Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares a post from my vast ‘n’ captivating Boppin’ (Like The Hip Folks Do) library. This week’s shared post is my very recent Greatest Record Ever Made! celebration of The Wonders’ “That Thing You Do!,” a piece I wrote in memory of the song’s author, Adam Schlesinger.
For those of us who are immersed in pop music and/or pop culture, the passing of a beloved artist can seem like an intimate loss, even if we've never had any direct contact with the writer or performer. The art itself connects us. There's nothing wrong with mourning a person we never met, with playing records or watching movies or reading books in memory of someone whose acts of inspiration and creation touched us, and became a part of our own lives.
As a writer and as a radio host, I've often felt a personal responsibility to pay some sort of tribute when one of my many heroes leaves this mortal world behind. It's not an actual responsibility--I’m not quite that arrogant--but I feel it nonetheless, and if I feel it, I act on it. This blog exists because I needed a way to express my emotions when David Bowie died in 2016. I had written many sincere eulogies for pop performers prior to that, sometimes for print media, sometimes as commentary for playlists on This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio. I've taken to referring to these pieces as "Closing Arguments," attempts to summarize what an artist meant to me, attempts to pay some kind of proper tribute as I say goodbye.
Examples of these closing arguments can be found throughout this blog, some of which predate the blog, and some which were written for it. I've bid farewell to Joey Ramone, Chuck Berry, Lesley Gore, Adam West, Lou Reed, Kim Shattuck, Tom Petty, Pete Shelley, Peter Tork, Aretha Franklin, Glen Campbell, Hal Blaine, Roy Loney, Mary Tyler Moore, Sue Grafton, Harlan Ellison, Stan Lee, Roky Erickson, George Martin, Muhammed Ali, and Alex Chilton, and I offered a combined adieu the week both David Cassidy and Tommy Keene passed. When Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens died, I turned this forum over to my friend Rich Firestone, who had already written a eulogy for Pat that was better than anything I could have done.
There were more, of course, including many older closing arguments I made but never got around to sharing on this blog. And there were many times I've looked back on an artist's life at some later point, long after his or her death. Today, we're thinking of the immediate reaction, the mourning process from afar, that loss we feel when we learn an idol is gone. There have been so many, and the accumulation of years guarantees many more to come all too soon. This week, we mourn the passing of Adam Schlesinger with a reverent spin of a song he wrote for a movie I love. "That Thing You Do!," The Greatest Record Ever Made!, and the subject of this week's Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.
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Barring pandemics, This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:
Volume 1: download
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Hey, Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 124 essays about 124 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).
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