Iowa City, 1992-1993: The Music

People who know me well know that I love my iTunes playlists. I have been making a more concerted effort to listen to more full albums these days - and let me tell you how I will NOT be blogging that endeavor as I certainly can't blog an album a day - but I still love grouping seemingly unrelated songs into a playlist that results in a cohesive whole, if only in my own head. One of my very favorite playlists is one crafted from the music I listened to during my first year at U of Iowa, creatively titled "U of I 1992-1993." You'll have to click it to make it readable, and I had to put two screen captures together to get all the songs on there, but damn it, I did it!

I think what I love most about this playlist is its variety. I have similar playlists from each year of high school, but when I was compiling those, I only allowed songs that were released during that time to make the cut. When I got to my college playlists, I was a little more liberal because my sophomore year of high school playlist has not one little bit of Stevie Nicks on it. That's a pretty glaring omission and because of that, I decided that allowing songs of any time period on to the list - just as long as I was actively listening to them at that time - was allowable.

I'm not going to comment on every song, although I will pick out a few, but allow me to make a few comments about the list as whole and the time period it represents. As I have mentioned before, that year was my third year of college, but my first at U of Iowa and my first year of pharmacy school. I had uprooted my life and moved it across the state - not that I was leaving terrible much because I was ready for a change after two years at Iowa State. Most of the music that I remember listening to was listened to in relative solitude, not that that was a bad thing. In hindsight, it was pretty important that I have that year in a single room on a floor full of guys, 99% of whom I shared not one single thing in common (although admittedly, my effort left something to be desired.) Eventually, I would make good friends in my pharmacy classes and would move out of the dorms for good at the end of the year. I specifically remember the spring of the year feeling like real living - friends and experiences and, well, life. The songs on this playlist provided a worthy soundtrack to that time period.

And now for some specifics...

• The songs from The Bodyguard soundtrack were inescapable during that time. While my favorite Bodyguard song is not represented on this list (the screaming-meemie "Queen of the Night") I always think about how that album was selling a million copies per week at Christmas 1992 and remember how much the record industry has changed since then. That, and how Billboard described "I Will Always Love You" as "beautifully undersung." Were we listening to the same song?
• Rick Astley's "Be With You" is on there because it applied to a girl in my class that I was enamored with. As shy as I was, it was not to be and looking back, it was a good thing.
• There is one Olivia Newton-John song on there - "Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying." I bought the Come On Over/Clearly Love Two-on-One CD at Camelot Music. The guy working behind the counter was so excited that I was buying that that he dug out some other ONJ CDs that were not on display. I bought those as well.
• You'll notice three songs from Deborah Harry's solo CD Def, Dumb and Blonde. This CD was purchased out of the cut-out bin at Camelot. I have said on multiple occasions that this was the best $3.88 I have ever spent on a CD. The last song on the playlist, "End of the Run", is the last song on the album and takes me back to those days instantly. Between this album and Erotica, I am hard-pressed to come up with what album provided more background music for me in the fall of 1992.
• Speaking of Erotica, the fall of 1992 would have been a different animal altogether had it not been for Madonna's triple threat of Erotica, Sex, and Body of Evidence. It forced my Madonna fandom out of the closet so-to-speak amongst those that I was getting to know. At our 10 year reunion several years back, more than one person told me that whenever they heard a Madonna song, they couldn't help but think of me. Mission accomplished.
• Simply Streisand (also another Camelot Music purchase) is an indelible part of that fall, as detailed already in this post. Plus that post discusses Babs, pussy AND the Beastie Boys. Top that.
• The sole Spandau Ballet song on the playlist, "Round and Round", is there because I HAD to have a copy of the song "True" on CD. Today, I would head over to iTunes and download it. In 1993, I bought Spandau Ballet's greatest hits CD. What a surprise to find that I liked (almost) every song on the album. Wouldn't have happened today.
• I first heard "Walking on Broken Glass" while studying for a test at the Iowa City Public Library, but I'll let this post speak for it. For as much as it was played on the radio, I'm still surprised it wasn't a top 10 hit.
• My flirtation with Eurodance started here as evidenced by the presence of "Rhythm Is A Dancer" and "Mr. Vain" - the latter being of particular importance as we had a TA whose name was "Mr. Fain." Hilarity ensued.

When I look at this list, I think that had anyone listened to what was coming out of my headphones at the time they would have probably had me committed. Maybe I needed to be. That's what I love about music. I can still see the nearly 40 year-old guy in the stuff the 20 year-old was listening to. The minute that stops, I need to throw in the towel.

Is it the most manly stuff in the world? Hell no. Do I care? Double hell no. Do I sometimes get teased for it. Yeah, sure. But it's all in good fun and if you can't laugh at yourself, you might as well just forget it. I didn't know that then, but I sure do now.

The only song missing from this list is REM's "Nightswimming." And because it's a playlist, well, I can just go add it because it's just that easy.

