How To Lose a Day of Your Life, aka, This Is Why You Have to Keep the Wireless Off While Writing

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This morning, I was working on a scene set in 1985. Two people — a 20-something man who’s not quite right, to use the Baltimore vernacular, and a 14-year-old girl, emphasis on girl — begin talking about music. This conversation was not part of the plan when I started writing today; the only thing on my mind was, “Well, what now for these two?” She reached for the radio and the next thing I knew, two deeply unhip people were talking about their musical preferences. Let’s be clear, this is not George Pelecanos land, where the musical references arrive with a smooth coolness rivaled only by the margarita I had at <a href=”http://www.lomasdetzununa.com/ “>this place</a> last week.

The girl likes Madonna and, as 14-year-old-girls did in 1985, she has attempted to dress like her idol. But when asked what other music she likes, she stammers out: Whitney Houston, Suzanne Vega, Kate Bush, Scritti Politti. With the exception of the first name, all the choices are her older sister’s. I filled those in from memory, sensing that I was on the edge of a time suck from which my day would not recover. Writing done — I did a respectable 1,400 words today — I followed a hunch and went to MTV.com and discovered that the site has a
<a href=”http://www.mtv.com/music/yearbook/index.jhtml?contentId=1536032l”>jukebox feature</a>that will pull up the biggest (video) hits from a given year. And the day was lost to me.

One of the surprises — forgive me, <a href=”http://www.markbillingham.com/tomthorne/coming.html “>Mark Billingham</a> –was the video for Phil Collins’s “Don’t Lose That Number.” (It wasn’t in the MTV jukebox, but a click on Collins led me to the whole trove of videos from “No Jacket Required.”) In 1985, the music video was essentially four years old, yet it already had enough tropes for someone to mock them knowingly. (This was the same year as Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” with Sting singing “I want my MTV.”) Yet the video era was also still young enough for a hit video to feature a band simply standing there, playing music. And then there was the unforgettable one-hit wonder of A-ha’s “Take Me On.” To this day, I keep expecting a nice Scandinavian man to emerge from my trashcan.

And, oh, the exposition. The stars! Well, sort of stars. Keith Carrandine and Robert Wuhl in “Material Girl.” Courtney Cox in “Dancing in the Dark.” (Granted, we didn’t know she was Courtney Cox, but still.)

But what would the man in my book listen to? It happened that I had recently read THE WISHBONES by Tom Perrotta, where one of the characters has a secret crush on Amy Grant. In 1985, she was just beginning to cross over from Christian to adult contemporary, but she seems like someone my male character would like, musically. Grant got me thinking about the kind of videos one might have seen on Country Music Television, although I’m not sure there was a CMT in 1985. (That said, a quick ‘Reba McIntire’ search on YouTube unearths a wealth of guilty pleasures.) However, there was John Denver’s “Don’t Shut Your Eyes Tonight,” which played in frequent rotation on VH1. Um, so I’ve heard. And Billy Joel as the angel who saves a teen from suicide in ‘Second Wind.’

So — what’s your brand/year of video corn?

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23 thoughts on “How To Lose a Day of Your Life, aka, This Is Why You Have to Keep the Wireless Off While Writing”

  1. “what’s your brand/year of video corn?”

    In 1983, I was going through a big end-of-relationship (well, it seemed big, at the time) and The Police were doing their Synchronicity album, and at that time, it really struck a chord with me. The ‘Every Breath You Take’ video was only a hop and skip better than “a band simply standing there, playing music” (which, as an ‘old guy’, I prefer!)

    Before that, I remember when music videos ran between movies on HBO; this was before MTV, and before Friday Night Videos; had to be somewhere around 1979-80. The Police video for “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” is an example of a plain-vanilla video of a great (or what struck me as “great”, at the time!) song.

    Then in 1991 or so, I had another – infinitely larger! (kids involved) – end-of-relationship, and Pearl Jam exerted a huge impact upon me (is any album better than Ten? No.) – and again, the videos were pretty plain.

    So those are my two years of video corn (negatively memorable crop-failure corn, but still…)

    edit: Guatemala? And did I read the room rates correctly? Less than $100?? Forget the margaritas, that lake looks marvelous (and I’m a sucker for mountains – Western Maryland is God’s Country!)

  2. “Every Breath You Take” is inextricably linked to a pick-your-own-peach orchard in Waco, Texas. I was driving away from there, thinking about visiting my boyfriend down in San Antonio and that came on and all I could think was, “Gee, that’s a little creepy.”

    Meanwhile, way down here in the comments section where it won’t feel like name-dropping, I am going to confess: I met Chrissie Hynde two weeks ago. It was at once as cool-and-terrifying as you might expect.

