…you hear a certain song and find yourself thinking, "Gawd, life was so much simpler then."
I have iTunes on shuffle today, and Meco's Empire Strikes Back came on a little while ago. Yeah, you know Meco did the infamous disco Star Wars, but did you know he followed up three years later with Empire as well? No, of course you didn't. It never got the kind of club or air play that Star Wars did. I'm fortunate in that Steve gave me copy for my birthday the year it came out.
It wasn't one of Meco's better works, although it stands up pretty well in more of a jazz-fusion sort of way than outright disco after all these years.
At the risk of running off the rail completely, did you know he also did The Wizard of Oz…released on yellow-brick-road colored vinyl?
Yeah, good times. Wizard is probably his most straightforward interpretation of all the movie soundtrack stores he attempted to discofy. I actually count the entire album in my Top 100 dance tunes.
But I digress, again.
As I was listening to Empire today, I couldn't help think back to that summer of 1980 when Steve and I were working as messengers for Lewis & Roca in downtown Phoenix. Back then, the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not the air conditioning in my truck would blow up, leaving me stranded somewhere—and what I was going to wear out dancing on any given Saturday night. We (and most of the rest of the world) were blissfully unaware of the shit storm that was to descend upon the world in the form of AIDS, Ronald Regan, George Bush (Senior and Junior), and Dick Cheney. (The impotent right wing was braying that Jimmy Carter was surely the anti-christ.) MTV wasn't even yet a glint in anyone's eye, and computers still occupied entire rooms. The most high-tech thing I owned was an analog turntable that had digital speed and pitch readouts and was controlled by integrated circuits! CD players were still a couple years out, and having an in-dash cassette player in your car was considered hot stuff.
It kind of makes you pause and consider how much life has changed during the last 30 years.