Here we are at the start of 2017, a brand new year, and the foremost thought on my mind is good riddance to 2016. While I've experienced years with far worse personal happenings than 2016 had, I can't remember a year with so many external happenings that bummed me out so much. A large factor in that was the many musicians lost in 2016, especially ones that I vividly remember from my high school days. David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, George Michael. While there were many more than just those four, those were the ones that hit me the most as they really took me back to a particular place and time. This even though I wouldn't characterize any of them as my musical heroes. In short, teen-aged me had a pretty crappy year.
David Bowie was the first shocker -- I saw the news of his passing late on the evening of January 10 on Facebook. I was doing one last check before bedtime and, wham, there it was. My first thought was of my cousin Laura, a huge Bowie fan, and how she'd be waking up to some lousy news. I was surprised by just how much his death impacted me. He was not one of my musical heroes -- I'm more of a "greatest hits" fan -- but I felt his loss deeply. In talking with Laura about this some time later, she said something along the lines of "well, you know how much he meant to me", and while that is certainly true, I don't think it's the whole thing. As I said, I'm more of a "greatest hits" fan, and I found a lot of his music to be somewhat esoteric for my tastes, but I also recognized his supreme talent. He was a unique creative force for his time and being able to witness it was something to appreciate. Losing that kind of creativity makes things a little less bright, and that's what I think had me feeling such loss.
Then a week later, news came of Glenn Frey's death, and this time I was more than a "greatest hits" fan. The Eagles were the first band whose album I wanted to buy for the music and not the teeny-bop idol of the day (sorry Journey!) While his death reminded me of some solo work from the '80s I had totally forgotten about, it was more losing half of the creative team of a band I'd enjoyed since I was 10 years old that hit me. Even with that though, I wasn't as sad as I was about Bowie, and I think that's in part due to being a bigger fan of the other half of that creative team -- Don Henley. Still, I knew before it was even announced that Glenn's death was the end of the Eagles. I'm so glad I got to see them several times over the years after they reunited in the early '90s.
Hop ahead in time to April when I overhear a couple of my co-workers talking. All I hear is one (in his late 20s) say "Well, he was kind of old." and the other (in her early 30s) reply "Yeah, I guess so." When I ask who they're talking about and they say "Prince." I look at them incredulously and say "He's not old! He's in his 50s, what's going on?!" Well, that was another wasted work day. As with Bowie, I'm a casual fan of Prince's; pretty much the early part of his career from 1980-ish to 1986-ish, what I described to my mom as "peak Prince." Purple Rain will always and forever remind me of high school, and if you were a teenager in the '80s and can't recite the opening of "Let's Go Crazy" upon request you've lost your '80s cred. Again, as with Bowie, I recognized the loss of a great creative talent and far far too young. That it was due to a drug overdose made me sadder -- I thought I had managed to get past the losing musicians to "sex, drugs, and rock & roll" a while ago and had moved on to the "age and illness" phase. While Prince's death was due to an addiction to prescription medications rather than the stereotypical hedonistic drug abuse cycle, it's still a loss that could have been prevented.
And now we've come to Christmas day and the loss of George Michael. This is the one that's hit me the hardest and had me thinking of a lot of different things over the past week or so. I recognize part of that is due to timing. With his death on Christmas and subsequently having the following week off from work, it's allowed me to stew on it more and with fewer distractions than the others I've mentioned. Would I have reacted the same way if he died next week once I got back to work? Who knows, but I do know that this past week I've listened to a lot of his music on repeat. I did the same with Bowie, Prince, and Glenn Frey too, but it was mostly while commuting to and from work rather than sitting in my living room reading a book or newspaper where I could stop what I was doing and listen to a song or two. It's a little weird to be listening to the peppy pop of Wham! and suddenly start crying.
So I've been thinking about why "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" puts a lump in my throat. I've figured out a couple of things. As I said at the beginning, none of these losses were of personal musical heroes (though they've definitely got me thinking about how I'll react when I DO lose a musical hero), George Michael definitely had a pretty significant role to play in my overall musical fandom. Add in three very vivid memories of him and his music, and it makes more sense.
We'll start with the memories. Back in 1984 this pop band from England appeared -- Wham! -- featuring catchy pop tunes and an absolute heartthrob on lead vocals. I, along with many of my friends and classmates at my all-girls high school, had discovered George Michael. Wham! was really my teen-heartthrob band. While many of my friends were also huge fans of Duran Duran, I passed on them for Wham! Now, generally, my music tastes (especially at that time) lean to mainstream rock and roll -- Journey, Huey Lewis, Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, with a dash of alternative in the guise of the Police and U2 (remember, we're talking 1984.) But oh those songs were so catchy and George Michael so cute! So, I had my teen-aged obsessive musical crush. I was completely jealous of friends who got to go to the Wham! concert at the Henry J. Kaiser center in Oakland on the Fantastic tour. (The fact I can remember it was at the Henry J. Kaiser center 30+ years later despite NOT going should say it all.) In my bedroom at home, I had very little wall space for posters due to the configuration of the room. I managed to hang a Wham! poster on my closet door (which was NOT an easy thing) and it stayed up through the end of high school. So, with all of this, you can imagine how excited I was when one of my friends decided she didn't want to attend the Day on the Green concert labor day weekend 1985 that featured Wham! as the headliners. She'd had a falling out with one of our other friends and rather than go to the show with her, offered to sell me her ticket. I begged my mom, promising we'd be chaperoned by another friend's older sister, and Mom relented, giving me the $20 for the ticket. My first concert! It's Wham! Woo hoo! (As I got older, it was a little more embarrassing to say Wham! was my first concert rather than Journey or Huey Lewis or pretty much anybody more "rock".) The chaperone fell through, so I made my friends swear that if my mom asked later to say that yes, we were chaperoned. Forget the fact that I'm a month from my 17th birthday and days from starting my senior year of high school. Parents, what can you do?
