New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
I spent three hours last night contemplating lost youth, so allow me to explain.
On the one hand, I'm no fan of biopics, and I probably won't watch Bohemian Rhapsody.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a 2018 biographical film about the British rock band Queen. It follows singer Freddie Mercury's life, leading to Queen's Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium in 1985.
I find it interesting and instructive that since the movie was released, there has been so much discussion about Queen's performance at Live Aid, but unless you're over forty years of age, it may not be clear to you what Live Aid even was.
The videos pasted here are two parts of a single three-hour BBC documentary, an hour and a half each, and the whole Live Aid story is recapped. It's solid and filled with information in spite of the many too-cute visual flourishes.
Verily, July 13, 1985 was a bizarre cultural landmark. Flawed, but indisputable. It's unclear if the millions raised that day accomplished very much in terms of famine relief for Ethiopia, and yet if you were a music fan at the time, Live Aid cannot be forgotten -- whether you loved it or hated it.
The following was pulled from my 1985 European travelogue and lightly edited for context. One thing that rings true about the documentary are those memories of walking the streets of London and hearing the concert from every window. I was in Ireland at the time, and the interest level was comparable. It was an amazing thing, indeed.
If nothing else, Live Aid will be remembered as a pioneering use of satellite transmission technology. As many as two million people around the globe tuned in, and while we're now connected in far more sophisticated and immediate ways, it's difficult imagining state-of-the-art technology bringing people together in quite the same fashion.
Because: we don't desire being brought together, do we?
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At one of the pubs in Sligo, I’d overheard a conversation about a big concert on Saturday, July 13. At first I thought they meant a show in Sligo itself, but then it became clear it was to be televised from Wembley Stadium in London – and finally I made the connection with the magazine I'd previously spotted at the hostel in Paris.
It was Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s epochal day-long, worldwide gig to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. I was about to learn the importance of being Irish; Geldof was born and raised near Dublin, and as the guiding force behind the punk-era Boomtown Rats, he doubled as curmudgeonly social critic.
It was a quality Irish conservatives found disconcerting – until the hometown boy made good on a larger stage.
So, never discount the power of national pride. Live Aid was the project of an Irishman, and Ireland was preparing to be quite enamored of this fact, whether or not any of them liked the Boomtown Rats.
On Saturday morning I asked Gerry, who with his wife Mary was my host at their informal bed and breakfast, to direct me to the bus headed for Strandhill. It was a settlement by the ocean at the foot of Knocknarea (nock-na-ray), a 1,000-foot tall limestone hill overlooking the Bay of Sligo. My plan was a morning hike to the top, where a Neolithic burial cairn is located, and then a return to Sligo to watch Live Aid.
As it turned out, Gerry was preparing to drive to the golf course, and so he deposited me at the trail head near Strandhill. It was hazy, muggy and fly-infested, and the path well-traveled. The view from Knocknarea was worth the effort, with majestic vistas of green fields, rocky hedgerows, shimmering sea and the ever-present Benbulbin.
I caught a bus back to Sligo after lunch, showered, and found a seat at a nearby pub. Live Aid was showing on a projection TV. The Irish national television channel had preempted all other programming, and between acts, there were cuts from the live feed to the studio, where an older presenter and Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy’s singer and bassist, provided what amounted to color commentary.
It struck me that whenever a set ended, and the two television commentators began talking, voices in the pub would be lowered, and the drinkers would pause to listen. This was interesting, though it still was relatively early in the day.
Live Aid was the most ambitious international satellite television production of its time, and Geldof’s creation was subject to rightful criticism: Wasn’t it the very same group of pious pop stars, pumping up their own album sales by means of a charitable “cover,” with little of the money raised ever actually making it to the intended beneficiaries in Ethiopia?
More pointedly for Live Aid’s connection with Africa, why were the acts almost entirely white? Stevie Wonder is said to have refused a slot at the American venue because he had no intention of being the token black.
Ironically, Lynott was a black Irishman, born in London, and he was in the television studio precisely because his band hadn’t been invited to play. How could Bob do that to Phil? They were mates. Still, as Live Aid unfolded, my fellow pub goers were united in praise for the idea – after all, it was Geldof, an Irishman, who’d organized it.
Unfortunately, illness and heroin addiction killed Lynott barely six months later. Did he and Sir Bob ever make up?
