Ultimate Road Trip Mix: Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50(something)

#386) “Into the Night” by Benny Mardones – “Into the Night” sometimes gets negative chatter for a couple of reasons:

1) The video, which is … I don’t know, how should I put this: not in any way, shape, form or fashion complementary to the song. I try to judge old stuff fairly, through my very own jerry-rigged lens of what I know about the times in which they happened. I'm pretty good at adjusting for the inflation of changing sensibilities as time passes. But the video for this song is especially tough to watch. Even by 1980 standards, pre-MTV, pre-image over everything, it’s cringey the way the video for “Friday” by Rebecca Black is cringey. The project could have used an advisor, someone with fresh, objective eyes to make suggestions, to pull Benny aside, perhaps, and say, “Look, dude, the song's great, but I got some notes on the video I would very much like to run by you ..."

2) The lyrics…which are … I don’t know, how should I put this: great actually. But there's that one line, the very first line in the song: “She’s just sixteen years old / leave her alone…”

In this vigilant world, that line would never fly. And, yes, at face value, it shouldn’t. It's also a bit cringey … at face value. But to be sure, the second part of the line is a warning to leave her alone, not get her phone number, and more to the point, I think it’s important to monitor how our minds engage the notion of censorship, scrutinize the where, when and why of labeling any creative expression, any expression at all, “inappropriate" or "problematic". This is especially important to do as time passes and everything finds its forever home in the quiet, sunlit repository of historical context. 

Mardones, who passed away in 2020, had a ready explanation for the origin of the song and that first line in particular, having to do with him living next door to a family that had a teenage girl in the house. Around the time he started writing the music that would eventually become the album, Never Run, Never Hide, a buddy apparently did once make a comment about this girl, to which Benny said “hey, she's just sixteen, leave her alone”… etc., etc. The rest is one-hit-wonder history.

Okay, fair enough. But I don’t really think that explanation, or any other, is necessary. “Into the Night”, like all songs, movies, TV shows and novels, like anything creative, is a work of fiction, and open to interpretation. Yes, the words “she’s just sixteen years old” are heard, but so what?  I’ve known this song a long time, it was hitting me in enticing ways when I was ten (six years younger than 16!), and in spite of the disillusioning video (which I didn't actually ever see until about three years ago ... damn you YouTube!), there is nothing in it to make the listener think the character singing, the "protagonist" (so to speak), is anything other than a young man, himself sixteen years old, or seventeen, or eighteen, and it is a protective father or mother, or older sister or brother, who has spoken these words to him, warned him to leave her alone, not Chris Hansen on Dateline.  

People overthink things, look for trouble, actively seek out a reason to be outraged, and that’s no way to live. It’s just a song. It can and does mean anything the listener wants it to. And while a debate about how good or bad a song it is may be warranted, at no time have I ever thought it was a non-fiction account of 33-year-old Benny Mardones grooming a teenage girl. I mean, come on, that’s just ridiculous. That wouldn't have flown even in 1980.

To me, in adulthood, the song reads as a gripping account of what I remember about being in love at that age. Evidence to support this can be found in the rest of the lyrics, which are quite good, intimate, vulnerable but smoldering, exactly how young love tends to play out. Confession: I was in love with a teenage girl once in my past, and lines like, “It’s like having a dream where nobody has a heart”, and, “I can’t measure my love, there’s nothing to compare it to” are pretty much exactly what it felt like. It was never so pleasant as it was torturous, but I craved it just the same. And yes, there was a huge age difference at play with this seventeen-year-old that I was obsessed over, but it was all okay. Why? Because I was fifteen.  

Fifteen, and yeah, "Into the Night" pretty much told the story of what I was feeling, and how it was making me feel.

