The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

It was a sad weekend in music my friends.  Heavy metal icon and all-around decent guy Ronnie James Dio passed away from stomach cancer at age 67.  Dio carved out a damn good career for himself and his powerful voice, fronting Elf, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and then his own band.  Here’s one of his solo tracks that I’ve always been fond of – from 1984′s The Last in Line, it’s “Mystery”.

RIP Ronnie, you will be missed.  Let us all throw the devil horns in his honor.

Today sure feels like a thrash metal kind of day, so here’s a nice one from the ’80s heyday of the genre.  It’s Testament with “Trial By Fire”, from their 1988 release The New Order.  Now I always considered Testament a notch below the premiere thrash bands of the day (Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, etc.) but I’ve always liked this song.

Sorry for the infrequency of posts these days – you see, I now have a baby in a gray flannel diaper to tend to now.  So today’s song (the title at least) should be relevant for all the new parents out there.  From his 1981 album Cured, it’s Genesis alum Steve Hackett with “Overnight Sleeper”.

Via the Consumerist is a recent Slate article concerning the great baseball card craze of the ’80s and ’90s.  It contains an excerpt from a new book by Dave Jamieson called Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession.  It’s a topic I am all too familiar with as a former sports card and comic collector.  I never became a card speculator, as others of my age did, so I didn’t get burnt too badly.  Nevertheless, I have binders full of football cards that are now barely worth the plastic sheets that house them, thanks in large part to the ludicrous overproduction and subsequent cheapening of cards in the ’80s and ’90s.

I had a lot of fun collecting cards back in the day – I didn’t care much about the value of the cards although I did try to keep them in the best condition possible.  Something about filling holes in my collection scratched me where I itched (a need I fill now by collecting songs).  That naturally led to some suspect purchases, and it started to become obvious even as a teenager that card collecting wouldn’t be a lifelong hobby for me.

The moment when I knew things had gone too far came when I was about 14 or 15.  I stopped into a local comic and card shop, a regular haunt for me, to peruse some possible new additions.  As I approached the counter I saw a kid who couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9 years old haggling with the shop owner over some cards like it was the SALT treaty sessions.  I can still remember the feeling of sadness and disgust I experienced that day; a day when I knew it was time to move on from card collecting.

This phenomenon extended not just to baseball cards but to football and other sports cards, as well as comics.  I got a little suckered there, as I distinctly remember buying multiple copies of Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 in 1990.  But for the most part I just collected comics I liked, regardless of value.  That’s why I’m more likely to hold onto a lot of the comics I bought, instead of the cards.

One thing I did learn from the whole collecting phase of my youth is this – if you see something that actually says “Collector’s Item” on the package, it’s probably not.

Most longtime Iron Maiden fans would agree that 1988′s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son marked the end of the band’s golden era.  They’ve certainly had worthy releases since then, but this album capped off a nearly decade-long as one of the preeminent metal bands on the planet.  My favorite cut from Seventh Son is one that was not released as a single, which is a shame.  It’s “The Prophecy”, and it stands in stark contrast to most of the band’s material to date.  My favorite part is the acoustic guitar outro, something Maiden had never done before.  It’s something they would do well to try more often.

A beloved piece of my generation’s childhood is no more.  Les Lye, a writer and actor known to ’80s children as any number of adult characters from You Can’t Do That on Television, has died at age 84.  According to what I’ve read Lye had a long and successful career in Canadian radio and TV, but Americans like me all remember him from Nickelodeon as Barth the cook, Nasti the German dungeon master, and of course El Capitano the vaguely Hispanic military executioner.

As a last goodbye to a truly underrated performer and important part of my wasted youth, let’s take a look back at some great Les Lye moments.  And by great I mean wet, slimy, and tasty.

It didn’t take Robert Plant long after the breakup of Led Zeppelin to find his musical footing.  From his superb 1983 sophomore effort, The Principle of Moments, here’s “Big Log”.  The song reached the Top 20 in both the U.S. and U.K., and the video complements it perfectly.

To this day “Big Log” is my favorite Plant track, helped in no small measure by the top-rate guitar playing of Robbie Blunt.  Blunt left Plant’s band in 1985 and has kept a pretty low profile since, doing occasional session work for various artists.