Although I was in the prime Van Halen demographic—“You Really Got Me” was a minor radio hit during my last semester in high school—I was never a fan. As somebody whose top two musical obsessions were A) Top 40 pop and B) English prog rock, I wasn’t wired for it. When I got to college in the fall of 1978, I quickly associated Van Halen’s debut album—and specifically, the siren-like fade-in of “Running With the Devil,” cut one on side one—with dormitory stereos cranked beyond the limits of human endurance. I cheered the music critic who wrote of Van Halen II that it was as imaginative as its title. When Women and Children First came out in 1980, I was writing for the campus newspaper, and I destroyed it.

I should go through my clips and find the actual column, but I’m not doing that today. If I’m recalling correctly, it was mostly a screed about what an asshole David Lee Roth was, a word that the paper actually printed. (And I remember that it led to a blizzard of aggrieved letters from Van Halen fans.) It occurs to me now, 40 years later, thinking about Eddie Van Halen, that 100 percent of what I hated about his band was Roth. He was the opposite of the kind of rock star I admired—a keyboard god like Keith Emerson, to name one. And he also represented the very kind of person I disliked in the real world—a strutting, bloviating pretty boy. It took a long time before I could get past him to the music of the band behind him. But by the end of 1980, after several months of hearing Women and Children First in radio rotations, I had come around a little. I was never going to be a fan, but I wasn’t going to savage them anymore, either.

One measure of genius is whether you can inspire legions of imitators without any one of them sounding exactly like you. Eddie Van Halen certainly had that. Just as guitar players who came up in the 50s wanted to be Chuck Berry and those who came up in the 60s wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, those who came up in the 80s wanted to be Eddie Van Halen. His sound owed plenty to Hendrix, but it went to its own places. Even when his band was making music that left me cold (the entirety of the Van Hagar years), Eddie’s one-of-a-kind virtuosity on both guitar and keyboards was clear.

Based on everything I’ve read about him before his death and after, Eddie was relatively normal, and largely unimpressed by who he was. (Maybe you have to be like that when you’re in a band with David Lee Roth.) A former radio colleague of mine tells how his station’s morning team somehow got the direct phone number to Eddie’s studio. They would call it every now and then, and sometimes Eddie himself picked up, and he’d talk to them when he wasn’t talking to anyone else. “Unfazed by fame,” one of the jocks said on Facebook this morning.

And the man was married to Valerie Bertinelli. I mean, really. That’s a life well-lived.

Also yesterday, we lost soul singer Johnny Nash. “I Can See Clearly Now” is Nash’s monument, having done a month at #1 in the fall of 1972 (not long after Mac Davis, who passed last week, did a month at #1 with “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me”). It’s as familiar as the weather now, and I’m not sure anybody needs to hear it again. Maybe give “Hold Me Tight” a few spins instead—it was a #5 hit in 1968 that somehow resisted becoming part of the good times/great oldies radio pantheon.

Nash, born in Houston, was an important figure in the rise of Jamaican music in the United States. On “Hold Me Tight,” he’s backed by the band of Jamaican impresario Byron Lee, and nothing that sounded quite like it had ever hit so big on American radio. According to music historian Charles Hughes, Nash got the first UK record deal for what became Bob Marley and the Wailers, and publishing deals for Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer.

If it’s true that they always go in threes, we need to hold our breaths today. But that’s a regular condition of life in America right now, and it’s got nothing to do with music.

(Pictured: Helen Reddy with Glen Campbell and Donna Summer, and Mac Davis with Doc Severinsen, both from 1979.)

I stayed off Twitter last night to avoid the presidential debate, so it wasn’t until early this morning that I learned of the deaths of Helen Reddy and Mac Davis. It wasn’t the debate that killed them, however. Reddy had Alzheimer’s disease, and Davis died after heart surgery.

Reddy’s first hit was a version of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. She would hit #1 three times between 1972 and 1974 with “I Am Woman,” “Delta Dawn,” and “Angie Baby.” She charted a total of 14 records on the Hot 100. On the adult contemporary chart, she had six straight #1 hits between 1973 and 1976. Five of her albums made #11 or better on the Billboard 200 in that period. She was not the sort of performer who was going to thrive in the disco era, however, although she had a few modest AC hits, and her career continued to thrive even after the hit singles stopped. She became the host of The Midnight Special in 1975, acted on TV, and appeared on variety, game, and talk shows for as long as that was a thing. Her last charting record on the Hot 100 and AC chart came in 1981.

Davis, meanwhile, first came to prominence as a songwriter, and every obit you read today will mention in its first couple of lines the ones he wrote for Elvis. His first big single under his own name, “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” spent a month at #1 in 1972. Of his other 14 Hot 100 hits, only “Stop and Smell the Roses” would make the Top 10. (America reached peak Mac-itude in September 1974, when “Stop and Smell the Roses” and “One Hell of a Woman” were both in the Top 40, just weeks after his limited-run summer TV series left the air.) Several of his Hot 100 hits in the 70s scratched onto the country charts, but he didn’t become a major figure in country until 1980; five singles hit the country Top 10 in less than two years, and three of those made the Hot 100, including “It’s Hard to Be Humble,” which peaked at #43. His last country chart hit was in 1985.

Like Reddy, Davis pursued an acting career as the 70s turned to the 80s, appearing in a string of high-profile movies: North Dallas Forty, Cheaper to Keep Her, and The Sting II. Based on their entries at IMDB, both Reddy and Davis largely retired from acting around the year 2000. Davis recorded his last album in 1994; Reddy released an album of re-recorded hits in 2002.

So it’s been a long time since Helen Reddy and Mac Davis were much on anybody’s mind, outside of their families. But if you could transport yourself from the fall of 2020 back to the fall of 1974, back into the world of Top 40 radio and TV as it existed in that bygone day, Helen Reddy and Mac Davis would be two of the biggest stars in the sky.

And on the subject of time travel. . . .

Continue reading “Stars in the Sky” →