At some point later in the afternoon, I walked back to my room to get more money from the secret cash stash. I heard familiar sounds coming from the kitchen, where Mary sat watching U2 begin its star-making Live Aid set.
“It’s U2,” I said. “I love this band. Are you a U2 fan, too?”
“I’ve no idea,” she replied. “But they’re our lads, aren’t they?” We watched together
Just as I re-entered the pub, Queen started playing. Like much of the rest of the planet, I was spellbound as Freddie Mercury worked the crowd of 75,000. I’d been only a casual follower of the group, and had not witnessed it on stage.
Queen’s 20-minute set at Live Aid is routinely rated among the most memorable live performances in rock history, and while it may have not been the music I came to Ireland to hear, it’s a personal memory I’ll always cherish.
It gets hazy after that. Back in my room, I listened to the some of the Philadelphia portion of Live Aid on a small radio I’d brought along. I fell asleep, and it would be many years, well into the Internet era, before I ever saw video of what I'd missed.
Arriving in Hungary thirty years ago for a stay that lasted almost the entire month of June, I had many potential activities in mind, but perhaps the last thing I expected to do was attend a big pop/rock show at the soccer stadium (Nepstadion; since demolished) in Budapest.
But that's exactly what happened, and for the whopping sum of $7.25.
For three decades, I've been grateful for the chance to see Genesis perform behind the Iron Curtain (June 18, 1987) and then later during my travels, witness U2 playing on the group's home turf in Cork, Ireland (August 8).
What I didn't know until moments ago is that U2 also played in Budapest while I was traveling in Hungary in 1987, on June 8, while I was reposing in the countryside.
SPOILER: Except it never actually happened.
Yes, Wikipedia lists the U2 Budapest tour date here and here, citing an off-line reference. I can find no other attribution anywhere else on the Internet, and as many refutations as you please, like here. It must have been ghosts. If a Wiki editor is reading, a correction is merited.
At the time, I was flummoxed to learn that Genesis was coming to Budapest.
Even in an era of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR ... even in Communist Hungary, where there was a tad more freedom to maneuver amid the East Bloc's subservience, and the term "Goulash Communism" was used to describe the Janos Kadar doctrine, "If You're Not Against Us, You're For Us" ... even as Magyar reforms permitted small-scale private ownership, which made things slightly more tolerable for social classes that officially didn't exist in Hungary ... the typical Western stadium-sized musical extravaganza was a highly unlikely occurrence, if for no other reason than a completely incompatible cost structure.
In other words, if a ticket to an Invisible Touch tour date cost roughly $25 in Western Europe and the United States, how could Genesis afford to reduce ticket prices to an affordable level in a Communist country given the sheer cost of mounting such a stadium-sized spectacle?
Following is the list of verified "western" shows in Budapest's Nepstadion between its construction in the 1950s and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
1965 – Louis Armstrong 1986 – Queen 1987 – Genesis 1988 – Human Rights concert: Peter Gabriel, Sting, Bruce Springsteen
Apart from the immortal Satchmo's peak Cold War appearance, which quite possibly was financed by the US State Department, there simply had to have been heavy subsidies to make the later concerts possible.
By extension, since Warsaw Pact currencies were essentially worthless, the subsidies surely would have taken the form of scarce hard currency -- American, British or German, or at least some form of barter. Proximity to Vienna also was a plus, though this wouldn't have mattered in places like Berlin.
That the Hungarian government was willing (and able) to negotiate such quality-of-life expenditures might well be regarded as a precursor of the end times, only two years down the road.
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In 1987, Genesis was at the pinnacle of its 1980s pop phase, and while the group was almost ludicrously popular, perhaps it could have been "fashionable" only in a locale behind the Iron Curtain. It seems that Hungary was willing, Budapest was able, and Queen had broken the ice the previous year (see postscript below).
Genesis had Invisible Touch atop the charts, and the album was ubiquitous on the radio. It inadvertently became the soundtrack of my extended stay in Hungary. I'd packed a small portable radio and what I hoped were enough AA batteries to get me through the trip, intended for use in the radio and the Pentax flash.
In Sopron and Kőszeg, much of my evening hours were spent listening to a primarily German-language station called Radio Danubius, which I assumed originated in Austria. As it turns out, it was founded in Budapest in 1986.