We had a great time at the show and got to hear a couple of new tunes that were due to be released on Wham!'s upcoming album. Of course, it was only a few months later that Wham! broke up and their final album, Music From the Edge of Heaven, was released. It was strange timing as about the same time this all came about I had a falling out with one of the friends I'd gone to the show with (the same friend the friend who'd sold me the ticket had a problem with) and other fractures and fissures among my group of friends had popped up. My senior year of high school was strange and as a result I didn't listen to Wham! much after then as there were so many conflicting memories.
Fast forward in time, and it's now early 1988, and I'm going up to Lake Tahoe with my friend Ana Gloria and her family. Our friend Mary is also coming along, so we pile in a car with Ana and her sisters for the drive up to Tahoe. Someone has a copy of George Michael's first solo album Faith on cassette. It'd been out for a few months at that point, but I hadn't bought it yet. A combination of the Wham! hangover, lack of funds, and that fewer and fewer albums were being released on vinyl conspired against me. If I wanted to buy Faith it was going to have to be on cassette (which I considered a waste of money) or CD (which besides being expensive required a CD player which I didn't have.) But we played the tape in the car on the ride up to Tahoe and I finally got to hear the whole thing. As a result, I finally scrape up a few bucks for the cassette (to eventually be replaced by the CD once I get a player about a year later.) That's a particularly memorable weekend full of laughs and listening to Faith reminds me of that fun time.
Fast forward even more now, and it's 2008. George Michael has more or less faded from popular view in the US, and the last album of his I purchased was 1990's Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1. I probably haven't listened to it or Faith in ten years, but when George announces his first US tour since 1991, I decide it would be fun to go. 2008 had started off kind of rocky and a fun pop concert seemed to be just the thing, little did I know what was in store. On June 1, I woke up to a phone call that my good friend, and Journey partner in crime, Darla had died from a cerebral hemorrhage. That this knocked me for a loop is a severe understatement. The only thing that kept me together was trying to be there to support her husband and daughter who were, naturally, even more devastated than I was. So it was on June 19, 10 days after burying my friend, I'm at the HP Pavilion in San Jose seeing George Michael live in concert. It was a fun, joyous night of music and the first time I'd felt even close to normal in three weeks. I thought of Darla often during the show, but the healing power of music was really what I needed. I will be forever grateful for that.
So, with those memories, and my teen-idolatry, I've begun to realize why George Michael's death has impacted me differently from the others. There's a very different connection going on with this one. But that's not all. Remember way back up there I mentioned he also influenced my overall music fandom? Well, there's that too.
Back in high school when I would devour as much information on Wham! and George Michael as I could, I knew he was a huge fan of Elton John. Well, that definitely made him cooler in my book as I thought Elton John was fantastic. Bonus points for the cute guy with good music taste! In the early '90s there was a tribute album put together for Elton John and Bernie Taupin with a variety of performers covering different Elton John tunes. I was already on a bit of an Elton John kick at that point, so when I noticed that George Michael was the only performer not to cover a known hit, but a lesser known album track called "Tonight" I was curious. The liner notes had comments by each performer about the song they covered, and the ones for "Tonight" told of George buying the album Blue Moves and instantly falling in love with the song. Hearing his gorgeous rendition sent me on a mission to find a copy of Blue Moves and some other lesser known (at least to me) Elton John albums, making me an even bigger fan of the legend that is Elton John. His duet with Elton on "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" is another all time favorite.
Around this same time Freddie Mercury of Queen died and there was a massive tribute concert a few months after his death. I never had an opinion one way or the other about Queen -- they were a band that people about 5-6 years older than me were in to (people about George's age.) To me, they were a band that had a few hits in the '70s and '80s that I remembered and kind of liked, but beyond that I didn't know much. The concert was huge with all sorts off performers playing in tribute and/or taking turns singing lead vocals with the surviving members of Queen playing. George Michael joined for "Somebody to Love" and "These Are the Days of Our Lives." Those recordings, along with a couple of other live tunes, were released on an EP that I picked up and led me to eventually purchase Queen's two greatest hits CDs, thus ensuring I discovered a legendary band. That I was far too late to the party to ever see Freddie perform is a disappointment, but I can at least enjoy that I have seen Queen twice and hear those legendary songs performed live. Thanks for the introduction George.
So 2016 was a disappointing year for all the brilliance that was lost. That we still have the music left behind to enjoy and remember is a comfort. I still think I'm going to be listening to more George Michael and Wham! than I have in a few years though, at least for the near term.
In closing, one of the things that happens when you have a lot of free time to go delving into the memory bank is getting stuck in the YouTube rabbit hole. I was looking for some old Wham! videos (specifically "Young Guns") when I stumbled on a video I had completely forgotten. Enjoy "Club Tropicana" and see why 15 year old me had a huge crush on 20 year old George.
