Author: DB (Page 1 of 354)

Chart Week: December 13, 1980
Song: “(Just Like) Starting Over” – John Lennon
Chart Position: #4, 7th week on the chart. Peaked at #1 for five weeks across December and January.

This entry is less about a specific song than an extraordinary moment in American Top 40 history. And an opportunity for me to revisit a lost piece of writing from my past.

One December night in the mid–2000s, I sat down and quickly typed out what I think is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was too personal to share, though, so I stashed it in whatever notes/journaling app I was using at the time. Since I was a serial app hopper back in the day – trying out whatever the newest, latest, interesting program Mac Geeks were yapping about – I eventually lost that draft as I failed to save it while jumping from App A to App B. I’ve tried to re-create it a few times, but never captured the tone or emotion of that initial effort.

That essay was about the night/week John Lennon died and how I imagined my mom reacted to his death.

My memories of that night, December 8, 1980, are vague. I had likely been watching the Monday Night Football game between the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins earlier in the evening. I know my mom was working late so I would have been staying at a sitter’s house, and the sitter’s husband always had MNF on while he drank 182 beers. However, my mom had picked me up and we were home, with me likely in bed, by the time Howard Cosell made his famous announcement of Lennon’s passing.

I definitely remember being at the mall the night after the shooting and hearing Lennon’s music coming out of every store instead of the usual holiday racket. I recall the coverage on the news of people gathering in Central Park to mourn his death, which didn’t make sense to me. I knew who the Beatles were – my parents had their “Blue Album” which they listened to a ton when I was little – but likely didn’t understand who Lennon was until that week. Why were all these people so sad about a singer dying?[1]

I have fuzzy mental images of my mom being sad that week, but that may be more my brain making it up than based on reality. Besides, she was down a lot that fall and winter, so no particular night of sadness would seem unusual.

She was going through one of the most difficult stages of her life at the time. We moved to Kansas City in July and a few weeks later she and my dad finally decided to divorce after being separated off-and-on for most of the previous two years. Their marriage officially ended four days after Lennon was killed. She struggled to find a job in KC, working 10–12 hour shifts at a mall jewelry store while she sent out resumes hoping to re-launch her marketing career. She had a nine-year-old kid who was kind of a pain in the ass, mostly because he was getting into trouble at school a lot after the move. She was deeply in debt, some of it leftover from college and some that she and my dad had racked up trying to stay afloat in the difficult late–70s economy. My mom was generally an optimistic person, but when I think of her during this period, I see her worn out, depressed, and sleeping a lot.

In that lost composition from nearly 20 years ago, I tried to get into her head and understand what she may have been feeling after she learned of Lennon’s passing. She had all this other shit she was dealing with and then a man who wrote and sang some of her favorite songs of her teenage and young adult years was murdered in cold blood. For her, like so many others her age, any idealism left from her college years was likely destroyed for good that night. The world must have seemed very bleak to her. I think I went to some dark places in my essay, which probably was the reason I kept it to myself.

I never got the chance to ask my mom about that week in December 1980. She died in 1998 and I didn’t really fall in love with the Beatles until a few years later, when high speed internet and file sharing allowed me to dive deeply into their catalog. By then my own recollections of the week of Lennon’s death had faded so they were barely distinguishable amongst all the other 1980 nostalgia in my head.[2]

I wish I still had those drafted words. Maybe it is fitting, though, that they were deleted from the hard drive that held them and my memories of it are hazy and imperfect, much like my memories of the week John Lennon died.

Now to that piece of American Top 40 history. Lennon’s death forced a change to the show that had never been done before, nor since, as far as I can tell. Although he was killed on a Monday night, the program for the week of December 13 had already been recorded and was being pressed and shipped to radio stations.[3] Following the shooting, Casey Kasem recorded a brief tribute to Lennon, recalling his career, how his life fell apart in the Seventies, how he retreated from the public eye to be with his family, and how he had recently released a new album.[4] Casey ended with a message to both Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon. It is a powerful moment that closed a terrible week for music fans.

The addendum was rushed to radio stations and most inserted it into the countdown before the number four song that week, Lennon’s comeback hit, “(Just Like) Starting Over.”

(Here is another video that has both the original and revised introductions. It also adds some unnecessary music so I did not embed it.)

It is impossible for me to evaluate “(Just Like) Starting Over,” or the other two singles from the Double Fantasy album – “Woman” and “Watching the Wheels” – dispassionately. I’m pretty sure I rate them all one-to-three points higher than I would had Lennon not been shot and killed as/before they were played on the radio. They will forever be weighed down by the knowledge that Lennon was murdered just as he was about to top the pop charts again. They will always remind me of what my mom was going through, as well.

“(Just Like) Starting Over” was a wonderful way for John Lennon to re-introduce himself to the public. It had a light, throwback vibe that recalled the early rock songs he fell in love with and inspired him to start making his own music. Lennon admitted that he was trying to sound like Elvis or Roy Orbison on some of his vocals. The track is about recommitting to a relationship, just as he was doing to his fans who had waited patiently for new music from him. There’s nothing edgy or experimental about it like much of his late era Beatles work, nor confrontational and caustic like some of his Seventies records. I think that’s the point. He had just turned 40. He was happy and healthy. He was rejoining the world after hiding at home for five years. There was nothing wrong with making solid pop music that didn’t have a huge message beyond remembering how much you love the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with. 8/10

Chart Week: December 6, 1976
Song: “More Than A Feeling” – Boston
Chart Position: #9, 12th week on the chart. Peaked at #5 the week of December 25.

A perfect song.

I could end this post there and it would be enough. Why waste your and my time cranking out a thousand or so words breaking down the how and why when that simple phrase sums it all up?

