Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Remembering Joe Cocker, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.

If you’re going to write a piece about the late, great Joe Cocker, or so it seems to me, that piece should be every bit as spastic and twitching all over the place as the feller himself. When he was singing that is. I don’t know as Joe walked the streets gesticulating and twitching and wringing his hands and all. If he did, God bless him.

Anyway, I tried to write a spastic and twitching review of 1969’s Joe Cocker! but gave up after sentence one, because the man did it better than I could ever do. He was possessed by genius, and told those who would exorcise said genius to piss off. A voice as gravelly and soulful and great as his came with a cost, and if that cost was that he twist himself into pretzel-like contortions ever time he sang, so be it.

The early Cocker was a genius of such magnitude that his idea of a great gig was coming on stage, vomiting on the front row, and passing out. A real showman, our Joe. But if his gravel-grinding voice was a gift from Heaven, it need be said that it was not the only reason Joe Cocker! is an indispensable piece of vinyl as you should turn red with shame for not owning.

No, Joe Cocker! is a classic due in part to the pure dead brilliant performances of the people behind the voice, namely his backing outfit the Grease Band, to say nothing of Leon Russell, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Clarence White, and a veritable heavenly choir of backing vocalists including Rita Coolidge, Merry Clayton, Bonnie Bramlett, and Shirley Matthews, amongst others. I take my hat off in particular to Chris Stainton, the fella as played piano in the Grease Band. His every performance is hair-raising, and he makes the LP worth owning all by his own self.

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Celebrating Pete Townshend on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Who loves The Who? Everybody loves The Who, that’s who. Six billion Chinese people love The Who. That Turkish family that walks on all fours loves The Who. Kim Jong-un loves The Who. The ape at the zoo loves The Who. Okay, I suppose there are lots of people who don’t love The Who, but I don’t understand them. Why, I would even go so far as to say there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with them.

Then again, how much do I really love The Who? I have no use for Tommy, dislike everything after 1973’s Quadrophenia, and have never really listened to their early stuff beyond what’s on the 1971 compilation Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. And don’t even get me started on the post-Keith Moon Who. Face Dances? Why, I have half a mind to dance on your face, Mr. Peter Dennis Blanford Townshend, for reanimating the corpse of a band that died with its heart and soul, Keith Moon.

So, unlike our friends the quadruped Ulas Family from Turkey, I suppose I’m ambivalent about The Who. But I have no mixed feelings about Who’s Next, the band’s 1971 masterpiece. From its cover of the foursome at Easington Colliery, having apparently just finished pissing on a concrete “monolith” emerging from a slag heap, to “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”—two of the greatest rock songs ever written—it’s a gas, especially when you toss in such odd birds as the hilarious “My Wife” and the cool and amusing “Going Mobile.” It may include some songs I flat-out dislike, but I don’t care. It’s still the best thing to come along since sliced Altamont.

Back story in telegraphic form: Formed in 1964 and briefly called The High Numbers… Mods vs. rockers and gratuitous guitar smashing… “My Generation” and rock opera Tommy… drummer Keith Moon drives limo into swimming pool… shirtless Roger Daltrey swings mic in great arcing loops… John Entwistle, bass genius, as great as Jack Bruce… Pete Townshend’s windmill guitar and famous boiler suit, STOP.

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It’s hard to believe that horn band Chicago, along with Grand Funk Railroad, were one of the most popular touring acts of the early Seventies. Why, I would go so far as to suggest the above proves that the young people of America had lost their collective fucking mind. Personally, I blame the Ohio National Guard.

I would blame drugs—acid and speed and St. Joseph’s Baby Aspirin and the like—but what respectable dope fiend would have been caught dead at the live shows that make up Chicago’s eight-sided beast, 1971’s Chicago at Carnegie Hall? Chicago was only slightly less square than the likes of fellow horn band Blood, Sweat & Tears and vocal group Three Dog Night, both of whom also raise questions about the intelligence, taste, and indeed sanity of the Children of America in the Age of Nixon.

I can only think that collective societal trauma induced a sort of mass idiocy that led America’s supposedly turned-on kids to buy albums by horn bands, including a quadruple live album that is largely unlistenable. So unlistenable indeed that you can tell it’s unlistenable without actually listening to it, or so concluded Robert Christgau in his contemporaneous review of the LP (“I’m not claiming actually to have listened to this four-record set—you think I’m a nut?”). And he wasn’t even apologetic about it!

