad was XTC's Drums and Wires.)

(Another side note: I started writing this posting on June 17, 2005. It's about time I got around to finishing it. :-)

This past weekend, Lisa and I stopped at a nearby garage sale. These people had a ton of stuff, including one of those Coleman screened-in things-- you know, the ones that look like a tent only it's all screen. (It was a steal at $45, but we passed anyway.)

At one point, Lisa looked down and saw a dirty, cat-hair coated broken Project/One speaker grille with a bunch of buttons on it. "This looks like your generation right here," she said.

She was right. There were about two dozen buttons pinned to the grille, mostly from bands from the early 1980s. The photo above shows about half of them.

I tossed the grille and now I'm in the middle of cleaning up the buttons, but here's what's on the buttons shown in the photo above:

- A Two-Tone guy playing a trombone
- John Cougar Mellencamp's "Uh-Huh"
- "I ♥ California" and 'I ♥ McDonald's"
- An original "Loop" button from the Chicago classic rock station
- Billy Idol
- B-52s "Rock Lobster"
- a Rolling Stones "She's So Cold" button
- Elvis
- Joe Jackson, from his Night and Day album
- Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen (representing solid family values)
- Bow Wow Wow cassette logo
- Pretenders
- Talking Heads' Remain in Light
- Mick Jagger
- David Bowie's Aladdin Sane
- Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers' Damn The Torpedoes
- The Three Stooges

My thought was that maybe the original owner of these buttons worked at Bennigan's and this was part of his/her "flair."

Maybe I should put these up on eBay, or perhaps I should dig out my own collection and combine these with my Sugarcubes, XTC, and Stiff Records buttons.

Ah, those were the days.

25 years ago this Friday night, I programmed my parents' VCR to record the first hour of a television show that ran overnight on WFLD-TV channel 32.

It wasn't so much a "show" as it was a "service." Nite-Owl was the in-the-clear broadcast of a videotext service called Keyfax. I wrote about Keyfax/Nite-Owl in a blog posting in September of 2004.

Sometime in the early 1990s, I made a copy of this tape for someone on the Usenet newsgroups, and about two years ago I heard from a guy who saw that last blog posting and wanted to know if I was, in fact, the originator of a tape of which he'd received a copy. I was.

The person who emailed me was a guy named Rick who runs a page on YouTube called Fuzzy Memories. I sent him a clean DVD transcription of the Nite-Owl tape and he digitized it for the YouTube Generation. You can check out the real thing by clicking here. The videos have been viewed thousands of times and based on the comments on the site, many people remember the show, too.

I never could have imagined on that Tuesday night 25 years ago that what I recorded just for grins would be out there being viewed by thousands all over the world.

Tonight, Lisa and I watched the 1978 movie FM on VH-1 Classic.

This is a time capsule of the late 1970s, complete with feathered hair on the guys, perms on the women, and a plotline about Sticking It To The Man, 'Cause He Just Doesn't Get It.

The movie centers around the operations at a Los Angeles radio station, QSKY. The station's owners send a new salesman to LA to goose up their ad revenues, and QSKY's management and air staff are resistant to their evil, capitalistic ways. After refusing to air some ads for the Army, station manager Jeff Dugan (Michael Brandon) quits and there's a fan-and-DJ revolt, resulting in the station going under siege.

If some of this sounds familiar, it's because the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati was written around the same basic premise. Supposedly, the movie and TV show had nothing to do with each other-- the WKRP pilot was shot before FM was released. Interesting coincidence, though. (The "station under siege" device was also used in the 1994 movie Airheads.)

Martin Mull was early in his career when he played a DJ in the cast of FM; his character is simply an extension of the "Barth Gimble" character he played on Fernwood/America 2-Night. Eileen Brennan plays "Mother," a 40-something evening DJ, and Cleavon Little plays the overnight DJ, Venus Flytrap "The Prince of Darkness" (sorry, there's that 'KRP influence again).

The movie also features cameos by REO Speedwagon, Tom Petty, Jimmy Buffett (looking like he's around age 20), and a soundtrack that you could program any soft-rock station by, although I put nearly every track here on the Songs-I'll-Never-Need-To-Hear-Ever-Again-As-Long-As-I-Live list. I get the impression that many people are unaware that the Steely Dan song "FM" was actually written as the title track for this movie.

(As an aside, it's worth pointing out the soundtrack's album cover was designed by John Kosh, the guy responsible for drawing about 90% of the album covers released in the late 70s and early 80s.)

The movie itself is passable; I don't recommend going out of your way to view it unless you want to see what life was like in 1978. That said...

Those of you who know me may recall that I had a bit of an infatuation with Linda Ronstadt around this time. FM features a concert performance by Ms. Ronstadt, which was enough to get me into the theatre and sit through this thing. She sings a cover of The Rolling Stones' "Tumbling Dice" that pretty much makes up for everything we had to watch on the screen up to that point.

I saw the movie in the theatre when it opened in April of 1978. When I went back a week later, it had already closed. It would occasionally pop up on cable and eventually came out on DVD, but by then it was already terribly dated with one exception: the whole story line about turning radio into something focused entirely on profit turned out to be spot-on.

It's quite a little time capsule, though.

In the summer of 1979, a song called "Hey St Peter" climbed into the pop charts. It had a unique, new wave sound with lyrics spoken in a tinny voice, a driving beat, and a catchy hook. I remember thinking at the time this was what would happen if Dire Straits got together with The Cars, The Police, and The Buggles. "Hey St Peter" was the product of a pair of Australian minds who called their project Flash and the Pan.

Flash and the Pan seemed to come out of nowhere, but its principals, Harry Vanda and George Young, had been around the pop music scene since the early 1960s when they released the international hit "Friday On My Mind" with their earlier group, The Easybeats. Years later, they produced the early albums for AC/DC, which happened to include George's younger brothers Angus and Malcolm. They also wrote and produced the international soft-rock hit "Love is in the Air" for John Paul Young (no relation to George) in 1978.

The first Flash and the Pan album (pictured above with its US and Australian covers) contained 10 songs, all done in the same synthesizer-heavy style with deadpan vocals. The songs range from poppy "Hey St Peter" and "Man in the Middle" to brooding and almost sinister with "First and Last" and "Walking in the Rain."

A standout on the album is the song "Down Among The Dead Men," which tells the story of the Titanic, complete with Morse Code being tapped out over the closing moments of the song. Lyrics are on the next page.

The 1980 followup album Lights in the Night continued in the style of the original, but didn't spawn any top 10 hits. The LP cover is interesting, though: it appears to be mostly black until you look closely and see that the cover from the 1979 US issue of the first Flash and the Pan album lurks underneath the black ink, revealed through a "scratch" in the Lights cover art.

Not much else was heard from Flash and the Pan in the US after that, although they did score a hit in Europe in 1983 with the song "Waiting for a Train," which has been described as sounding like "New York white guys did the backing track for Timmy Thomas' 'Why Can't We Live Together?'"

If you want to explore a lesser-known piece of 80s musical culture, check out this band.