Who Sings if I Could Hold You Again
When it comes to nostalgia, in that location are those things that are true memories and those which are false memories. No decade has more of this going for it than the 1980s. Eighties nostalgia is a juggernaut that began when I was in high schoolhouse back in the early 1990s and actually hasn't stopped since, particularly since I've had students who say they're nostalgic for the 1980s, something I find hilarious considering they weren't really old enough to remember it (And no, they don't, because that would be like me proverb I retrieve the 1970s when I was born in 1977 and my only memory of annihilation world events before 1981 is seeing Jimmy Carter on a television screen. That might be a 1970s memory only information technology doesn't exactly put me within Studio 54).
If you are truly a Child of the Eighties, you are fully aware of these ii sides of nostalgia because for every movie, telly show, compilation album, or Glee medley that says, "Think Eighties? Here it is! No, don't think about anything that really happened. This is Eighties. Enjoy these memories." You lot're not supposed to think that Wang Chung had 3 good songs, only that they recorded "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" and made a seizure-inducing video to go along with it. You're not supposed to remember Fresh Horses, the piece-of-crap other Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy flick, merely Pretty In Pink. And you're not supposed to recollect the Cloris Leachman years of The Facts of Life.
Okay, sorry about that last one.
Anyway, I'thousand ane of those people who will listen to a flashback station on Sirius and be happy that Alan Hunter has decided to play "Stone in Love" instead of "Don't Terminate Believin'" for the hour's dose of Journey. Perchance it's considering I'grand a nostalgia dork, or perchance it'south considering I've been exposed to and so much Eighties nostalgia for the past two decades that I need more than than something that scratches the surface. I call back that anybody reaches that signal in his life, where he wants more than but some other playing of "Hungry Like the Wolf," and ordinarily there is ane work that serves as a trigger for the truthful memories that prevarication beneath the VH-one-produced surface. For me, it was "At This Moment" by Billy Vera and the Beaters.
First recorded in 1981 when the band was playing live shows at the Roxy, "At This Moment" is one of those songs that took its sugariness time to striking number i. In fact, it didn't hit that position until January 1987 after it had been featured on a now-famous Family Ties storyline and Rhinoceros Records had the sense to rerelease it. I wasn't a big fan of Family Ties at the time (and honestly haven't watched much of the show in reruns, although I have seen the one where Alex forgets to take his test because he'south thinking almost Ellen and they're playing this song), but in 1987 I was becoming a adequately regular radio listener and this was one of the songs that got abiding airplay non just during the showtime of the year, but during the whole twelvemonth, at to the lowest degree on the station that my sister and I preferrered, WBLI.
Now, virtually people my historic period who grew up on Long Island will chop-chop point to Z-100 or maybe even Ability 95 (WPLJ) as where they got their pop music pedagogy, if they didn't have the luxury of MTV, which I did non; or an older sibling/cousin who would skid them tapes of bands that nobody only nobody played on the radio, which I as well did not. Just I had a rather weak radio signal in my room that only really picked up a couple of stations strongly: the adult contemporary WALK and the "adult Tiptop forty" WBLI. I say "adult Acme 40" because at the time WBLI seemed to accept a playlist of the lighter side of the Top twoscore, which meant that when Madonna decided to get completely risque with stuff like "Justify My Dear" they would stick to playing "Holiday" and when Celine Dion and Michael Bolton rose to stardom, well … then it was over. I take lost count of the number of times I had to endure "How Tin can Nosotros Exist Lovers If We Can't Exist Friends" or "The Ability Of Love" while sitting in the passenger's seat of my mom'south Honda Prelude.
The fact that we could get all of the awesome New York-area radio stations (and even one or two out of Connecticut) on the radio in my mom'south car only fabricated the fact that my parents liked to listen to either the oldies station or Lite FM worse than it should have been and whenever we had to take a long car trip, Nancy and I spent almost of the ride badgering them with "Tin y'all put on WBLI? Can you put on WBLI? Can you put on WBLI? Can yous put on WBLI?" We knew that asking for Z-100 would be automatically denied but they would put upwardly with WBLI until the first twinge of static when my dad would claim that we were "losing the station" and immediately put on Lite FM.
The cover of "By Request: The Best of Baton Vera & The Beaters," which I spotted at my friend's graduation party in 1995, causing me to call up the vocal.
The station didn't necessarily play swell music and probably led me down the wrong path in that I did not have an all-encompassing drove of Van Halen tapes before I left simple school, nor was I passing Dead Kennedys tapes effectually and wearing Circle Jerks T-shirts in my 8th grade study hall. In fact, the one mix record I did have in the 8th grade featured Roxette, Jesus Jones, Def Leppard, and EMF.
Unbelievable, right?
Lamentable. Had to.
I blame WBLI for that. Certain, they aired Casey Kasem's Weekly Elevation forty every Sunday, and then I did become at least some passing knowledge of what was charting, only I likewise found myself listening to the station in January of 1987 and thinking virtually how much I liked "Mandolin Rain," a song that I still love but would never cop to loving during my formative years lest I be laughed at by my Biohazard-loving friends.