Lester Bangs did listen to all eight sides, which makes him a hero in my book, and after sarcastically calling the album “a classic” and commending it for its sheer heft (3.2 pounds according to his calculations) he went on to add, sarcastic still, “Loving Chicago at Carnegie Hall as much as I do, though, I still don’t play it very often. In fact, I’ve only played it once since I got it, and never intend to play any of it again.”

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Celebrating Robert Fripp, born on this date in 1946. —Ed.

What a great album! The songs are brilliant! The entire cast of musicians, which include Daryll Hall, Tony Levin, and Terri Roche defy the laws of talent! Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins also make guest appearances! And Mary Lou Green does hair! And does a bang-up job of it I’m sure!

On 1979’s Exposure—the first of his four solo albums—Robert Fripp condescends to the conventional, or as close as the dyed-in-the-wool avant gardist would get to making an album for progressive rock haters. Fripp has spent his long and illustrious career on the experimental end of the rock party; he co-founded and played guitar for King Crimson on all thirteen of the albums they released between 1969 and 2003.

He also kept himself busy during those years by recording two LPs with Giles, Giles & Fripp, two with the League of Gentleman, and collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno and David Sylvian. He also fell in with the crowd attracted to the work of Russian spiritualist George Gurdjieff and went off to a ten-month course at Gloucestershire, where he achieved so much deep spiritual wisdom he would later say, “I was pretty suicidal.” I’m thinking of signing up myself.

On Exposure Fripp enlisted the usual array of prog-rock musicians, including Brian Eno, Tony Levin, Peter Gabriel, and Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator fame. But his real genius lay in enlisting Hall and Oates’ Daryl Hall in the project. Hall was not as surprising a choice as, say, John Denver, but many wondered why Fripp engaged a top notch pop songwriter and blue-eyed soul singer to participate in a project that—with the noticeable exception of “North Star”—made so little of Hall’s perceived musical strengths.

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Street Hassle is a hassle indeed—this 1978 part live, part studio LP is a hot mess, and after listening to it for days, I still can’t tell you whether it’s a good album or not. It’s certainly an interesting album, and Lou sounds committed to doing whatever it is he’s doing, and in all I find myself drawn to it despite the fact that I’ve booked enough reservations about it to fill a commercial airliner headed for Perth, Western Australia, which is as far from “street poet” Lou’s muse, New York City, as you can get on this planet.

And I’m not alone. Critical opinions of Street Hassle are wildly divergent, with some calling it brilliant (“the best solo album Lou Reed has ever done” said Rolling Stone’s Tom Carson) and others calling it, well, let’s just say it was Tim Lott of the Record Mirror’s opinion that “Lou Reed has been a musical corpse for years now. Street Hassle is a creative nadir.” Me, I can only say that the fact that I can’t stop listening to it is proof that there’s something there—Lou Reed put out a whole slew of albums I’ve only listened to once, because listening to them twice would have made me a masochist.

Street Hassle is a true conundrum and act of polymorphous perversity—on the live tracks (although it’s hard to tell some are live because the crowd noise has been eliminated, and mucho overdubbing has been done) he does irreparable harm to one old Velvet Underground chestnut, does a bizarre but amusing riff on another one, tosses off some half-baked ditties (one of which I swear is a Bad Company ripoff), tosses in a joke of a song about how he wants to be black because then he’d be able to “shoot twenty feet of jism,” and centers the mess around one of the most brilliant and complex songs he would ever write as a solo artist.

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Celebrating Brian Eno, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

What a divine creature: In the first half of the 1970s the pre-ambient Brian Eno flitted about England’s glitter rock scene in fantastical glam attire, making an indelible mark on Roxy Music’s first two LPs with his VCS3 synthesizer and “tape effects” before moving on to create two utterly idiosyncratic art rock masterpieces with Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, both released in 1974.

On the former album, Eno utilized a boldly original approach to recording that placed a high premium on happy accidents that were not really accidental; Eno very deliberately lined up a cast of studio musicians he felt would be incompatible with one another just to see what would happen. In his own words he organized the situation “with the knowledge that there might be accidents, accidents which will be more interesting than what I had intended.” He then doubled down on the oddness by “treating” instruments and doing a lot of heavy condensing and mixing of the recorded tracks, some of which ended up sounding nothing like what the musicians played in the studio.

