This year’s annual Record Store Day had to kick with sad news via the loss of several people who made significant contributions to Pop/Rock music. I can only relate to two of them. I know the significance of The Band, I just couldn’t get into them.
The first departure was Dick Clark, a man whose career transcended the generational gap between my parents and me. Through the show American Bandstand, I got to check out some acts I was curious about, much like how the folks did in the Fifties and Sixties. Clark’s show had a little pull before MTV became a more dominant force. We usually skipped the other parts, namely watching audience members dancing.
However, by the time I was paying more attention to pop culture, Clark had shifted toward the roles the many really knew him for: a game-show host ($20,000 Pyramid often), host of a blooper show with Ed McMahon (it was funny and exciting at the beginning) and the MC to New Year’s Eve specials on ABC. With the latter, I fondly recall watching him usher in the Eighties. He had a sense of humor about it too. For The Simpsons, he turned out to be a robot when the Y2K disaster hit and his head in a jar hosted Y3K on Futurama.
After his stroke in 2004, it was incredibly sad to see him in such a terrible state. The man was the irreproachable host of anything! Nothing upset the guy. I never recall any scandals involving him like this infamous Casey Kasem meltdown. Despite all the jokes about him being the world’s oldest teenager or purporting schlock, Dick Clark made the world a better place for what he did.
The Onion has a couple pieces about him which I think they nailed it. The first one is a string of clips covering his career over the decades. The last snippet makes me cry because it was sad to see a man who was such a constant in American culture struggling to express his gratitude. Their obit was perfect. They even strengthened my opinion of Clark by bringing up how he and Soul Train founder Don Cornelius eventually became allies to produce programs featuring Black artists.
The other passing seems like a Trivial Pursuit question/answer but 30 years ago, Greg Ham was a member of Men at Work, the hottest Aussie act since Olivia Newton John, LRB, Andy Gibb, the Bee Gees and AC/DC. Through him, the first major wave of Aussie Pop/Rock flooded American radio/record stores: INXS, Mental as Anything, Midnight Oil, Eurogliders, Goanna, the DiVinyls, Real Life, Machinations, the Church, Go-Betweens, Hoodoo Gurus and the Sherbs. (INXS returned the favor by spearheading the second wave in the late Eighties, which also gave a couple of these bands another shot at the American shores.)
Greg’s saxophone solo on their first hit “Who Can It Be Now?” along with his harmonizing vocals clinched it in my memory of what late 1982 was like. However, I will always love Greg’s saxophone on “Overkill” the most. He enhanced the song’s sad, anxious mood conveyed in Colin Hay’s lyrics, thus making it my personal favorite and probably for other people suffering from depression/anxiety. His flute solo on “Down Under” will sadly be what many music experts and historians are going to keep bringing up. It began as a blessing and ended as a curse thanks to a recent court ruling. You can read the details here. Personally, I think Greg got screwed over in light of the eventual vindications awarded in other suits, namely George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” debacle.
When Men At Work’s popularity plummeted, resulting in the loss of the band’s bassist and drummer; it was cool to see Greg remained for the third album Two Hearts, a greatly underrated record I found in a cut-out bin around 1988. Seriously, “Hard Luck Story” and “Man with Two Hearts” are great, they also were a preview of where Colin Hay was headed as a solo artist; Colin continues to produce, tour and appears in Austin about every other year.
I do hope Greg passed away of natural causes. When MTV was reviving the Eighties during the Nineties with a “where are they now” special, I was glad to see that Greg continued to perform around Aussie nightclubs and the Sydney Morning Herald said he was a guitar teacher.