Perhaps because Genesis was playing Hungary, Hungarian radio was playing Genesis. When I returned home and bought Invisible Touch, just about every song on the cassette (you read that right) was familiar.
On June 17, the day before, I took the subway to Nepstadion with the idea of surveying the landscape. I found dozens of Sealink trailers lined up on both sides of the "service" entrance, probably a hundred workers hard at it, and neither a gate nor security to prevent me from wandering inside the stadium and spending a leisurely hour watching the stage being built.
On the 18th, I met my new American friend Mike and we went to the show. At this late date, a review would be senseless, although it's hard to argue with the brutally frank approach at Allmusic.
At the same time, I was (and remain) an unreconstructed fan of Genesis throughout the band's evolving prog-to-pop career. The "pop era" Genesis took no chances and its stage show was formulaic; consequently, the group was savaged for doing exactly what successful show biz aggregations are supposed to do, which is give the public it's money's worth.
Genesis in Budapest wasn't avant garde. The show eschewed edgy, but the natives seemed to enjoy it, and so did I. Here's the song I'll always associate with June 18, 1987.
Genesis itself has a measure of ambivalence about the song "Abacab," off an earlier album and a staple of its 80s live performances. This version was filmed at Wembley Stadium in London two weeks after the appearance in Budapest.
At concert's end, public transportation had concluded for the day, with the exception of unfathomable night buses. It would be a four-mile walk back to my accommodation on the Buda side of the Danube, and Mike accompanied me part of the way, eventually peeling off toward his digs in Pest.
Everything was closed, and I recall it being bizarrely quiet at the stroke of midnight along a major avenue in a large European capital city. Then I heard a rumbling sound echoing through deserted streets, and stepped behind a statue to take a break and see what was happening.
Promptly a Soviet Red Army motorized column rumbled past. The Cyrillic lettering on the tanks and support vehicles contrasted with Hungarian on the signs all around me. The column was gone fairly quickly, and I've always wondered what it meant, although the most likely answer is it was moving from one base to another through the city during the least busy time of day.
Land of confusion indeed. It's always possible Phil Collins was more prescient than he's been given credit for.
--- Postscript ---
A DVD called “Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen Live in Budapest” was released in 2012. It grandly documents the very epitome of the now-discredited stadium rock genre, rewinding to the groundbreaking 1986 show at Budapest's Nepstadion, when seemingly every movie camera in the entirety of Communist-era Hungary was assembled in one venue to capture the rare spectacle of a Western concert behind the Iron Curtain.
This film is an essential gem, capturing the late, lamented Freddie Mercury and his band mates at their post-Live Aid pinnacle, on what proved to be their final tour. Footage is interspersed of Queen behaving as tourists. For me, it's a time capsule given that my visit to Budapest and the unexpected Genesis concert was only a year later.
As much as seeing Genesis meant to me at the time, after seeing the Queen film these many years later, I’d have chosen Queen because of Freddie Mercury. He was a one-off. Then again, so are we all.
"online.com/en/the-band/members/freddie-mercury/">The life of Frederick Bulsara began on the East African island of Zanzibar on September 5, 1946. 25 years later in London under the name of Freddie Mercury he was fronting the now legendary rock group named Queen ... "
You never know where it's coming from, or what might trip it.
Bob Youngblood was my high school English teacher. He was a mentor and a friend. He died on Friday, but because it was my responsibility to host the annual family reunion weekend, I pushed it off to the side.
First you do your job, then comes the rest.
On Saturday night, 40 of us descended on Big Four Burgers + Beer (staff was awesome, by the way) for food, drink and socializing. Most of my cousins are older than me, and many have grandchildren. Some of these kids were there at Big Four, for the most part running amok.
Often I'm a Grinch at times like this, but oddly enough, on Saturday their joyful, writhing presence seemed comforting. None of it bothered me.
Closing ceremonies for the reunion came on Sunday morning, with Honey Creme doughnuts and Quills coffee, and then a bout of yard work, and finally a chance to catch up on writing.
Looking at the photograph of Bald Knob (the future Summit Sprigs off State Street), the very first words to come into my head were "Mother Nature does it all for us," a lyric from the Queen song "online.com/en/the-band/discography/miracle/">The Miracle", off the album of the same name.