In short Eno puts chance in charge, and like any good gambler chance works in his favor. Marcel Duchamp abandoned art to play chess; if Eno were to retire, he would no doubt take up craps. Not enough random variables in the game of kings.

Art Rock with a sense of humor and none of the grandiosity, Here Come the Warm Jets is a collection of beautifully textured songs filled with staggering performances by the slew of stellar performers Eno gathered together because he thought they didn’t belong together. All of Roxy Music (excepting Bryan Ferry) were on hand, as were guitar aces Chris Spedding and Robert Fripp; other players included members of King Crimson, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, and Matching Mole. They don’t seem like such an incongruous bunch to me–Spedding excepted, there’s a decided tilt towards art- and prog-rock–but if Eno considered ‘em an Odd Bunch, well, he’s the guys with the ears.

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Remembering Ian Dury, born on this date in 1942. —Ed.

You have to wonder how this album came to be called Laughter. The sessions that produced it were stressful and marked by discord; Chaz Jenkel was gone and personalities clashed. Ian Dury, who was juggling addictions at the time, was, by all accounts, almost impossible to work with. The subject matter is often dark, and very dark at that. So why the incongruous title? Said England’s most foul-mouthed polio victim matter of factly at a later date: “I called it Laughter to cheer myself up.”

That said, I have this to say about 1980’s Laughter; it never fails to make me laugh. Which is to say Laughter isn’t such an ironic title after all. Even at his most lugubrious Dury–who was, and will likely always remain, England’s most lovable vulgarian–cheers me up, and that’s a rare gift. Down in the mouth Dury may have been, but he hadn’t lost his cheek, and he still managed to produce an album chockfull of dance friendly grooves and happy-making pub rock sing-alongs. So what if “Uncoolohol” is a dark ode to the perils of alcoholism; I spent plenty an alcoholic night cheerfully slurring along to its rousing chorus while falling down drunk. Laughter is not unlike one of the later Beatles albums; John and Paul may well have hated one another’s guts, but you’d never know it listening to the music.

I have my favorites on Laughter. LP opener “Sueperman’s Big Sister” (that’s no typo) is all swing, strings, and vocal bluster–a funky dance floor raver that will simply sweep you off your feet. “Dance of the Crackpots” comes at you in a rush; Dury can hardly get the words out of his mouth fast enough. Harmonica and some great tap dancing by Will Gaines transform Dury into a mad square dance caller; he name drops Thelonious Monk and Rosemary Clooney, and utters the Inspirational verse: “Being daft is a therapy craft/Which sharpens up your wits.” “(Take Your Elbow Out of the Soup) You’re Sitting on the Chicken” is sheer joy to the ears, what with its mental nursery rhyme lyrics (“The mouse runs up your leg/It’s one o’clock in China”) and chorus you simply have to join in on.

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Forget about the Rise and Fall of Western Civilization for a moment, and let us reflect instead upon the Rise and Fall of Van Halen, if only because in certain important respects they come down to the same thing! In the space of one album (from 1984’s 1984 and 1986’s 5150) Van Halen went from a band that was the personification of pure exuberance, wit, pop fun, and sheer flamboyant elan to a drab machine, and things went steadily downhill from there. It was like history worked backwards, and instead of moving from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance Van Halen did the opposite.

Some precipitous band declines are mysteries—the ghost leaves the machine, and no one knows why. In the case of Van Halen everyone knows why—Mr. Entertainment Hizzownself, David Lee Roth, walked.

Walked after the band hit it high-water mark with 1984, easily the best and most entertaining glam metal record of the decade, and perhaps of all time. (Some fools would brand it a sellout because it had, gak, synthesizers on it.) And after “Jump,” arguably the most infectious pop confection of the eighties. And he took the joy, the wit, the flamboyance, the spirt, the fun, the stage lights, the hilarious asides, the backflips, and even Eddie Van Halen’s shit-eating grin with him. Roth was rock’s consummate ham, but without him Van Halen turned into a turkey.

Roth was irreplaceable, but Van Halen did itself no favors by bringing former Montrose frontman and tequila entrepreneur Sammy Hagar on board, after first being turned down by (and this speaks volumes about Eddie Van Halen’s suspect picker) Patty Smythe and Darryl Hall. Replacing Roth with Hagar was kind of like replacing Dean Martin with, well, Sammy Hagar, who seems like a nice guy but speaks entirely in platitudes and has all the wit of Ayn Rand.