Ease on down

One of my favorite things to do to help rein in my unwieldy iTunes library is to make smart playlists that randomly pick songs. I have 3 such playlists right now: Random 80 Minutes, Random 25 Songs and Another Random 80 Minutes. What they lack in creative naming, they make up for in eclectic song choices. What's even better is since they are smart playlists with live-updating, if I ever get tired of a few songs on the list, I delete them and replacements from the library magically appear. This process pulls stuff out of the furthest reaches of the library, songs I might not even think of otherwise.

Which is how "Ease On Down The Road" from the movie version of The Wiz came to be one of the my most played songs this week. It got me to thinking (as I am wont to do every couple of years) that I really should rewatch The Wiz in all its late 70s glory.

The only problem with that idea is that The Wiz is really an absolutely horrible movie. The concept of the musical is cool and intriguing. Based very loosely on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it has all the familiar cast of characters, this time portrayed by an all African-American cast. Instead of Kansas, it's Harlem. Instead of a tornado whisking Dorothy away to Oz, it's a snowstorm. Oz is an odd amalgam of fantasyland and 70s New York City. And instead of Judy Garland as Dorothy, it's Diana Ross. Too bad the execution did not live up to the concept.

As a kid, I was kind of obsessed with this movie. In hindsight, this does not surprise me but what DOES surprise me is that I was never able to watch it all the way through. Oh, I managed to get through the beginning just fine. Dorothy is deposited in a graffiti-filled Munchkinland and the standard Oz set up ensues. But really, I could never make it much past the scenes immediately following the introduction of the Scarecrow and the descent down the roller coasters of Coney Island to find the Tin Man. But it was in there that "Ease On Down The Road" makes its first appearance




I finally sat down in 1995 and watched the entire movie. It was a huge chore. I have a pretty high tolerance for musicals (higher than most guys my age) and even I had a hard time making it through this movie. Michael Jackson's turn as the Scarecrow is pretty good. I enjoyed 70s New York turned on its side a little bit through its reworking as Oz. But the songs are, by and large, horrible. Aside from "Ease On Down The Road," the only other song I even remember from this movie is "Brand New Day" which is performed just after Evilene the Wicked Witch gets flushed down a gigantic toilet. (yes, believe it.) Too many of the songs feature an extreme close-up on Diana Ross singing a solo, which considering Ross' famous diva-sized ego, should surprise no one.

I love the story about how Diana Ross allegedly forced her way into being cast as Dorothy, despite the fact that the filmmakers wanted to cast Stephanie Mills who had originated the role in the Broadway production. The argument was that Ross was too old, which caused Ross to make what seems to be some back-room deals in order to insure that she be cast as Dorothy, ultimately tying financing and production to her being cast in the role. You can read all about it here, but it's amazing! Despite the intrigue, it's still not my favorite Diana Ross story. That will always be the story of the DUI that Ross received in Tuscon, AZ while driving to rent a video from Blockbuster. Seriously, Diana Ross has to rent her own movies from Blockbuster? She's DIANA ROSS for Pete's sake! Jeff and I found great humor in this unfortunate event which probably means we're going straight to hell.

I've talked more about The Wiz than I thought I could, which means I'm inevitably going to go get the DVD from the library or from Netflix and at least watch highlights. If only it were streaming on the Netflix box!

(and I managed to get through the whole post without making a pee joke. Oops, I spoke too soon.)

It's all coming back to me now out of nothing at all (but I won't do that)

I have this new playlist in iTunes that carries the rather unsexy title of "Shit I Never Listen To Because I Forgot I Had It." I created it the other day as I am going through my iTunes collection by artist and clearing out the stuff that I do not listen to and will probably never listen to again. I've always been a bit of a pack rat when it comes to music, always afraid to let go of that 4th live version of "Like A Virgin" from the Blond Ambition Tour because it sounds just slightly different at 3:12 and who knows, I may want to listen to it again even though the sound quality is for shit. Well baby, those days are over. I'm being pretty ruthless with what I cut and what I keep, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep the best sounding version of each Madonna tour and archive the rest on DVD-R. They're just taking up space on my hard drive and, as I said, they never get listened to.

BUT one unintended side effect is that I'm discovering songs that I really like that have been lost in the great sea of music that is my iTunes collection. I've chronicled the ultimate inadequacy of a digital music collection before, even though it beats the hell out of having all these CDs all over kingdom come gathering dust. So I created this playlist and have added songs to it that fall into that category - basically stuff that I never listen to because it never (or rarely) bubbles to the surface.

One song that has made that playlist is the 1996 Celine Dion bomabstic drama-fest "It's All Coming Back To Me Now". (watch the video here, I can't embed it to save my life, and believe me, I've tried.)

"It's All Coming Back To Me Now" is cut from the seemingly endless supply of cloth that Jim Steinman has been crafting songs out of for years. Jim Steinman, who wrote pop radio staples like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for Bonnie Tyler, "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" for Air Supply and "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" (among many many others) for Meatloaf, knows cheese when he hears it and is not afraid to squeeze every last ounce of sturm and drang from every note. But an side effect of this is that they all kind of sound the same. I still think that you can sing "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" over the top of "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" in much the same way you can sing Rick Astley's "Together Forever" over "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Yes, a little bit goes a long way with Jim Steinman (and Celine for that matter) but as I've said before, there are a handful of good Celine Dion songs and this is another one of them. It was a huge song when Heidi and I were dating - I think it was a single right around the time we got engaged. We loved it as an album track (yes, we bought Falling Into You, but so did 35 million other people in the world so cut me some slack) but we figured it was too long for the radio at 7 minutes and some.

