Those who know my journal and have been here a while may remember that a couple of years back I used to run two daily sections, “Random Track of the Day” and “The Daily Earworm.” Keeping this up on a daily basis soon became a pain and I knocked both on the head. This new section is nothing to do with either of those, and yet there are some basic similarities, with the idea having been somewhat born from a kind of amalgamation of those two ideas.
From time to time, I wake up (as you probably do) with a song inexplicably lodged in my head. It may be a song I haven't heard for years, but for some reason --- maybe it was involved in a dream I had which I no longer remember on waking --- it's there when I open my eyes and I go around for an hour or so after getting up, humming or singing it. When this happens, from now on, assuming the song is interesting enough for me to write about it, I will do so here. I'll tell you what I know of it, the artiste that sings it, and any other information that seems relevant, interesting, or will just fill up space.
Whereas RtotD and TDE were songs I purposely chose (even if at random) to feature each day, these will not be anything of the sort. Firstly, they will most certainly not be daily, or maybe even weekly or monthly. If nothing else, they'll serve to fill in for that one time out of a thousand when I have nothing written!
There'll be no real order on them; I may feature one today and not another for three months, and then six together, who knows? But they will be born from actual experience in my sleeping state, or anywhere else that they happen to pop into my brain. In other words, they will be
The first one I want to look at is, oddly, not one that was playing in my head when I awoke. In fact, this morning I woke up with Billy Idol's “Hot in the city” running around in my brain. It's a great song, but for some reason put me in mind of another, one I have not heard in at least thirty years, and which has a similar title.
Hot child in the city by Nick Gilder, from the album City Lights, 1978
The things you learn when you start to research! I had no idea who Nick Gilder was, and for some reason --- maybe because their names sound a little similar --- had him linked in with Nils Lofgren! But it turns out Gilder was singer in the glam rock band Sweeney Todd, who also were home at one time to one Bryan Adams, and who had a big hit of their own, and this is where serendipity and coincidence collide, as the name of that single was “Roxy roller”! Sound like one of our favourite MB members? Perhaps she knows the song. And yet, this is a Canadian band. Or was. After success with that single, which got to number one, Gilder went solo and this is from his second album.
It's quite clever really, as it's an uptempo, feel-good pop song but Gilder tells us it is in fact written about the curse of child prostitution. He wrote it from the point of view of someone looking for just such an assignation on the dark city streets, which makes the lyric a little more disturbing when you know the story behind it. Listen to this:
”Come on down to my place, baby/ We'll talk about love/ Come on down to my place, woman/ We'll make love.” When you realise he's talking to a fifteen or sixteen-year old --- and he knows that --- well it just makes you shudder.
But it's still a great song, and everyone else thought so too, as it went to number one for him in Canada and in the USA, emulating the success he had with Sweeney Todd. After that of course he had no more hits, though he released six more albums, wrote songs from Better Midler and the late Joe Cocker, as well as Pat Benatar's hit “The Warrior”. He's still recording and touring today, but I guess if he's known at all, it'll be for one of those two big hit singles.