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Celebrating Tom Petersson on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

What a cheap trick. Here Rockford, Illinois’ finest put out Heaven Tonight which I considered the coolest album in the galaxy, only to follow it up with Cheap Trick at Budokan and the heinous “I Want You to Want Me,” which I’ve had to suffer through like 80,000 times over the years. Every single person I know loves the damn song. I’d sooner listen to the death rattle of a unicorn.

That said, 1978’s Heaven Tonight–the band’s third–still makes me as giddy as an axe-wielding maniac at a remote summer camp. It’s a knee-trembling, rock ‘em sock ‘em, wham bam than you ma’am classic, and it solidly established Cheap Trick amongst America’s Power Pop elite alongside the Raspberries, Big Star, and (my campy faves) Redd Kross.

What set Cheap Trick apart from the power pop pack was hard rock crunch. They infused their catchy melodies with steroids: had they been ML baseball players they’d have gone the way of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Songs such as “Surrender,” “On the Radio,” and “How Are You” may not be cement mixers, but “High Roller,” “Auf Wiedersehen,” and “Stiff Competition” all fall into Robert Christgau’s characterization of Heaven Tonight as “power-tooled hard rock product.”

Heaven Tonight is a case of eclecticism at work. “Surrender” is an ecstatic-making monument, like Mount Rushmore but with a better chorus. And it’s funny to boot. Robin Zander comes downstairs to discover his parents going at it, and with his Kiss records playing to boot. It’s a friendly bridge across the generation gap; if the kids are alright, so are the parents. Mom and dad aren’t out of it, they’re with it, and it’s a life-altering revelation.

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Look: Unless you’re a resident in, or owner of, an English retirement home, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you purchase a copy of early Seventies English novelty act Lieutenant Pigeon’s 2023 compilation album The Decca Years. It’s the kind of album you should listen to with antimacassars, not headphones. The smell of overcooked roast beef should be in the air. And your best friend should be a desiccated specimen of vintage English truculence named Gertie, who is forever accusing you filching her “kinky knickers.”

Of The Decca Years’ forty-eight tracks, compiled from three LPs the band recorded in 1973 and 1974 along with some songs, many are relatively staid music hall fare. I find maybe ten listenable, and I’m being charitable. And unless you’re a rather perverse person, or living in the aforementioned retirement community, you’ll probably never feel the need to listen to said maybe ten listenable tracks more than twice, once to be struck agog, and then again to be sure you actually heard what you think you just heard.

But: you should give The Decca Years a listen, if only because Lieutenant Pigeon of Coventry England (birthplace of The Specials!) are probably the strangest band to ever find their way onto BBC’s popular television “programme” Top of the Pops AND the top of the pop charts (back in 1972), which given we’re talking about England where eccentricity is more tolerated (and even celebrated) than here in the boring States, is really saying something. The English are a strange people. They sit down to eel pie and spotted dick, say completely incomprehensible things like “Bob’s your uncle” and celebrate Boxing Day, which has absolutely nothing to do with fisticuffs, bare-knuckled or gloved. And they don’t even celebrate the Fourth of July!

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Celebrating Alex Van Halen, born on this day in 1953. —Ed.

A couple of years ago the apartment my ex-wife and I lived in suffered a mouse infestation. We tried regular traps and glue traps, but they seemed terribly cruel, so we finally bought some catch-and-release traps. We lived on the third floor, and I got tired of carrying the traps down to the alley to release them. So I thought, why not release them on the balcony, where they’d be free to scamper along the rooftops to safety? So I tried it, but instead of escaping via the rooftops my frightened test mouse shot out of his little prison like a furry little bullet, promptly sailed off the edge of our balcony, and fell screaming (I may have imagined the screaming) to the concrete parking space below.

I’m not sure why—or actually I am—why that mouse never fails to remind me of Van Halen’s great “Jump.” I might as well have been singing, “Jump! Go ahead and jump!” as he plummeted earthwards. But anyway, the point I want to make is not that mice should look before they leap, although they should, but that I love Van Halen’s “Jump”—loved it even during those years when virtually all I listened to were SST bands, and admitting to liking a Van Halen song (at least amongst my crowd) was not so far from confessing to like that Seals and Crofts song about the summer breeze blowing through the jasmine in your mind.