Never underestimate the power of the radio edit. Chop two and half minutes off the song and you have a breakaway pop hit, as Anya would say. At least they didn't cut the faux slamming door at the "and you were history with the slamming of the door" part. I remember liking this song so much that I purchased the CD maxi-single without having heard any of the remixes first, which turned out to be a big mistake. It didn't remix well at all, which kind of surprised me because some of the best club mixes are full of drama and angst which this song had in spades, but it did't translate well. The vocals felt sped up, the production frenetic, and one of them turned the already seeming interminable song into a 14 minute behemoth.

The funny thing is I think those remixes are in my iTunes, but I won't part with those just yet. Just don't expect them to show up on my "Shit I Never Listen To Because I Forgot I Had It" playlist.

Jim Steinman also wrote a song that Barbra Streisand recorded for her Emotion album in the mid-80s. Predictably, it is not short of drama either, but "Left In The Dark" was always a highlight of that album for me. Not surprisingly, you can sing "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" over the top of that song too. However, I never knew until just recently that it had a video.

The beauty of the playlist

When Apple introduced Genius playlists a while back, I thought the move was a stroke of, well, genius. I was completely enamored of Genius playlists for a while. But, like most everything else, it was a crush and when the glaring inadequacies of Genius playlists became more and more apparent, I became much less fond of them. I do like how they have a tendency to pull songs out of your library that you have either forgotten about or have not heard in an age. With nearly 20,000 songs in my library (note: not 20,000 unique tracks), that can be a positive thing.

But the problem with Genius playlists is that they are really not all that smart. For example, in response to my brief re-flirtation with 90s club music, I made a Genius playlist based on Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." And while it did manage to pull "Rhythm Is A Dancer", "Another Night", and "Pump Up The Jam", it also rather inexplicably put Annie Lennox's "No More I Love Yous" and Christina Aguilera's "Genie In A Bottle" in the same playlist. Those are two songs that, had I been building the playlist myself, would have never even been considered.

So ultimately, I am much happier putting my own playlists together, even though using Genius is a good way to grab 25 songs on the fly and put them together. One of my favorite playlists to listen to right now was one inspired by the book I am currently reading (and close to finishing) Band Fags. Each chapter is named after a pop song from the 80s, a snippet of the lyrics of said song serving as a brief introduction to the chapter. I had a good 95% of these songs already, so making the playlist was not hard. Here it is, for your perusal. (Click to make bigger.)


There are a few songs missing. Currently, I am missing OMD's "Secret", Timex Social Club's "Rumors" and a song I had never heard of called "Bless You Boys" (which I think has something to do with this.) I had to buy a handful - including that Rex Smith song which made me twitch a little bit when I bought it ("I can't believe I'm paying 99 cents for this!") but it's amazing how well the songs blend together. Even the Michael W. Smith song which I thought would stick out like a sore thumb fits in well with the rest of the music. (Mary/Heidi, I can still hear old what's-her-name at Fairfield singing that song!)

So I guess the bottom line is, when it comes to playlists, Genius is nice but I'd rather have them on my own terms. Kind of like I like the rest of my music. There's a reason I don't listen to the radio anymore.

Your call cannot be completed as dialed

A week or so ago, I was having serious spyware issues on my computer. I am usually hypervigilant about that sort of thing, never really downloading much of anything of a suspicious nature and certainly not falling for those stupid "you look great in this secret video" type thing. Despite all this, in what I have determined to be a post-stroke moment, I fell for the stupid Koobface Facebook virus right after I got my computer cleaned up, which led me to have to debug the whole computer AGAIN. Surely the universe is trying to get my attention.

Things are pretty much back to normal, except for one little thing. No matter what I do, I am completely and utterly unable to connect to the iTunes store. This is the message I get about 5 seconds after I try to connect to the store. It happens every time I try to connect.


I have uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes multiple times. I have checked the iTunes forums. There have been issues with iTunes 8, but most of the posts are from September when iTunes 8 launched. It isn't a Norton Antivirus issue either as I made sure that iTunes was listed as an "allowed" program. Nor is it a Windows Firewall issue - iTunes is "allowed" there as well. The store is accessible from the MacBook and I have not heard of Heidi having trouble from her iMac so it appears to be specific to me. I am not really sure what to do next. I wish I had a bit more technical knowledge than I do! Much like my medical diagnostic ability, I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

Normally, this would not really bother me all that much as I am pretty much a complete convert to Amazon MP3. However, my inability to connect to the iTunes store has rendered the "Get Album Artwork" function (upon which I rely heavily) worthless. And that, folks, is pissing me off.

If any computer geeks (a term I use with humility and love) are out there reading this, and have an idea, I'd be more than happy to hear it!