But where the song really punches hardest is musically. For my money, it is among the most potent rock ballads ever recorded, really something akin to sumptuous - the thick, lurching rhythm, syncopated guitar strikes, leathery bass line standing guard as a fever-dream piano twirls and skitters its way across an intersection like St. Elmo's fire. It's a musical left hook that very much evokes thoughts of desire, longing, and yes, a certain desperation, even a permeant shame and regret for it all. Mardones’ vocals are appropriately anguished, reflecting the kind of pain that accompanies unrequited, forbidden or interrupted love. And at the end, as the fadeout commences like a moonrise, it really does sound like the whole emotionally messy business disappears into the night.

And the truth is, in spite of what I think the lyrics are about, I don't really associate anyone under the age of 21 with this song, on account of where I mostly remember hearing it when I was a kid. In the very early 80s, as I was riding my banana seater around town and the song was still kind of new and likely still being considered by some to be Mardones’ springboard to rock god immortality one day, I only ever heard it in places where grown-ups were. 

Not older kids or teens, but grownups. Grown-ups gathering in the loungey, local supper club/tavern-type places my parents frequented. They were usually town adjacent, and always down-to-earth (read: local) enough to be interesting without ever being sketchy. The dining room shared the same space with a long bar. Sometimes there was a river rock fireplace in the corner, but there was always trophy fish on the walls, an ashtray at every table, a happy hour, a jukebox and a great Friday fish fry, which turned into live music "'til 1 a.m.!" around 9.

My parents never stayed that late, but they were denizens of these places in the evening and twilight hours. Picking my through that crowd of middle-aged, middle to upper middle-class 70s gents and 80s ladies, “Into the Night” was thumping out of any and every jukebox I crossed paths with. I bummed a quarter here and there and played it myself more than once, and long before I knew what it was like to be in love with anyone, it made me feel things, made me feel some type of way (as the kids say), which I could never have described, but couldn't possibly ignore.

"And I would wait 'til the end of time for you ..."

#387) “Look What You’ve Done to Me” by Boz Scaggs – I've come to realize in recent years that Boz Scaggs is underrated (or perhaps underappreciated) as a performer and songwriter, and as Boz Scaggs songs go, “Look What You’ve Done to Me” is surely underrated and/or underappreciated.

I think the song might suffer a bit from its association with the 1980 movie “Urban Cowboy”, not because there's anything wrong with the movie necessarily, just because the song is so damn good, such an exquisitely rendered ballad, it almost seems a shame to share it.

And really, how could it not have been great? Co-written by Scaggs and David Foster, whose contributions have helped shape a lot of songs now considered classics, it features the members of the group Toto playing and The Eagles singing background vocals. Close, fragile piano chords and strategic key progressions work and play well with Scaggs unusual vocals, coming together to form a psychologically haunting brew that never turns sappy. A brew that is simply not done justice and will never be fully satisfied in its role as the “love theme” for any movie.

Like "Into the Night", it’s one of those songs that played a more richly textured role in my childhood than merely being another song on the radio. I grew up in a small struggling town that was quiet a lot of the time, quiet as the sun came up and quiet as the sun went down, and the mildly erratic blush of “Look What You’ve Done to Me” is what I remember so many of those days sounding like. There was always a radio on in the background somewhere, and always a mist of small-town loneliness condensing out of the the air on a dim Saturday morning or darkening Tuesday evening as the last daylight slid out through the window above the kitchen sink. 

For better or worse, "Look What You've Done to Me" still reflects this low-grade anxiety over a day that hasn't really done anything wrong but is making me feel low just the same. 

"Hope they never end this song / This could take us all night long ... "

Ultimate Road Trip Mix: Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50(something)

#384) “Will You be Staying After Sunday” by The Peppermint Rainbow - I was born into a world of Sunshine Pop, man. Technically, its hey-day was the late sixties, but I was lucky for where I grew up. Those close chilly harmonies and striated string notes strung like clothesline between bright white clouds, that rummage closet assemblage of acoustic guitar, horns, harps and harpsichord, that tambourine rattle pairing so well with the simple metallic tap of a 3-piece kit, was still being played on our town’s small, isolated radio station through the Carter administration, still actively part of its morning and afternoon playlists, in between which painfully local spots and weather forecasts were heard.