I should add that my love for “Jump” did not extend to Van Halen itself. I had in fact never so much as listened to a Van Halen LP in its entirety, much less owned one. Honestly? I thought they were a band of morons. They dressed like Jose Feliciano was their haberdasher, and it was my considered opinion that Eddie Van Halen was a shameless showboater with his tapping (a technique he didn’t invent); single pickup, single volume knob guitar; and volume swells, or “violining.”

Then there was the perpetually mugging David Lee Roth, whom I considered the world’s oldest class clown. (I’ve come to love him over the years for the same reason.) As for bassist Michael Anthony, well, bassist Michael Anthony was just short. Too short. Like midget short. Then there was the drummer, Eddie’s brother, whose name slips my mind (Alex? Alek like Lee Harvey Oswald’s USSR name?) but it hardly matters because who pays attention to the drummer except other drummers anyway?

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Celebrating Bob Seger on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Through no fault of his own—or maybe it is his fault, I don’t know—Bob Seger has never gotten any respect. He’s the Rodney Dangerfield of rock, and this despite the fact that he’s written his fair share of memorable, and even great, songs. He’s always been the consummate journeyman—someone you might go to see, but without being totally psyched about it—but in the bicentennial year of 1976 he rose above his station to produce two very, very good LPs, Night Moves and Live Bullet.

The former included a couple of instant standards, while the latter made a convincing argument that seeing him live might just be a better bet than you think. I’ve liked him since I first listened to my older brother’s copy of Live Bullet way back in 1976, and I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for him, this despite the fact that he’s the force of evil who bequeathed us such awful songs as “Like a Rock,” “We’ve Got Tonight,” and the dreadful “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which to his credit he didn’t write but still recorded, which probably merits the electric chair. Why he even helped the Eagles write “Heartache Tonight,” a song that deserves to be burned at the stake.

But I forgive him, because he’s also given us such great tunes as “Get Out of Denver,” “Turn the Page,” “Beautiful Loser,” “Looking Back,” “Katmandu,” “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” “Night Moves,” and “2 + 2 = ?” And his version of “Nutbush City Limits” is almost as good as Tina Turner’s. As much a product of Detroit as the trucks he’s helped to sell via the suckass “Like a Rock,” Seger played in or founded a number of bands—the most notable being The Bob Seger System—without achieving much more than regional success before forming the Silver Bullet Band in 1974. Live Bullet finally propelled him to national stardom, and Night Moves solidified his status as a player in the big leagues.

Unlike fellow Detroiters the MC5 and The Stooges, Seger was never a firebrand; instead he was the epitome of Heartland Rock, which pays due respect to rock’s origins and doesn’t have a musically radical bone in its body. He was John Mellencamp before there was a John Mellencamp, a purveyor of meat and potato songs that told stories and that never veered too far from a relatively conservative template that fit neatly into the classic rock tradition. Which is undoubtedly why he’s been inducted into that den of iniquity, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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Celebrating Bill Ward, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

Is Black Sabbath the dumbest band in rock history or what? Even as a wee lad “Iron Man” struck me as the work of a band that was slow, and I don’t mean slow as in sluggish in tempo but slow as in dim in cerebral wattage—heavy metal half-wits who wore boots because the alternative was those shoes with Velcro straps on them. They reminded me of the weird kid down the street who chewed then swallowed the heads off a full battalion of little green plastic army men but continued to play with them, despite the fact they were dead.

And I’m not alone: rock crit Robert Christgau gave Sabbath’s debut LP an unprecedented “E,” and when I asked my younger brother to sum up Black Sabbath he said simply, “Apparently the Devil likes doofuses.” Personally I lay the responsibility for this perception of the band from Birmingham as English oafs at the feet of Geezer Butler, whose wooden, stilted, and startlingly stupid lyrics make the boneheads in Bad Company look like MENSA material in comparison.

Let’s be honest: The Geez’s “I’m living easy where the sun doesn’t shine” may well be the most unintentionally hilarious rock lyric of all time (what, has he rented a penthouse in a giant’s bunghole?) And “I looked through a window and surprised what I saw/A faerie with boots and dancing with a dwarf” runs a close second. Then there’s “Into the Void,” wherein Butler comes up with the bright idea of sending freedom fighters to the sun to escape a doomed Earth, which ought to work out just dandy until they spontaneously combust.