  3. Way cool! But – all it would remind me of is Rush Limbaugh…! (presumeably she might have a little dirt to dish on that guy)

    Still working on getting to Indy in March; I think I’m about 75% likely to make it there

  5. Too funny!

    Meanwhile, I have just had the important epiphany that a certain Reba McEntire video could come straight out of Patrick Dennis’s Little Me.

    Oh, on a more serious note, Sarah: I’ve been catching up with some O’Nan backlist that escaped me and I think Snow Angels is remarkable.

  6. Yes, the room rates are as posted; I hear the place is always full. We were staying nearby and hiked up the mountain, then had a drink on the terrace.

    But once you’re there, you’re THERE. You can walk down the hill to the nearest town, but it’s terribly poor, disturbingly poor. Or you can take the public boats to the various towns around the lake.

    And to get to the lake, you need to drive three hours from Guatemala City. Still, I’d go back.

  7. For me “Every Breath You Take” is linked to a storyline in All My Children that ran in 1984 (I remember the year because I watched while we lived in Minnesota, and we were only there 9 months) Watched that show for over 20 years before I finally weaned myself from recording the videotapes that were no longer getting watched

  8. I was lounging on the couch at the Delta Tau Delta house when MTV first came on the air with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. We were instantly hooked. (And before you ask, yes, we were. High as a stand of Georgia pines, as a matter of fact.)

    Back in those days, though, it seemed like they only had about twenty videos that played over and over and over again. So I got very familiar with stuff like “The Warrior” by Scandal and Tenpole Tudor’s “Swords of a Thousand Men”, which I used to sing at the top of my lungs when thoroughly drunk. It’s a great song for that. But my absolute favorite was a crudely shot concert vid of a tune called “I Will Follow” by an obscure Irish band called U2.

  13. Please understand, that is the hierarchy of shock FOR DUSTY. I have friends who are Republicans. I had a date with the president of the Young Republicans of Bexar County.

  14. I was already old in the 1980s, but love YouTube and
    have found a lot of really wonderful opera, operettas and musical clips from movies. But not enough Elaine May and Mike Nichols.
    All you “youngsters” make me again realize the truth of my youngest brother’s accusation that I was “terminally square.”

  15. Speaking of fundamentalist Christians,I grew up in one of those families. So in 1985 I didn’t know pop music existed. Amy Grant was sort of okay to be a rebellious church kid but the adults thought she was the devil. So I listened to a lot of Steven Curtis Chapman, Micheal Card, Steve Green, and oh, man, DC Talk. What’s awesome is I still have a taste for that stuff.

  16. Favorite highlight from an Amy Grant video: A happy couple spending an evening rolling and an orange back and forth across the floor to one another.

    Doris Ann, you are the least square person I know.

  17. I am way behind on O’Nan reading but SNOW ANGELS is pretty damn great, yes.

    More video corn: distinct memories of a New Year’s sleepover at my best friend’s place maybe six, seven years ago, finding one of several MuchMusic (Canada’s MTV) channels. The video for the duet Elton John did with Kiki Dee comes on and we giggle at the bad fashion….and then he grabs her boob. What?! Where did that come from, we all wanted to know in our hangover haze. It just made no sense then, and less so sober…

  18. I WANT CANDY, as covered by Bow Wow Wow was my 1st ever MTV video. But the foundation of music videos goes back to Hollywood Musicals (American in Paris and Elvis’s JAILHOUSE ROCK, for example) and were perpetuated by the Beach Movies and even the Monkees.
    Don Kirchner’s Rock Concert also paved the way for MTV.

    I like the song “1985″ that says “there was music still on MTV”.

  19. I’ve read The Good Wife, Last Night at the Lobster, The Speed Queen, Snow Angels, Songs for the Missing and A Prayer for the Dying. Haven’t read the short stories or the one on the Hartford circus fire, which I don’t think I can handle.

    Currently reading The Life Room by Jill Bialosky. And by “currently” I mean: I will be reading it once I read three books I agreed to blurb.

  20. In the ’80s I was a very poor newspaper reporter and did not have cable TV. I missed pretty much an entire decade of music videos and by the time I actually had cable, I wasn’t into it.

    And on the subject of O’Nan: Snow Angels is remarkable. But have you read The Good Wife yet? That one stayed with me for ages. I just finished Songs for the Missing, which is a little scary as a parent.

  21. Hah! NOW I fell much less like a shirker, for not doing the internet thing & reading the installments.

    After I read a few more Lippman’s, I’m thinking of composing a multiple-choice, purely non-authoritative (and unauthorized!) quizz. For example, I think Ms Lippman’s favorite fictional color is green, (arbitrarily) based on the raincoat and on the color of the lingerie in the racey pictures in To the Power of Three (and other places)…

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