Hey all.. Sorry for the relative slowdown in regular posting, but it being the holiday season, I'm afraid I'm crazy busy at the moment (as are, I'd imagine, most of you). There have been numerous things I've been intending to address here -- everything from the insane annoyance of "SantaCon" last weekend to the sad closing of M.J. Armstrong's, a bar on the East Side named after a high school friend of mine who died on September, 11th -- but, again, there simply haven't been enough hours in the day. `Tis the season.
In any case, I have had one idea for a post -- or multiple posts -- floating around in my head that I'm finally taking the time to tackle. While around this time of year, everyone loves to wheel out and dust off their favorite Yuletide songs (I've certainly done that in the past), I thought it might be interesting to cite a few tunes that -- while in no way discernible as proper "Christmas Music" -- still evoke specific Christmas associations for me. Yeah, it's high concept, but bear with me. Here's the first installment...
1980: "(Just Like) Starting Over" by John Lennon & Yoko Ono
In a perfect world, I'd have put this up last week, on the 31st anniversary of the man's death, but what'cha gonna do? Regardless, while I touched on some of this in this post last year, I've never been able to hear any song off of the Double Fantasy album from 1980 without thinking of the Christmas of that year. To me, they are inextricable.
In that year, I was in 8th grade and just beginning my nascent appreciation for music. I'd long-since graduated out of a phase of listening solely to KISS, and was now exploring everything from Pink Floyd, AC/DC and Black Sabbath through Devo, The Clash, Adam & the Ants and many points beyond. This was also an era when radio seemed to mean so much more. MTV wouldn't rear its head for another year, and wouldn't even make it over to the East Coast until a while after that. As such, I found out about music the old fashioned ways -- through my older sister, through my friends (and their older siblings), from hanging out in record stores and via the good ol' radio.
If memory serves, the go-to rock radio station at the time was WPLJ, whose format still clung tenaciously to classic rock, but with the occasional forays into the new stuff (I still have a recording on cassette of `PLJ segueing from The B-52's "Private Idaho" seamlessly into "Long, Long Way from Home" by Foreigner ... a coupling that would probably never happen on today's programming). In any case, since its release in mid-November, WPLJ had been basically playing John Lennon's Double Fantasy to absolute death (pardon the unfortunate turn of phrase), largely concentrating on "Woman," "Watching the Wheels," "I'm Losing You" and especially "(Just Like) Starting Over." You really couldn't flick on the station for under a half-hour without hearing that tell-tale ding-ding-ding at the intro alerting you that, once again, there was a new John Lennon album that you needed to own. Lord knows you didn't need to go buy it, being that it was being played everywhere, but still ... Double Fantasy was the album of the season.
Having already been a big Beatles fan (they actually pre-dated my slavish fandom for KISS, being that my parents owned several key albums of theirs), I was not at all averse to Lennon's new stuff, but it wasn't until that morning in early December when it took on a new resonance. Without delving too deeply into the obvious, John Lennon's inexplicable murder during the early hours of December 8, 1980 struck a jarring, culture-shifting chord. Again, I pretty much covered the rest of that back on this post from last year, but when my mother gave me a copy of Double Fantasy as a Christmas present that year, it sort of forever fused the bizarre, tragic event of Lennon's passing with Christmas.
If you go on YouTube, there are many video clips for "(Just Like) Starting Over." Some are finer quality than the one below, but I chose this one for its fleeting shots of Lennon and Ono cavorting around New York City, and indelible image to be sure.
Stay tuned ... there will be more to come.
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