Laurie T, And The Trick



A fine band - lots of 70's covers: 'Hotel California' by the Eagles, KC & The Sunshine Band, some newer stuff that sounded like Shania Twain. I didn't hear them play Sheryl Crow, but she would have fit right in.

At one point, a delicate diplomatic moment arose. An enthusiastic patron called out for a DJ. For most bands, that might be quite insulting. Seeing the patron's enthusiasm, though, and the possibility that her English skills were quite limited, the appropriate interpretation of the remark was that she wanted more dance tunes. So everyone clap your hands!

At one point, the band offered to play Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Free Bird' but then changed their minds. I took this to be a good omen. 'Free Bird' has been overworked all these years.

When I graduated from West Mesa High School in 1974, a student committee chose two songs to best represent our class: one by Cat Stevens (was it 'Oh Very Young'?), and another by Seals and Crofts. These were excellent, youthful, optimistic songs from our golden year of 1974.

When the Cibola High School class of 1980 (my youngest sister's class) chose their class song, they chose 'Free Bird,' even though it actually came from 1974. In the intervening six years, the song had become something of an anthem of southern rock-and-roll, and had achieved an enduring second popularity that escapes most pop songs. I took the mismatch of year to be a bad omen, however, indicating a nostalgic, conservative bent-of-mind of the graduating class. Then that fall, Reagan was elected, and it's been downhill ever since.

When most of the band members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were wiped out in a plane crash, I heard about it on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Cronkite pronounced the band's name with a jolly Swedish lilt that knocked me on the floor with laughter. It was clear that Cronkite had never seen or heard the name until it popped up on his teleprompter, and he gave it a good, robust sight-read attempt. I suppose if you tried to plot out social circles with a Venn Diagram, and put Charlie Daniels and the Allman Brothers Band in one bubble, and the '60 Minutes' crew in another bubble, you'd end up with two separate, isolated bubbles. It was the funniest plane crash I ever heard about, which reminds me of Don Henley's song, 'Dirty Laundry' (which Laurie T and the Trick also covered), which was inspired by the 1977 movie "Network," and cynically discusses a TV anchor:

We got the bubbleheaded bleach-blonde, comes on at 5
She can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry

We need new anthems to replace the old ones like 'Free Bird'. How about 'Beat It' by Michael Jackson? (Bad idea - forget I ever mentioned it) How about that incredibly windy Celine Dion Titanic hit 'I Will Always Remember You?' (Too cold!) How about the 'Macarena'? (I can hear the call for a DJ now).

We'll think of something, I'm sure.