The Day the Music Died

So, internet, when I was a little kid, my family had a paltry vinyl record collection. This was in the days of vinyl records--I still remember when my sisters and I received a cassette tape of Thriller as an Easter present in 1983 and it seemed like a giant leap forward in both content and technology, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was born in 1973, and for the first ten years of my life we listened to records that spun around on a little machine, and getting the needle into the groove without scratching the surface was tricky business and our options of what to play were limited both by my parents' disinterest in popular music and what I must say was their appalling taste.

We had Peter and the Wolf, and Mary Poppins, and the Muppet Movie soundtrack, which was all well and good. But I remember only two non-kid records in the set. You ready? One was the latest Barry Manilow, and the other was this, our beloved Hit Explosion record, as seen on TV. My sisters and I loved this record.

We had two favorite tracks, and try to keep in mind here that we were three girls between the ages of eight and eleven, and our other choice was Barry Manilow. Be gentle, is what I'm saying, internet:

I Only Want to be With You, by the Bay City Rollers

and

You Are the Woman (That I've Always Dreamed Of) by Firefall

And despite the clunky sentence-ending preposition, and probably because of the crippling banality of the lyrics, this latter one really appealed to my dreamy pre-adolescent romantic side. I loved the bit about the star--

You are the woman that I've always dreamed of
I knew it from the star
I saw your face and that's the last I've seen of my heart.

I had this whole vision of a guy walking along at night, and suddenly this star appears to him, and there's a woman's face in the middle, a celestial vision of love. My ten-year-old heart swooned.

Thankfully, this song must have gone into a twenty year hibernation, because I can't remember hearing it any time between 1983, when it got replaced by Thriller, and yesterday, when I was leaving the YMCA and heard it on the cornball music station they play there so as not to bother the old people. Awwwww, I thought to myself. It's that song from Hit Explosion! Gosh, that takes me back.

And I actually stopped in my tracks, because all of a sudden cynical adult Newt realized what surely you knew all along, internet. Dude's not saying "star," he's saying "start." He knew it from the "start." "Star" doesn't even rhyme with "heart"!

(Although, in ten-year-old Newt's defense, if a guy is going to end a line with "of," in defiance of all grammatical and aesthetic logic, I guess you can't put a clunky near-rhyme past him).

So there you have it, internet, another cherished childhood illusion shattered. I blame my parents. My parents and Barry Manilow.