what the closing music to wkrp in cincinnati

April 07, 2022 Post a Comment

(NOTE — Today's invitee blogger is Tim Hudson, a friend of Lauren's and mine. The first time I met Tim, we talked about Husker Du. I don't retrieve where it was or what else we talked about. Simply Husker Du, and that's what matters. Tim lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, with his wife and 2 daughters.)

And so Russ asked me to do a invitee web log almost a song of my choosing and of course I said yeah. He and I have extremely similar tastes in bands and an nigh identical passion for music, so I jumped at the chance.

I had to think for a minute on what to option because frankly pretty much every amazing song always has been written about ad nauseam, and much better than I could ever hope to do. Then what to do? I somewhen settled on — every bit the title suggests — "that end song from WKRP."

Is that what information technology's chosen? I don't even know if it has a name, but that'southward what I'chiliad calling information technology. And I bet that's a song that'due south been written near minimally, if at all.

For those non enlightened, WKRP in Cincinnati was a tv set show about a fictional radio station that ran from 1978 to 1982. I was 8 when I showtime saw information technology, and that's important to notation. My parents hated any and all rock music at the fourth dimension and I had no older siblings' record collection to raid, or anything to help along the journey.

Of grade, information technology goes without saying that this was way earlier MTV and Napster and all that stuff made finding music easy. I think I'd heard the Bay Metropolis Rollers, and Donnie and Marie upwards to that point.

But thankfully along came WKRP. For some reason my parents were into it, and not but let me picket information technology but laughed along with me at each episode. In that location was a ton of music on the show — and good music too, the kind that I would massively go into and explore later.

This was that wonderful netherworld of the '70s, where no one was paying attending to things that would after screw stuff up for everybody — things like music licensing. I mean, they played all the stuff on the show that a rock station in those days would play, and it was all new for me. I kid you not, the first time I heard Pink Floyd was when Mr. Carlson (read: older fuddy-dud) asked Johnny Fever (read: cool DJ) "what's the name of this orchestra?" "Pinkish Floyd," Johnny replied as side i of "Animals" droned in the background.

I didn't know what the hell that was all about, only I wanted to find out. In that location were posters of cool bands all around the studio — the Clash, Styx, the Commodores. It was all across the board, and I idea it was all cool. I wanted to hear what everyone sounded like and put the sounds I was hearing with the records covers I saw at Kmart.

Merely I digress. It was mostly almost that ending song. To my 8-year-old ears, it sounded like forbidden fruit. Information technology was the "hard stone" my mom so desperately wanted her son to have nothing to do with, and I got a niggling minute or then dose of it every week.

Knowing what I know now, it was apparently a riff on bands similar Foghat, Nazereth or BOC, simply I hadn't discovered any of that however. The lyrics were about a bartender, and rock and gyre in her centre, or something similar that, and that all sounded proficient. Not like stuff you got in Oglesby, America, where I lived. My imagination went wild. I spent hours trying to piece together lyrics that made sense while playing tennis (actually badminton) racket guitar and making eight-twelvemonth-old rockstar faces.

The great Henry Rollins said of the equally great Jane's Habit, "Jane'due south Addiction pointed it out without pointing to information technology," and I think in a weird mode that's what happened here. Information technology wasn't specific. It kind of but gave me an idea of what would literally be a chapter in my life, a chapter that thankfully keeps adding pages.

The epilogue to the whole cease song is that, it turns out, there weren't whatsoever real words to that song. According to Wikipedia, the lyrics were a scratch track that ended up sounding proficient. Basically just some phonetic nonsensical stuff to show the producer what the song would probably sound like one time the lyrics were washed. It'southward funny that something that literally was never finished inspired so much imagination and dreaming.

Ironically the same music licensing would cause the evidence to exist in a time bubble. As the years went by, publishing laws would get in difficult for WKRP to be released on video, as all those songs that added so much to the testify now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to license, negating a real release of the testify. Then now, the DVDs you buy have canned classic rock sounding songs subbed in for the existent stuff. I guess in the same way that the ending vocal'south "pointing it out" without pointing to it worked and then well for me, at present the whole feel — or at least the original experience — is, as Roy Batty says in Blade Runner, "All those moments will be lost in fourth dimension, similar tears in rain."

Too dour or hyperbole? Maybe. Regardless, get listen to that finish song.