Anyway, how was I going to know in the first place? Aside from some basic cognition of Van Halen from my cousin Kelly, who I hope notwithstanding owns that "Van Halen Kicks Ass '87" tour T-shirt she came home with from the Nassau Coliseum that summer, I knew little to aught about music when I was ten. I think I owned 4 tapes: Thriller, Born in the United states of americaA., Sports, and the Superlative Gun soundtrack. The side by side tape I would become would be the soundtrack to Footloose. It wouldn't exist Billy Vera and the Beaters, unfortunately, because for all of my Bruce Hornsby love at the time, I actually didn't like "At This Moment" very much when I first heard it considering I didn't know what a live recording sounded similar vs. a studio recording, so I got really turned off by hearing the audience at the song'southward stop.
I can still motion picture myself, in the fourth class, with my radio on in the basement during a rainy Sabbatum, playing Nintendo and getting annoyed that I could hear people get "Woo!" when Vera sings "If I-I-I-I-I could simply ho-0-o-o-ld you," as if the people who were at his concert were there to personally offend me or something. The first twenty or thirty times I heard the song (and WBLI, like so many other stations, was in the habit of playing every single to death), I didn't fifty-fifty know what it was called or who sang information technology.
I found that out on New Year'due south Eve when WBLI played its Height 106 songs of 1987 and announced the title and artist earlier each one. New year'southward Eve was always pretty special to me, not because of any huge party or anything just considering of the simple fact that it was the but dark of the year when I was immune to stay upwards until midnight instead of dragging myself up to bed at eight:00 (9:00 or possibly 10:00 on a weekend nighttime), long before whatever of my friends even started to experience tired.
Of course I watched the ball drop in Times Square to count into 1988 that yr but for virtually of the night I sabbatum in my parents' basement with some toys and a pencil and paper, playing G.I. Joe vs. Stuffed Animals while listening to the 106-vocal inaugural and writing downwards who sang what and where they placed. The number 1 song of the year was Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," a song that had been popular back in the 4th grade when my friends were walking around with Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet cassette before it was replaced with Licensed to Ill. I can sort of sympathise that, although considering that 1987 was the yr of The Joshua Tree and Appetite for Destruction, WBLI's selection was a fiddling doubtable to me and so and still is.
"At This Moment" was in the elevation ten of the countdown–four or five, IIRC–and on the paper where I was keeping track, I wrote "Billy Bera and the Beaters." Sure, I'd misheard the proper noun of the band but at least I sort of knew, and if my years of watching G.I. Joe afterwards school had taught me anything, it was that knowing was half the battle. And I would win that battle because I wouldn't run into or hear annihilation related to "At This Moment" until 1995 when I spotted a copy of By Request: The Best of Billy Vera and the Beaters in the CD pile of my friend Andy at his graduation party. At first, I thought this was ballsy because some of my friends were known to ridicule others' music tastes (or perhaps that was me and my love of Queen and Springsteen? Because that I got shit for just about everything, it probably was just me); and then I idea of when I wrote "Billy Bera" downward and remembered "At This Moment."
Had 1995 been the age of the iPod, I probably would accept gone home that nighttime and downloaded the song and enjoyed it. However, in order to get it on a tape I would accept had to come upon it by hazard on the radio, ask Andy to borrow his CD or hunt the CD down on my own. I did none of those and instead waited another year for Billboard's Hits of 1987 to land in my lap courtesy of someone in college. I tin can't remember if information technology was my roommate Dave, our friend Kristy, or ane of the girls in the dorm room side by side to us, to be honest, all I know is that on i of the many mix tapes I called "Tom'southward Crap" was "At This Moment" (and "Lady in Cerise," which is a whole other story), except this time I really listened to it and really enjoyed it.
" data-medium-file="https://popcultureaffidavit.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/billboard-top-hits.jpg?w=131" data-large-file="https://popcultureaffidavit.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/billboard-top-hits.jpg?w=131" class="size-full wp-image-344" title="Billboard Top hits" src="https://popcultureaffidavit.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/billboard-top-hits.jpg?w=620" alt="">
Billboard Pinnacle Hits of 1987, from which I taped "At This Moment" and several other songs.
A combination of the song itself and Vera and the ring's performance makes it 1 of the Top 5 breakup songs of all time, easy. I might be a little prejudiced here because I played the piano for and then many years and this is a piano-driven song, but the manner that Vera sings honestly without going for bombastic glory notes (I tin can simply picture someone on American Idol butchering this song while getting a ton of adulation because he's loud) and lets the music and lyrics do the work makes his heartache sound incredibly real. I mean, I'll fifty-fifty alibi the rather cheesy Eighties-style saxaphone solo because when he comes dorsum for the finale and puts those pauses in between "If I could just agree you …" he'southward definitely got me. And you really feel those 4 guitar notes subsequently "Again" earlier the saxaphone plays out. If I'd experienced whatsoever heartache in junior high or the commencement couple of years of high school, this would definitely exist the soundtrack.
Instead, what information technology did back in 1996 was remind me that there was more than to the decade I grew upwards in than what was featured on a compilation CD, and that while I was making some sort of attempt to heed to music that was popular amongst my peers (even if that music included Improve Than Ezra), I needed to brand certain I endemic up to everything I'd listened to or loved.
Source: https://popcultureaffidavit.com/2010/12/29/if-i-could-just-hold-you-again/
0 Response to "Who Sings if I Could Hold You Again"
Postar um comentário