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| Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits |
At the last Chorale Midwest concert, conductor Bradley Barrett recalled the first time he heard "Close to You" by the Carpenters. That got me to wondering how many songs I could remember specific details of the hearing them for the first time. The answer is, not that many, although more than zero.
1. "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits. It was a cloudy Sunday morning in March 1979, and I was driving down Roosevelt Road, having delivered my sister Susan to her restaurant job. It was spitting rain, which is ambient as a Sunday morning can get for this song which is clearly set at night.
2. "Tragedy" by the Bee Gees. Someone requested this song during my show on WONC early in 1979. I was beginning to recover from the Bee Gees-fueled disco orgy of the previous year, and I really liked this song, so much so that I thanked the guy on the air for requesting it.
3. "We" by the Roches. This was another one I heard for the first time in WONC's rickety studio on the 4th floor of North Central College's Old Main. I was doing a rock show during the interim between fall 1980 and winter 1981. I really didn't know enough about rock music, so I just grabbed a bunch of records labeled "Rock" and played the first track off each one. This one grabbed me!
4. "Love Over and Over" by Kate and Anna McGarrigle. In my first year of graduate school, 1982-83, I lived in a basement apartment on Green Street in Champaign with Jeff Barnet and Jim Hauskey, who were fans of "The David Letterman Show." Kate and Anna McGarrigle performed this song on Letterman one night; I had been vaguely aware of them before, but this kicked me into full fan mode.
5. "Karla with a K" by the Hooters, an unjustly neglected third single off their 1987 One Way Home album. The only time I ever heard it played on the radio, I was driving on the Tri-State Tollway, back to my parents' home in Wheaton from Steve Sanford's house in Flossmoor. It was on 101.1 FM, I'm pretty sure, which I think was still WKQX at that point.
6 & 7. "Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls and "Days" by Kirsty MacColl. I heard both of these in the summer of 1989 on the bus as I was chaperoning field trips for The American School in Switzerland's England campus.
8. "King of Calypso" by Ed's Redeeming Qualities. Jane and I were driving to the Inn Pasta on Memorial Drive and Mt. Vernon Road, which is now a vacant lot due to the widening of Mt. Vernon Road a few years later. This would have had to have been 1991 or at the latest early 1992. We had KUNI on in the car, and I had to stay in the parking lot until the song was over.
9. "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow. I heard this on whatever station was playing in Coe's Gage Memorial Union when I went to the ATM in 1993.
10. "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by the Proclaimers. The first time I ever heard of the Proclaimers, one of my favorite groups, was when this song from their late 80s album Sunshine on Leith was featured in the movie "Benny and Joon." I saw that in Joplin, Missouri, while traveling with Coe students Steve Junion and Vaughn Vance to the Midwest Political Science Undergraduate Research Conference in late April 1993.
Interesting that the newest of these recollections is still more than 30 years ago!
