Oldies Lite

I'm out with a few friends from a professional association, and one of them asks me how things are going with the band. I tell her about our Fountains gig. I recount how they were playing oldies from KTUC-AM on the speakers, and how it made me think about what they'll be playing when I'm ready for the old folks' home.

"KTUC," one of my friends says. "Isn't that the really conservative oldies station?"

Huh. I have no idea what the station's political leanings are, but come to think of it, they do play a very specific kind of old music. I look up their playlist later online. Here are a few of the songs they've broadcast tonight:

"Beyond the Sea" by Bobby Darin
"Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford
"Love and Marriage" by Frank Sinatra
"September Song" by Tony Bennett
"Teach me Tonight" by the De Castro sisters

You get the idea: oldies lite. There's no "Splish Splash," no "Rock Around the Clock," definitely no "Louie Louie," for damn sure no "My Generation."

If a station like this is around when I'm in my 90s, they won't be playing REM. They'll be playing Boyz II Men.

NOW I'm depressed.

Oldies

It's not like years ago
The fear of getting caught
The recklessness in water
They cannot see me naked
These things they go away
Replaced by every day

Kitchen chores beckon. Some people love to cook. I'm not one of them. To relieve the tedium of food prep, I decide to listen to an album as I chop and fry and clean. I pick REM's Automatic for the People because one of its tracks has been going through my head for the past few days.

It occurs to me that this album is more than two decades old. When I was a kid listening to the radio in the '70s and '80s, the stations that played '50s and '60s music were oldies stations.

Wow. REM is oldies now.

That doesn't seem right. 1992 feels like three lifetimes ago, but when I hear "Man in the Moon" it might as well be three days. For all it belongs to a distinct era, it doesn't sound nostalgic.

I had a similar line of thought last week when Ron the Drummer and I performed at the Fountains, an assisted living facility on the northwest side of town. Oldies station KTUC 1400 played on the speakers as we set up and broke down. The music of our audience's youth. What will nursing homes be playing when I move into a place like this? The Talking Heads? Nirvana? Sir Mix-a-Lot? Will those bands sound as hopelessly out of date to the visiting grandkids as Tony Bennett does to my generation?

Time marches on. I can accept that. I pretty much have to accept that. I just don't want it to march on without me.

Manilow and me

I tend to float through my days blissfully unaware of pop culture. Keeping up with music news isn't a big priority. Despite that, I found myself surprised to learn that Barry Manilow had debuted a new album in June—his first collection of new material in a decade—without me noticing. I was a huge fan of his back in the day, so ...

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Anyway, the album, 15 Minutes, is apparently somewhat of a departure from his usual style, more guitar-driven than his previous work. I checked out a few clips on Amazon.com, and ...

What?

Shut up!

* * *

"At the Cooooopa ... Copacabaaaaaana ..."

"What are you singing?" I asked.

It seemed like a reasonable question to me, but my friend Tina could hardly believe it. I'd never heard "Copacabana"? I'd never heard of Barry Manilow? My awareness of pop culture at age nine wasn't much better than today, so yes on both counts.

Not long after that conversation, I caught "Copacabana" on the radio and listened carefully.

"It's a pretty stupid song," I told Tina the next day. "And you sing it better than he does."

But for some reason, "Copacabana" started to grow on me. Enough that I asked my mother to buy me the album when I was home sick. She brought me back a copy of Even Now, and I wore out my little kiddie record player's needle on "Copacabana." Every other song on the record was a keeper too. Soon I was spending countless hours in the living room, parked in front of the stereo, listening to Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits.

What wasn't to like? Catchy melodies, heartfelt lyrics, great piano arrangements—Barry Manilow had it all.

Alas, other members of the household didn't share this assessment. My mom mostly tried to ignore the music, if memory serves, but my dad was not one to suffer in silence. We had constant battles over the volume when he got home from work. I had no idea how funny this was at the time. I could have blasted Judas Priest at them. I could have spun Led Zepplin backwards, trying to find satanic messages. I'd say they didn't know how good they had it, except that they probably would have preferred the satanic messages.

Anyway. Somewhere around the age of 11, my musical tastes went in a different direction. I started listening to the "adult contemporary" station whose format would today be considered classic rock-ish. I discovered Chicago and the Eagles. A friend introduced me to "Hey Jude" and it blew my little mind.

Barry Manilow fell by the wayside. This wasn't a conscious decision on my part. I wasn't convinced by my parents and other naysayers to stop liking him—in fact, I never really stopped liking him. I just moved on.

* * *

Home alone one night, flipping through radio stations, I came across a Barry Manilow song—"Weekend in New England," I think—on Lite Rock 94.9. Yay! I was in my 30s at this point and hadn't heard him in ... I couldn't even remember how long.

I settled in to listen, and ...

Oh god.

He sounds like THAT?

All these years, I'd assumed everybody made fun of Manilow because he was sappy. But no. At long last, I heard what everybody else heard. The earnestness. The lack of any kind of edge combined with a dropping of the Gs ("yearnin'"). The highly produced arrangements, complete with violins and soft brass.

Bring them all together and you had a perfect storm of cheese.

After the first shockwave of realization, a discomfiting thought hit me: If there was a time when I could listen to this and not hear the cheese, it was because I hadn't been filtering it through a half-dozen layers of cynicism.

There was a time when those layers simply didn't exist.

So now what? Would I join the ranks of all the people who made fun of Barry Manilow's music? Chalk up my previous adoration to not knowing any better?

I didn't want to. I couldn't. Those songs were my friends when I didn't have a lot of friends. They made a long, rough patch of childhood a little more joyful. Who can ask any more from music than that?

Besides, love him or hate him, you couldn't doubt the man's sincerity. He meant every word he sang. He performed the way he did because he wanted to, not because people considered his sound cool at the time. Hell, even at the height of his popularity, Barry Manilow was never cool. He was just Barry Manilow.

Above all? I wanted to preserve that kid who hadn't yet grown all those layers of cynicism. Who could listen to the earnestness and the dropped Gs and the violins and just accept his music for what it was intended to be. This went far beyond nostalgia. If I treated Barry Manilow like a joke, those last vestiges of my innocence would dry up and blow away.

So I decided. And to this day, I still smile when I hear one of his songs.

And I'm buying his new album, dammit.