Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.
We were at the Albuquerque Sunport, waiting for our Alaska Air flight to Seattle, the start of a working vacation -- a long weekend in Seattle, followed by a midweek mediation in Vancouver, Wash., and an arbitration hearing near Eugene, Ore., before wrapping up with a weekend in Portland that culminated in a concert at McMenamins Edgefield.
The airport playlist was doubling down on the '70s. There was my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song, "Sundown," which we featured five years ago when reviewing the documentary about the Canadian singer-songwriter. But the ringer was "Bad Time," an unabashedly syrupy pop confection by Grand Funk (Railroad), the flinty long-haired power-rock quartet from Flint, Mich., who were partial to covers of '60s lollipop songs. They had hits with Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion" and the Soul Brothers Six's "Some Kind of Wonderful." They put more muscle into their own compositions, such as "We're an American Band" (No. 1 in 1973) and the epic saga "Closer to Home (I'm Your Captain)" (their first Top 40 single, from 1970).
"Bad Time" was written by Mark Farner while he was going through a divorce. It peaked at No. 4 in spring 1975, and it was not out of place alongside similar throwback tunes of the era like "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (an ultimate guilty pleasure) or as a counter-balance to "Love Will Keep Us Together," which "Bad Time" was chasing up the charts.
I'm sure all the burnouts who worshiped the band in grungier days were appalled at the band's mid-decade descent into sap. (Producer Jimmy Ienner had worked with the Raspberries and Bay City Rollers.) I have a vivid memory of spinning the song at an '80s party, when it would have been considered the height of hipster retro, and my friend Marcy, a connoisseur of all things bubblegum, positively swooning over it.
(The song comes from the album "All the Girls in the World Beware," which is notable as the only record I ever won in a contest. I figured out a way to game the system for the giveaway by WLS-AM (the big 89). You had to be the first caller when you heard the WLS theme rendered in phone tones. I had a plan. When the station ran a string of commercials, I would get ready by dialing the first six numbers, poised to hit the seventh as soon as I heard the prompt. I still have the vinyl album, with a cut-out notch in the upper right-hand corner of the cover.)
At the tail end of the trip, we spent our last full day in Portland at Edgefield for another round with the Pixies. Opening were Spoon and Fazerdaze, whose show closer, "Bigger," reminds me of John Lennon's "No. 9 Dream":
Fazerdaze (New Zealander Amelia Murray with Dave Rowlands) did not play our favorite single, "Treading Lightly":
Spoon crunched through a set of about 14 power-pop tracks. Talk about '70s throwbacks, I'm partial lately to 2017's "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb":
A highlight was "Wild":
BONUS TRACKS
The Pixies opened with five or six newer songs before segueing into the classics, like "Wave of Mutilation" (both versions), "Gouge Away" and a meaty "Head On" (their Jesus & Mary Chain cover). Once "Planet of Sound" kicked in, the band was fully in their catatonic state of unrelenting noise rock. They built to the inevitable climax, "Where Is My Mind?," and then tossed in a bonus track. As the stage filled with white smoke, Black Francis ceded the microphone to bassist Emma Richardson for a haunting version of the trippy b-side "Into the White." Here is Kim Deal's original from 1991: