OK Boomer Gets His Groove On

Shower thoughts while leaning back in my desk chair, a schizoid warm/cool/warm again spring breeze blowing over me from the open window in the Season of the Plague Panic.

Does anyone remember when they were young and when asked their age, would say, “__ and a half,” as if that half-year meant something? It was something kids I knew did up until age 10, if not a little earlier, in the late 1960s. I have no idea if it’s something children still do. I don’t recall hearing any of that from my own when they were small in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I passed the halfway mark of my 59th year earlier this month. Lord willing and the Chinese Kung Flu don’t git me, I’ll be 60 years old soon. Although I was born late into the generational frame known as the Baby Boomers and identify more with Generation X in values and outlook, I’m old, and all old people are Boomers. The science, as they say, is settled.

What more Boomer thing, after all, to seek out and purchase most of the Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog on compact disc as I did for my birthday last autumn? 

The first four albums, which arrived the day after my 58th birthday. Cosmo’s Factory, the most popular and highly regarded of the discography, will be added later, but for my money Willy and the Poor Boys on the far right was the band’s masterpiece.

I was listening to “Sweet Hitchhiker” from the 20 Greatest Hits CD (the only CCR disc most people have—hey, 20 songs, and you know ‘em all!) sometime in September and I was put out by the awful sound. Didn’t they make remasters of these? Thank God, they did, back in 2007. There was a box set, out of print, naturally, and, oddly, that’s the only way you’d get a remaster of the infamous final album, Mardi Gras, also known as “John Fogerty’s Revenge,” which still has two of Fogerty’s best songs on there, “Someday Never Comes” and “Sweet Hitchhiker.” I solved that issue by downloading remasters of these tracks in mono. I had no idea people were still recording in mono after 1968—and these tracks are from an album released in 1972!—but there it is.

Anyway, I got all of them except for Pendulum, the penultimate album, and Mardi Gras. I might yet pull the trigger on them, if only to round out the catalog, but I’m happy with what I have. It’s a rich treasury of hard rocking Americana practically invented by a former National Guardsman who declared to his brother, “I am not going back to that car wash!” when his leadership of the band was challenged. John Fogerty was/is the genuine article. Unlike what passes for Great Artists today (in the tradition of those horrible singer-songwriters of the 1970s, and hold that thought), he did not grow up in upper middle-class wealth and comfort. 

I ordered my copy of Cosmo’s Factory in December. It arrived on top of a 28 lb.of cat kibble. I’ve been practicing avoiding going out long before it was cool.

I’m only two discs away from the complete CCR studio discography. The deep cuts on these albums were all I ever dreamed of and more. Such an astounding run of creativity in four years. Yes, four years.

Which brings me to the Never-Ending Funeral for John Prine, the Wuhan Deathflu’s most (sorta) famous victim. Most people didn’t know who John Prine was or what he’d done until last week, and those who did, for the most part, didn’t know he was still alive until he wasn’t.

Prine went to folk music school, which sounds as bourgie as it gets to me, but he did at least do some time humping sacks of mail for the U.S. Postal Service, where he famously wrote all of the songs on his first album. If he was faking the empathy demonstrated towards the characters in his songs, as Bruce Springsteen did, the Prine, like Springsteen, did a master-class job of it, and it’s just as well that Springsteen should appoint himself Mourner in Chief.

What gets me is I’m seeing one video after another posted to my Facebook feed by people doing one tribute after another. I suppose an algorithm thought I’d be interested. No problem. Except each and every one of these people paying tribute to the late, great songwriter is...I’m not sure how to put it. Let’s just say they have never met, nor would ever go out of their way to meet the kind of people John Prine saw on his postal routes. They’re of the untouchable caste to these Brahmin singers, fit only as pitiable subjects for song, sung with as much earnest poignancy as can be mustered for maximum virtue-signalling points.

“Priced for the PEOPLE!”...the kind who think nothing of blowing nearly $80 on a CD that hasn’t had a remastering since 1990. They’d do better to spend $449.00 to hear sad songs about poor working people on vinyl.

With respect to Prine, who truly was a fine songwriter worthy of the accolades, my inner Holden Caulfield rages at the reminder of how shamelessly phony so many our much-lauded singer-songwriters are. Again, you’d have never known Prine was alive at all until all these sad-faced clowns in their boutique bespoke clown shoes showed up to hang their brand on his aw-shucks Regular Guy ethos when he passed.

With all the notices of yet one more Sensitive Girl Singer from the mean streets of McMansionland doing the umpteenth hundredth cover of “Angel from Montgomery” it’s past time I called on Facebook to block these notifications as “Irrelevant.” Which, sadly, they rather are. 

I’m not of their caste either, just another old white guy in flyover country. Don’t I have a meth addiction to attend to? (No “Sam Stone” weepies for you toothless trash!) Therefore....

Rip the tracks, make multiple backups, and keep the discs themselves in a cool, dark place. Unless you don’t care about someone else taking away your favorites on the streaming channel because news has come to light that someone heard the bass player say a bad word in 1985.

By way of rinsing the metaphorical dirt from my handling of the above subject, I turn to a most fortuitous recent acquisition. It’s especially fortuitous because box sets don’t last so long; when they’re gone, they’re gone. Fortunately, the entirety of The Cars’ discography was still available to me as of last month. This is six albums for the price of two high-end in-demand CDs, or three regular (and rapidly disappearing) catalog CDs. They appeared within mere days, too, despite having ordered these a week after the onset of the Chinese Bat Soup Plague Panic.

The Cars’ discography covers a full decade from 1978 through 1987, plus the surprisingly good Move Like This, released in 2011. Now I have them all. I’d always wondered what Heartbeat City and Door to Door sounded like, as I’d found The Cars’ mid-1980s output to sound weirdly dated, as most ‘80s music sounded to me. That sound was already going out of style in 1987 by the time their last album came out, so you can literally hear the end coming. 

You also hear it beginning. Here’s something most people never realize: Elvis Costello’s classic first album came out in 1977, the year before The Cars’ debut. Debbie Harry and Blondie exploded all over the radio with “Heart of Glass” the same time “Just What I Needed” went into rotation on the radio. Again, we’re talking 1977, 1978. The Cars’ sophomore set, Candy-O, which might as well be the second disc in a double-album with their first, dominated most of the college parties I attended in the autumn of 1979.

Yet all of the above musical outfits, despite breaking in the mid- to late 1970s, are thought of exclusively as ‘80s bands. They were considered “New Wave” when they started—The Cars, with their mix of heavy, shreddy guitar and funhouse synth, particularly embodied the genre—yet that scene was over and forgotten by 1981. Shake It Up, coming on the heels of the third album speed-bump Panorama, arrived just in time to send it all off—also, just in time for MTV, when it was dedicated to music videos.

Their biggest success was with 1984’s Heartbeat City and “Drive,” the song that I grew quickly tired of upon moving to Atlanta that summer. That particular album translated well onto the then-new “compact laser disc” as the contemporary rock radio station touted it.

It was another three years before Door to Door, but aside from the times having changed, and poised to changed more, with the arrival of Guns ‘n Roses debut album and the precursors to grunge beginning to make noise, it’s easy to hear everyone losing their enthusiasm on the album. There are moments that recall the old days, such as the radio hit, “Tonight She Comes,” but as the tracks wear on it’s clear it’s over.

It had been ten years, and although it was an uneven run, The Cars had their own sound and personality and did much to improve the state of radio back when that was something we listened to. 

My old Sonic Stage platform may not be the greatest, but I’m used to it. Note the duplicate albums in The Cars section at top. Those are the HDCDs that came out many years back that some say are the best remasters.

 

It stands to reason that if I’m old enough to have seen child stars like Drew Barrymore and Christina Ricci grow into buxom sex bombs and fade away into middle age and menopause, I should see entire careers come and go. Between Creedence and The Cars and all my other old friends from way back in the day, I’m keeping myself entertained.