Music Of My Years: 1984-1986: End Of The Drive In's

Around 1983 on a patch of land now where my second home Half Priced Books is at, used to be the Twixt Town Drive In,  a majestic beautiful drive in that we used to go watch movies at during the high school years.  That is where I watched Up In Smoke and the God awful Looking For Mr. Goodbar around 1979.  I think the last year they showed any movies was 1982 and then it closed up.  However, it would stand there in the next couple years, fairly maintained, ready for the next season of movies but nobody bought it.  Some days I would bike ride out to the drive in and hang around the playground area. and one day wishing I could buy it.  Too bad I never took any pictures of this while it was up.

Back then Twixt Town Road was a simple two lane road curling out to the front of Lindale Mall.  Before the strip malls came and congested traffic likewise.  Around 1985, the Drive In would be bulldozed down to make way of incoming evil.  The evil that would claim the Drive In and later the record store I used to hang out in the 90s.   The evil known as Best Buy.

If anything this part of my life is very blurry.  After the failure of trying to become a DJ and getting a degree at Kirkwood, I ended up enrolling at some fly by night college called Hamilton Business College (later bought by Kaplin University, the snake oil fly by night school whose commercials are ran 10 to 12 times per hour in the daytime.  The last semester at KCC was interesting.  I got to meet John Hauseman, the actor from The Paper Chase and he was fun to talk to.  In fact KGAN did a commercial to which he was there and I made a cameo so I made the TV news that way.   There was a girl in my Public Relations class that taken a liking to me, I forgot her name, but she was cute.  One night me and my friends were up at Kitty's watching a band and she sat a table across from me and smiled and waited but I never got much courage to go up and talk to her and frustrated she left the bar crying about that.  I felt about it and decided that when I got to Kirkwood I'd look her up and try to explain myself, that I wasn't used to having that type of attention.   I never did find her.

Basically the rock band was dying and the folk were tired of supporting my lost cause even though we did play at the OK Lounge December 7, 1984 in Marion and made 32 bucks in the process.  By then I was studying to be a computer programmer but all we did at Hamilton was seeing the teacher take us down to Bulicheks and drink and bullshit most of the afternoon.  We did graduate but out of the 20 people who graduated from HBC with a diploma but only 1 person did get a computer job.  Myself I ended up finally taking a 3rd shift job, processing Pell Grants for some place called National Computer Service in Iowa City, a long drive but it was a college town and it had record stores galore.  BJ's Records the best and there was Record Collector to boot and a big cutout section.  So I found myself staying up all night and then waiting for the store to open so I can buy them.  It seemed to be a big deal buying Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street for 16 bucks back then (try today when I bought the same set for 35 bucks, should have kept the original). and plus I was completing my record collection when the ones up around home didn't have them.

But for all the intent, my job was a temporary position and that if you wanted to get on full time you had to apply from within.  The biggest pain in the ass was hearing The Fox going from album rock to top forty and hearing the same damn songs four times per night.  This began my dislike for top forty, hearing Broken Wings four times a night would be nerve grating or Take On Me.   One night somebody changed it over to the university station to which they actually played Sister Ray by The Velvet Underground which the old ladies begin to really complain about that song as much as I did with Broken Wings.

That winter of 85-86 was terrible.  Snowstorms every night and below zero days when the sun came out so I was ready to get the hell out of Iowa and head down to Arizona for warmer weather.  I made the decision to go on a blizzard night to which I got ran off the road by a GD F'n oversized pickup driving down the middle of the fucking road.  And being stuck in the middle of nowhere for 3 hours before a sheriff came and got me a tow truck and 55 bucks later made it to work around 3 AM.

At that time I really begin to regress back to the music I grew up with.  At that time Atlantic and Chess/MCA were beginning to open up their vaults and reissuing lots of the out of print soul and blues albums.  If I paid much attention to stuff it was basically the old classic rock acts trying to update their sound with disastrous results.  Blue Oyster Cult's Club Ninja was one of those.

But with an attempt for a better life, I moved in with my aunt in Chandler Arizona late 1986 and discovered Tower Records and Zia Records and Rockaway Records and that they had much more old records from the past, which enabled me to discover Love Forever Changes and the Mott The Hoople Atlantic albums which I never saw back home.  Unfortunly in the five and half months of being there, I couldn't find a decent job, everything was part time temp help and got the roundaround from Burger King to a contruction job site that I went there twice at 5 AM trying to convince the guy to hire me and to which he said next time he was calling the cops.  I got into a temp help agency about their hiring practices only to have the fucking jerks follow me out after I called them a waste of time.  I thought I had something lined up at Discover Card, hell the woman kept winking at me and thinking I may have gotten a job but no avail.  And basically the aunt told me I either had to leave back home or out of the house.  Fed up, I returned back to Iowa late march and reconnected with NCS back to Pell, back to square one and 3,000 dollars in the hole.

In 1985, K mart was selling these small compact discs for 25 bucks a pop and touting them the wave of the future. Just down the road from the ashes of the Twixt Town Drive In, came up a new strip mall with a new place selling electronics and the new CDs was a place called Best Buy.  Little did we know that this was the beginning of a brand new era in recorded music and a big change in the wind.

The records that mattered at that time.
John Mellencamp-Uh Huh, Scarecrow, The Lonesome Jubilee
The Firm-The Firm, Mean Business
Roger Daltry-Under A Raging Moon
Peter Townsend-White City-A Novel, Deep End Live
REM-Fables Of The Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pagent
Georgia Satellites
Blue Oyster Cult-Club Ninja
The Plimsouls-Everywhere At Once
Jesus & Mary Chain-Psycho candy, Dark-lands
Aerosmith-Done With Mirrors
Husker Du-New Day Rising, Warehouse
Stevie Ray Vaughn-Texas Flood, Couldn't Stand The Weather, Live Alive
Nick Lowe And His Cowboy Outfit, The Rose Of England
The Lonesome Strangers-Lonesome Pine
The Ramones-Too Tough To Die
Deep Purple-Perfect Strangers, House Of Blue Light
Fabulous Thunderbirds-T Bird Rhythm, Tuff Enuff
The Who-Who's Last, Who's Missing, Two's Missing
Rank & File-Long Gone Dead, Rank & File
The Beat Farmers-Tales Of The New West, Van Go
U2-Under A Blood Red Sky, The Joshua Tree
Richard Thompson-Hand Of Kindness, Across A Crowded Room, Daring Adventures
Fairport Convention-Gladys' Leap
Graham Parker-Steady Nerves, The Mona Lisa's Sister
Velvet Underground-V.U, Another View
Rolling Stones-Undercover, Dirty Work
The Kinks-Word Of Mouth, Think Visual
John Hiatt-Warming Up To The Ice Age
Neil Young- Landing On Water, Life
Whitesnake, Slide It In, Whitesnake
Robert Palmer-Clues, Pride, Riptide