Night Ranger was a band that, sadly, history has relegated to the discount bin of 80s music. They were consistent hitmakers and released a series of successful albums, but never established themselves as a band with staying power. They’re still around in some form or other now, touring the casinos of America as a legacy band, usually appearing with collections of other bands in different classic rock packages. They’ll occasionally put out albums of new material, which I usually download out of some sense of leftover band loyalty and a hope that they’ll have two or three great songs buried in the track listing for me to discover. Their songs spoke to both what my high school experience was and what I wished it could have been, but here in the new century they’ve been systematically reduced to being thought of as the band responsible for “Sister Christian.” However, they did give me an accidental moment of musical revenge one time, in a way I had not seen coming and never really enjoyed, because it put me in such a fear of parental consequences.
Back in my American Top 40 days (junior high), before I had any kind of a job, I only made enough money with my allowance to buy the occasional package of Star Wars trading cards and never bought music with any kind of exploratory feel. I pretty much had to know exactly what I’d get from an album before I’d even think about spending the $9.99 it would take. Because of this, I, like so many other kids from my generation, solved the problem by making mix tapes of my favorite songs off the radio. And what better source for finding the best songs of the moment than the weekly broadcast of American Top 40? I’d like to think that I would have put this plan together on my own eventually, but I’ll pass on the credit, once again, to my cousins the Carlsons, who made AT40 mix tapes habitually. In fact, I got my first information about the Birds and the Bees from eighth-or-ninth-grade John Carlson while traveling across South Dakota to the Black Hills. We were riding in the back of a camper-topped pick-up truck and listening to an American Top 40 mix tape he had brought along, and my fourth-or-fifth-grade self had asked what the Donna Summer song “Bad Girls” was about.
Listening to American Top 40 wasn’t just a casual experience for me, but usually a mission. I vigilantly paid attention, trying to delve clues from whatever Casey Kasem was saying about a song or an artist as he led into the next spot on the countdown. I mentally kept track of where my favorite songs were from week to week so I could make a fair prediction about when they might appear in the show, in case I still needed to get a recording of them for my collection. The game was to learn Casey’s speech patterns well enough so you could record as much of the song as possible without having to hear him talk over it, which also meant becoming familiar with the fraction of a second lag time between pressing play on the cassette recorder, knowing the best position for holding the tiny little microphone square up to the even tinier radio speaker, and holding my breath for three minutes straight to make sure there wasn’t any ambient noise added to the song. Most of the time it worked out pretty well. Most of the time.
One night I was hidden away in my bedroom having a fairly successful night of recording. The show was nearly over, and the Top 10 was dramatically counting down to one or two songs that had been back and forth between the number one position for weeks. I had a favorite between the two and I wish I could remember what it was — in all likelihood it was either REO Speedwagon or Hall and Oates, since both bands were nearly permanent residents of the Top 40 back then. Finally Casey cut to the chase, revealed the top song, and, since it had been the one I had been rooting for and I knew it was the one and only time during the entire week I could absolutely know for sure it would be played and I could record it, I pressed play and waited for the song to end as my finger rested on the STOP button with the caution of someone trying to defuse a thermonuclear weapon.
The song was half over when my bedroom door flew open. My dad stood there in the doorway with a big grin on his face and cried out in a comically overenthusiastic voice, “WHAT’S NUMBER ONE??”
My heart stopped.
I calmly pushed the stop button, slowly turned my head to lock eye contact with him and said, in the slowest burn of a voice I had ever dared use with my father before, “I was recording that.”
His eyes opened even wider and he quickly backed out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him as if that was going to make any difference at that point. Later on I heard from my mother that he had sheepishly walked into the kitchen with kind of a smile on his face and said to her, “Boy, if looks could kill.”
So anyway. Years upon years later I was in high school and had moved on from recording off the radio to buying my own vinyl, and Night Ranger, at that time, represented two titles: Their debut album “Dawn Patrol” — featuring the rock radio staple of the time “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” for the purists out there — and their more successful follow-up “Midnight Madness,” which featured the minor radio hit “You Can Still Rock in America” and the ultimate power ballad of all power ballads, “Sister Christian.”
There was a summer when everything my family did in one way revolved around a community theater production of “The Sound of Music.” Our cousin Sue was playing the lead as Maria, and ended up marrying her leading man Chuck. Erin had a big role in it as one of the Von Trapp children. Jenny had one or two minor roles, just on stage for moments at a time in different costumes, but still a part of the production. Even Dad was involved, playing the role of Baron Elberfeld in one scene, hamming up his one or two lines in what became a signature theatrical voice for him in the years to come as he appeared in a number of other community theater productions.
After the run ended and the summer was over, VHS copies of the play were made for everyone involved, and of course we had one, carefully labeled to make sure nobody accidentally used the tape to record some movie off cable. Several years later my parents hosted a casual dinner party, reuniting some friends involved with the play to watch it together in our basement.
Everything was going great. I was patiently sitting through a recording of a play I had sat through at least five times in person when someone suggested a break when we reached the intermission. Since even back then I was the unofficial tech support go-to in the house, I was asked to stop the tape until everyone was ready to continue. I did, and while everyone was out of the room doing whatever adults did upstairs during a VHS intermission in the mid-1980s, I started flipping through channels to see what else was on to watch while waiting for the crowd to reassemble. MTV would have been one of my go-to networks in high school so I went there first, finding a Night Ranger concert! And they were playing Sister Christian! So yeah, I watched it. Which was only part of the mistake.
As things turned out, I didn’t press stop on the VCR. Which didn’t become evident until everyone was back and I had to press play again, only to discover I had just recorded about five minutes of a Night Ranger concert right over the only VHS copy my family had of the play that three of them had been in. Erin didn’t really care. Jenny had probably been more annoyed by her younger brother pulling another idiot move than anything else, and might have even just labeled it as another of the typical idiot moves of which I was so frighteningly proficient.
Upon discovery, my first reaction, because I was in high school, was to try and think of a way I could finesse my way out of what had happened. That reaction didn’t hold though, because I recognized two truths in that moment: (1) I was unequivocally screwed, because my dad had loved everything about being in that play so much and for me to disgrace that artifact with one of those damned rock videos was tantamount to heresy. Even if it was done accidentally, the damage was done. (2) He was going to discover what happened in front of a room full of people he had invited to his house as guests. There simply was never going to be a better time for me to just come clean about what had happened. It was my only out.
I owned up to it, legitimately contrite. Sue’s now husband Chuck tried to lighten the blow by saying the part I’d recorded over had been boring anyway, which got some laughs and diffused the tension enough to watch the rest, which gave Dad the time to calm down before everyone went home. He was still royally pissed about it, but at least I wasn’t being blamed for anything other than a stupid mistake.
I never saw a connection between these two moments before I sat down to start writing about this, but now I see them as something approaching an almost Karmic parallel. I never would have erased any of the tape intentionally, just as I know Dad hadn’t meant to burst in on my American Top 40 recording session. Neither of us was happy with the end results, but neither of us could blame the other for what had happened.
So, I suppose what I’m saying as a summative statement is this:
Dad, I guess we’re even.
No comments:
Post a Comment