The fifth and final single was the album’s title track. The Miracle, coupled with a live version of Stone Cold Crazy (recorded in London in 1974) was issued on November 27, and reached No 21 in the UK charts. The accompanying video is one of Queen’s most endearing and memorable, and features four child look-alikes (chosen after weeks of auditions) in the guise of the Queen band members. Directed by the DoRo team and filmed at Elstree studios, the real band members were only seen in the final part of the video, when they join their younger counterparts on stage. After seeing the ‘young Queen’ performing, Freddie was later to quip “Could they do a whole tour for us?”
I wrote the article, then thought it might be nice to hear the song. It had been a while since I'd listened to it. Life is strange. You push play, and before you know it, you're bawling -- because of life, death and all the stages in between.
They're tears of sadness because Bob's no longer with us, and tears of joy at his amazing, enduring legacy.
It's crying because those grandchildren are the future, and because I hope they have a damned future.
You're reaching for the tissues because music can be so deeply redemptive, often when you least expect it.
Thanks. I really needed that. I'm going to listen to "The Miracle" again. This time, I'm ready.
Purportedly, this second segment of my annual review of music was supposed to be devoted to listings of classical, world music and jazz, as intended to illustrate the sublime well-roundedness of my artistic taste.
This time around, you’ll have to take my word for it, because no new ground was broken in the year recently passed. There was stasis. So it goes. It remains a matter of overt pride and personal enrichment for me that all types of music can be enthralling at any given time, in a certain place, and according to variable moods.
For example, at some undisclosed point each year on a Saturday, I switch on WUOL-90.5 and listen to an opera broadcast from the Met. It doesn’t even matter which opera it is, because I don’t know enough about the genre to be selective. If nothing else, it helps to keep the Marx Brothers satire alive.
Elsewhere, my favorite classical works – medieval music, Smetana, chamber works, Shostakovich – are revisited regularly. These come from my own CD collection, and also via WUOL, for which I am thankful, and need to get back to supporting with some real money in 2013.
My world travel schedule has taken a hiatus in recent years, but music from the remainder of the planet still features regularly on my play list. I browse Internet radio stations and YouTube, delve into the CD collection, and make pairings: Fado for a Port night, or Dengue Fever with Asian cuisine. In fact, the Cambodian-American band’s documentary, “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong,” was a 2012 milestone, and I regret coming to it so tardily.
And then there are my first true loves, jazz and swing, the prototypically American musical styles I literally was raised to appreciate. Alas, I have been profligate of late. In 2012, the death of Dave Brubeck probably served as the only reminder of jazz for many observers of the Lady Gaga cohort, and while sad, it’s not unexpected. Perhaps 2013 finally will be the year when I muster the necessary organization to wire the WCTU Reading Room at Bank Street Brewhouse for sound, and begin devoting certain nights entirely to jazz. Or samba. Perhaps Handel or Borodin.
After all, we need listenable diversity.
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Last week I reviewed the list of my favorite pop/rock recordings of 2012. One release was purposefully omitted, because while influential in its limited time, I suspect it won’t stand the ultimate test of shelf life, in the sense of music worth returning to again and again. However, I might yet be wrong, and that’s why it’s time to talk a bit about Van Halen.
Early in 2012, there was much fanfare when the group announced a new album, the band’s first since 1984 (both the year and the title) with original singer David Lee Roth, and a tour to follow. I skipped the cash outlay for the tour date in Louisville and bought the CD instead. Interestingly, there was little truly “new” material therein. Rather, the songs were assembled largely from leftover, unused or discarded demos from the heyday of Van Halen during the Reagan Administration, newly recorded for the digital age.
For three weeks straight, I listened to Van Halen’s comeback CD. It made such a profound impression that when I started writing these musical columns in December, I couldn’t even remember the album’s title. Forced to scan the rack for a look see, it came back to me: “A Different Kind of Truth.”
The album isn’t entirely bad, although I’d be guilty of damning Van Halen with faint praise if I were to call it the “best” since the band’s last album with Sammy Hagar in 1993.
Gary Cherone, where have you gone?
There is formulaic filler, reminding the listener of why certain songs were omitted in the first place, but there also are moments of bliss and excellence, as when the lumbering leviathan belatedly gets rolling during Eddie Van Halen’s inspired, throwback solos on the song “Blood and Fire.” Thus was the air guitar duly enabled, back when we were sweaty and utterly shameless.
