Let's get to the point....

This is the absolute worst way to have to do a 450th TM post.  Yeah, he wasn't a smooth, crooning vocalist.  His songwriting didn't produce the stuff of breathless romantic rhyme.  No, he was the guy you wanted to party with.  And we did, for a very long time.


When Breakdown peaked on Cashbox at #33 for three weeks, it had been on the charts for How Deep Is Your Love at the top, stopped the week Stayin' Alive was at the top, and that third week got leapfrogged by Night Fever.  Leapfrogged maybe, but not topped.  While it was at #33, TWO different versions of Theme From Close Encounters Of The Third Kind were above it.  Show of hands, those that know more than those annoying five notes of that theme.  Now, hands up those of you that could be wakened from a sound sleep and sing every word of Breakdown.


His last hit on Cashbox was in the last weeks of that magazine.  In fact, it was by then so feeble that it only published new charts on three of its six-week run.  The Macarena was at #2 still, as a summer of crappy music trudged into an autumn of worse.

Like many acts, I thought better of his older stuff.  It was his third lp, Damn The Torpedoes, that made his mark.  Every song released made you more excited than the last.  Unreleased songs rocked the radio as well, songs like Century City, What Are You Doing In My Life, and Even The Losers were almost as well known as Don't Do Me Like That, Refugee, and Here Comes My Girl.  All of us had DTT.  Like Rumours, or Hotel California, or Boston, it was ubiquitous.

After that, it was hard to get to that same level.  He hit a bit of a slump, as anyone would.  Argue with me if you like, you tell me which song you'd kick off DTT to add The Waiting.  But even a slump was better than most people ever achieved- witness You Got Lucky and Change Of Heart.


Then came inspiration renewed in the form of Jeff Lynne and the Travelling Wilburys.  Ironic that he is now the third of the five giants of the TWs-  fourth of six if you count Del Shannon, who committed suicide before he could actually join them.  Under Lynne's tutelage he blasted back to the top with Full Moon Fever.  A new generation of fans began their journey to adulthood with him, just as we had.  Into The Great Wide Open came next, and that new generation had their anthems- the title track, I Won't Back Down... Free Fallin'...

A last great burst of chart popularity (which does nothing to show you TRUE popularity) came in 1993-4 with Wildflowers, and Greatest Hits, which gave us perhaps the best of all- Mary Jane's Last Dance.  "Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain..."

Today, I did one thing to memorialize him- I filled out my tally board with Tom Pettys.  But there was one line of lyrics that kept coming back to me... and I guess it made a better epitaph than I have...

Well it was kind of cold that night,

She stood alone on her balcony

Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by,

Out on 441 like waves crashin' on the beach

And for one desperate moment

There he crept back in her memory

God it's so painful when something that's so close

Is still so far out of reach...