Which meant that in any space where musical sound was tinkling and crinkling out of tiny, tinny, wired tweeters, Sunshine Pop was there, hanging around the periphery of my consciousness, trimming all hard edges like garland, and yes, helping me put faces with the names of the grownups in my life, whom it was only just yesterday I had started to really be aware of.  

And if not from a radio, then some off-brand version of that oft-mimicked sound was sure to be heard in other places - movie soundtracks, TV theme songs, commercial jingles and most certainly children’s programming. From Saturday morning cartoons, to PBS at lunchtime to after-school specials, throughout the 1970s a veritable musical rainbow of Burt Bacarach/Roger Nichols/Paul Williams-inspired melodies and arrangements accompanied the delivery of an exquisite blend of information, comfort, virtue signaling and just a little plainclothes angst to Generation X as they emerged from diapers and learned to ride bikes.

I’m happy to have been born into it, kind of relieved, actually, that my parents were easy listeners as opposed to rock and rollers. Sunshine Pop was extremely good music to be a little kid to, and no other song better exemplifies the auditory essence of the genre than “Will You Be Staying After Sunday?” by The Peppermint Rainbow, released in the spring of 1969.  

That "essence" was propagated not only by the practice of prioritizing melody and harmony over vocals and rhythm, but also by being deceptively cheery. The subtext of so much Sunshine Pop often involved as much cloud cover as sunshine. On the surface, "Will You be Staying After Sunday?" is musically light and airy, almost sounds like the "sunshine" itself, but the woman singing, the protagonist if you will, is struggling with what's coming. There is a subtle element of foreboding afoot, a disquiet that sounds distant, like a storm on the horizon. You're not necessarily involved, and it isn't necessarily affecting you, but you're aware of it. Aware that the sunny skies might not last, that there is likely to be, at the very least, a sun shower, but possibly, possibly, a small rain-wrapped tornado wrecking afternoon and evening plans.

That very kind of dynamic tension did nothing less than color the early perceptions of this Gen X'er, as he emerged from diapers and learned to ride a bike.

"Don't let a lonely Monday come again ..."

#385) “Desert Moon” by Dennis DeYoung – This song haunts me. Not so much for the song itself, although I do think that, for all it ever wanted or tried to be, "Desert Moon", released in autumn 1984, holds up better than many other, "FM 95.7 Light Hits..." staples. Some of the lyrics are actually pretty good ... poetic.

But what I remember most about it is the video.

In it, Dennis DeYoung returns home, presumably for a high school reunion, and over the course of a weekend, it would seem a real sun-drenched, “you can’t go home again” vibe is engaged by Dennis and his buddies. There was a girl he loved who moved away, and clearly he's not forgotten her, and this ongoing longing sullies the visit. 

It's a video from the golden age of MTV, when, well, first of all, the "M" still stood for music, but also a time period when many new videos were trying cinematic themes on for size. That simply doesn't happen anymore. Not the same way. I mean, just the notion of depicting something so Alan Alda-ish as a high school reunion weekend seems unlikely ever to happen in a video for a Top 10 single nowadays.  And even at the time, it might have been better suited for VH-1 than MTV.

I wasn't 28 or 38 in 1985, I was twelve (and a fan of Alan Alda's The Four Seasons, actually), so I responded to the sense of sumptuous melancholy depicted in the video, to the notion of times and people changing in some ways and not changing in other ways, and all of it right when I was feeling the anxiety of my older brother graduating high school and leaving the house for good. In fact, the brother aspect of the video is probably what initially got my attention. DeYoung is greeted home by his younger brother at the beginning, and his younger brother sees him off at the end, leaving him waiting for a train out of town, where they share these final potent words:  

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“I don’t know ... maybe Chicago.”

I admit it reads a bit corny now, but it was nothing less than evocative when I was twelve.

And fine, I admit: it still kind of is.

 "When a whistle cut the night, and shook silence from our lives..."