Eddie still has it, but David Lee’s voice isn’t at all the same, even if he’s crafty like a vaudevillian and adept at concealing vastly reduced range. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the single most noticeable absence is that of former band member Michael Anthony, ingloriously booted by the conspiratorial brothers to make room for Eddie’s son Wolfgang. “A Different Kind of Truth” proves definitively that Anthony’s backing vocals always were an integral part of the band’s sound. Without them, something vital is missing.
So, why will Van Halen still be a memorable presence for me whenever I think back on music in 2012, even if the new album was so-so, and in spite of missing them live? It’s precisely because it compelled me to return to the archive, and to listen again to those first five albums from the band’s original incarnation.
I liked the Van Hagar era, too, but indeed, there was a time when Roth prancing in spandex, screaming, and a grinning Eddie with his axe, shredding, meant quite a lot for the rock oeuvre as a whole. After finishing those five timeless albums, the new release seemed utterly irrelevant. And so collectively we age, gracefully or otherwise.
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These intense musical dalliances and re-immersions are hallmarks of my year I music. It always happens. In 2012, there was Van Halen, the “pop” period of Genesis, wonderful recaps of King Crimson and Soft Machine, and two Blu-ray/CD purchases to close the year: Led Zeppelin’s “Celebration Day” (the 2007 London reunion show with Jason Bonham on drums) and “Hungarian Rhapsody” by Queen, a concert from 1986 in Budapest.
In the days of my youth … it never could be said that I was a Led Zeppelin fan. It may have been a cultural phenomenon, given that the pot smokers in my school milieu steered toward Zepp, while the drinkers listened to the Stones and the Who. Whatever the case, the band’s performance as elder statesmen is quite compelling. Listen to Robert Plant as a lion in winter, wisely reinterpreting his own rock singer legacy, not as a shouter, but as a craftsman.
To view the very epitome of the now-discredited stadium rock genre, rewind to 1986 and revel in the excess as Queen plays the soccer stadium in Budapest, with every movie camera in the entirety of Communist-era Hungary assembled to capture the rare spectacle of a Western concert behind the Iron Curtain.
The film, unreleased until now, is an essential gem, capturing the late, lamented Freddie Mercury and his band mates at their post-Live Aid pinnacle, with interspersed footage of Queen as bemused tourists that chills me to the bone, so redolent of the mood in Budapest just one year later, when I purchased a ticket for $7 and saw Genesis on the very same stage.
As much as seeing Genesis meant to me at the time, after seeing the Queen film these many years later, I’d have happily swapped Phil Collins for Mercury. He was a one-off. Then again, so are we all.
Radio, someone still loves you. But that’s a tale for another time.
If you're in the position of flamboyant rock front man Freddie Mercury and know you're dying, what better way to go out than this observation of what one must do in order for the doors to open for business on this and every other following day?
Strip away the window dressing, and finding the will to carry on with the show is what it's all about, every morning. NABC's mission may be interpreted as pizza, frites, beer and a ballgame on television, but what it's really about is performance. When it comes to performing, the show must go on. Most of the time it's fun. Occasionally, it can be quite grim ... but the smile still stays on. At least it should.
I'd post a few more of these, but I need to be on site. Enjoy today ... and remember, let's be careful out there.
These clips are a primer: Stadium Rock Basics 101. I was watching at a pub in Sligo, Ireland, cradling one Guinness after the next and amazed that 72,000 attendees at Wembley would sing along to "Radio Ga Ga."
Steve Jobs' death was a surprise, but not so much of one. He'd been ill for a while, and the foreshadowing was fairly evident when he stepped down in August. He looked bad, although the spark was still there.
In a way perhaps not so odd, it reminded me of Freddie Mercury's death in 1991 from AIDS-related complications. It came prior to the Internet era of instant information and incessant speculation, and Mercury made no public mention of his illness until the day before he died. But he continued working until very near the end, and the videos for Queen's final album, Innuendo, clearly signaled something was amiss.
Mercury was 45, Jobs 56. At 51, I'm right in between, having achieved very little in life compared to them. I've no reason to believe I'm anything other than healthy, and yet this mortality gig can be daunting ... daunting, indeed.
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