But if I’m coming off all condescending (and I am) the joke’s on me, because Black Sabbath must have had something going for them (I know I’m talking past tense when they’re still around, but are they really?) or they wouldn’t have spawned a thousand heavy metal, doom metal, sludge rock, thrash, goth, and stoner rock bands, to say nothing of that Satanic duo Loggins and Messina. And that something wasn’t the dumb lyrics but duh, the music, which was murky, heavy-as-Leslie-West, and doom-laden, and kicked the bats out Hell because frankly Black Sabbath made a scarier noise and Ozzy was more than happy to bite the head off any bat that thought different.

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Want to know exactly how many times I’ve heard the Fall played on American radio, AM, FM, for-profit, not-for-profit, college, high school, guy down the block who sticks his speakers out his windows and considers himself a radio station because he shouts “The next song is by Oingo Boingo!” etc? Zero. And do you want to know how many American Fall fans I know? Don’t even get me started. I know more HENRY COW fans, and Henry Cow are art prog shit!

All of which is to say, from my personal experience, that The Fall are a distinctly un-American proposition. In Great Britain and other places around the world they’re considered sacred, the only band that matters, and they regularly made the pop charts. You can walk into any pub in England and find rabid Fall fans hitting other rabid Fall fans over the head with pint glasses because they had the temerity to suggest, I don’t know, that the Brix Smith-era Fall is far superior to the Live from the Witch Trials-era Fall. Here in America the legendary curmudgeon and band resident genius Mark E. Smith could (if he weren’t deceased) win the Masked Singer and people would say “Mark E. Who?”

It’s undeniable that the music of The Fall can be both challenging and, and, at least upon first listen, off-putting. The band sounds amateurish, the songs are as often not repetitive grooves, and Mark E. Smith declaims obscurantist (to me anyway, people keep telling me he’s actually making sense) “poetry” in a voice that veers in an instant from rant to sneer to falsetto squeal. He sounds like the strange geezer at the far end of the bar muttering to himself. And you may almost think he’s saying something of momentous import until he stops you dead with a word like “infaskunkstructure.” He’s anything but the Iowa Writer’s Workshop type.

And I think that’s the gist of it. Americans simply can’t wrap their minds around Mark E. Smith. He’s a crank and uniquely English species of iconoclast, a type as exotic to the American sensibility as spotted dick or deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road. Smith is always driving on the wrong side of the road, and as often as he not he’s pissed in both the British and American meanings of the world. It’s an aside, but one of my personal Mark E. Smith anecdotes goes as follows:

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Celebrating Christopher Cross in advance of his 74th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

A few observations on Yacht Rock anti-Christ Christopher Cross’ Grammy Award winning 1979 debut LP.

1. If Stephen King was the Master of the Macabre he claims to be, he would write a short story about a ruthless businessman with a Type A personality who is on his way to shut down an unprofitable mental hospital. He gets into his Porsche only to hear the doors lock around him. Then, and this is the important part, Christopher Cross starts playing on his car stereo and HE CAN’T TURN IT OFF. No matter how many dials he twists or pummels it just keeps playing over and over until the poor fellow goes blubbering insane and ends up as a permanent ward of the very hospital he wanted to close. If the great Mr. King can conjure up a more terrifying scenario than that one, I would love to hear it. Oh, and the scariest part? The whole process takes less than two hours.

2. CC became the face of soft rock with his eponymous debut, which remains one of the sleekest Yacht Rock vessels ever to be launched upon the Easy Seas. It spawned several hit singles (including those immortals “Sailing” and “Ride Like the Wind”), garnered him the Big Four Grammy Awards (which had never happened before and hasn’t happened since), and went platinum five times over in the process. Forget about the horror scenario outlined above. It doesn’t get any more frightening than this.

3. My good friend Dennis Warnack St. George recently told me this story:

“I was on a date with my future first wife when “Sailing” came on the radio. I reached over to change the station, and the next thing I knew I was in Georgetown Hospital. A priest was telling me I would be fine, and I was thinking that that’s what they always say to the moribund. Anyway, a van hit my girlfriend’s car head on. I was thrown through the windscreen (no belt). She was uninjured (belt). She nursed me back to health and we got married two months later.

So, I have bad associations with Christopher Cross. His music makes me think about that harpy I married.”

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