Because that’s not the point of this series, obviously. In a pinch, though, say if asked as an elevator door was closing why I love “More Than A Feeling,” those three words would suffice. I’m not alone; I came across the same statement more than once while reading up on this all-time classic.

We’ll get to the tune itself in a moment, but first I wanted to use this entry as a chance to dive into my history as a true music geek. Because Boston might have been the band that started me down that path.

I certainly knew of Boston as a kid, although unlike several other records on this week’s countdown, I don’t have clear memories of it from late 1976. I do recall visiting my grandparents a couple summers later and seeing my uncle’s Boston albums in his collection and thinking the spaceship motif on the covers were cool. I may have been around when he played their second album, Don’t Look Back, and surely I heard its title track on the radio. But, again, no concrete memories from the first era of the band.

Fast forward to the early Eighties, when I began to form my own musical preferences. There were constant rumors of a new Boston album. They came on Entertainment Tonight and in quick comments by radio DJs. I heard them often enough that I had this low-key excitement for an album that may or may not exist by a band I wasn’t actually sure if I liked or not.

In the fall of 1986 Boston finally returned from their eight-year sabbatical with the monster ballad “Amanda,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. I quickly bought the Third Stage album and listened to it over-and-over. I also read band leader Tom Scholz’s super detailed liner notes over-and-over as I listened. In them he documented the arduous process that was the making of the album, including tales of tape so old it was nearly disintegrating and having to apply a restorative agent by hand in hopes of saving a song he had been working on for nearly a decade.

His notes piqued my interest. Soon I was digging through the Rolling Stone magazine archives at the library, pulling out articles about Boston from 1976, 1978, and any other year that they made news. I learned about Scholz’s unique background and the band’s incredible, out-of-nowhere rise to popularity ten years earlier. I bought and absorbed the first two Boston albums. Soon I was playing “More Than A Feeling,” “Peace Of Mind,” and “Don’t Look Back” along with the songs from Third Stage as often as current Top 40 tracks.

This was the first time I ever did this, discovering a band and working backwards through their history, both in consuming their music and exploring their biographical details. I would soon repeat the exercise with Van Halen, buying most of their back catalog later that same fall. Eventually I would do it with U2, The Clash, and others, falling in love with a band’s latest tunes and then exploring their older music while reading all I could about them.

In the Nineties, when I was both hearing bands as they burst onto the scene and logging onto the Internet for the first time, I was able to become an expert on groups that had only been releasing albums for a matter of months. Online music magazines, message boards, band websites, and weekly alternative papers kept me on the forefront of knowledge about the Gen X Alternative Rock Revolution.

This quirk has never faded, even as my music tastes changed.

Given my personality, surely I was destined to behave this way. But the credit, or blame depending how you look at it, for falling into my first musical rabbit hole goes to Boston.

Now, the music.

Tom Scholz was/is a legitimate musical genius. He has crafted almost every song Boston has ever made in home studios, spending hours meticulously assembling them by playing most of the instruments, sending those sounds through devices he invented to arrive at the tones he desired, and producing and mixing them to their final format. An engineer educated at MIT, music was a hobby to provide relief from his job at Polaroid. Beginning in the late Sixties, he spent nearly a decade toiling in his basement, shipping his demos to record labels, only to have each attempt ignored or rejected.

Finally, in 1976, his demo for “More Than A Feeling,” featuring vocalist Brad Delp, got a bite from Epic Records. Within a matter of months the duo had written, recorded, and released an album; formed a touring band; earned a slot as the opening act for Black Sabbath; and then headlined their own tour that featured a stop at Madison Square Garden. A crazy trajectory of success, especially in the pre-Internet age. For over 30 years, Boston was the biggest selling debut album of all-time, finally eclipsed by Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction in 2008.

Scholz is a studio master, recording and re-recording tracks endlessly and then spending hours layering and editing them in order to get the perfect sound. Again, in the pre-digital age. Lining up multiple tracks was not the simple act of cutting/pasting that it is today. It was an intensive, manual process that sometimes involved razor blades and tape – literal cutting and pasting! – to get multiple sections lined up properly.

That was one criticism of Boston and the other arena-oriented acts of their time: the music was overproduced, refined to sound great on radio, losing some of their soul in the process. Which is fair. If not careful, you can strip away some of a song’s energy and sense of spontaneity when refining them.

Boston’s answer to this was the presence of Delp. I’m going out on a limb here and proclaiming him as the greatest singer in rock history. Notice I say singer, not frontman. At worst, he is in a three-way tie with Freddy Mercury and Chris Cornell. But the man did things with his voice even those two legends could not match. Go watch some of the music theory breakdowns of Boston’s music and pay special attention to Delp’s isolated vocals. He hit notes that seem impossible, especially in the analog era when what you sang was what you recorded was what you released. Delp’s otherworldly voice added back any soul that had been eroded by Scholz’s hours of studio tinkering.

Put Scholz’s musical and engineering skills together with Delp’s unrivaled vocals and add Sib Hashian’s mammoth, caveman drumming, and the result was a sound that recalled those spaceships on the covers of Boston’s albums.[1] It was massive, irresistible, and brilliant. The instruments were the horsepower, Delp’s voice the torque that launched you into the heavens.

And this was their first ever single! Again, it is flawless, from the slow fade-in to Scholz’s guitar tone[2] (and pick slides) to Delp’s pitch-perfect high notes to its arrangement to its universal theme of wistfully looking back at a moment from your past.

“Amanda” might have been their biggest record on the pop chart, but this is the track that stands above everything else Boston has ever produced. It is one of the great songs of its era, of its genre, and of all time. Close your eyes and slip away. 10/10

I’m not sure why the official video is time edited, so I’ll throw the whole song on as well.