Earth's hot spots can blow just about anytime and anyplace

Nebraska used to be like the Serengeti plains in Africa, which is now where much of the world goes when they want to have the very best safaris. Starting in 1971, animal bones such as those found in Africa were discovered there buried under volcanic ash, which was odd, since volcanoes have never been in Nebraska. Through more scientific discovery, the source of the ash that killed all the animals in the state was present-day Yellowstone National Park, about 1,600 miles away. 

The park is the source of such a cataclysmic hot spot on earth that the ash in Nebraska was about 10 feet deep. And those massive volcanoes at Yellowstone happen every six hundred thousand years. Oh, and by the way, it’s been six hundred thousand years since Yellowstone blew hard.

If that’s not bleak enough for you, then consider that we know lots more about the sun’s core than we do the middle of the Earth. “If the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken through the skin,” via our various mining operations, writes Bill Bryson in his classic A Short History of Nearly Everything. (I also wrote about the geology section of the book back in 2022.)

We hear a lot about the Richter scale, which is less an actual scale and more an idea about the power of individual earthquakes. It’s named after Charles Richter who was at Caltech the 1930s. Since that time, the two largest quakes measured were both in the low 9s, centered in Alaska in 1964 and in the ocean near Chile in 1960. Just a little less powerful was the one in 1755 that destroyed Lisbon, Portugal. Sixty-thousand people died and virtually all the buildings there crumbled.

Tokyo could consider a new marketing slogan as “the city waiting to die” because it sits on three tectonic plates. It suffered a big quake in 1923 that killed 200,000 people. If that happened today, the economic cost would exceed $7 trillion, which, give or take, is about one-tenth of all the money that exists in the world.

Less understood are earthquakes called intraplate quakes, which aren’t close to plate boundaries, come from much deeper underground, and are completely unpredictable. The three worst of this kind all happened in the winter of 1811-1812 in New Madrid, Missouri (yes, the place Uncle Tupelo sang about). These quakes caused chimneys to fall in Cincinnati, wrecked boats docked on the East Coast, and toppled scaffolding on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Such quakes “are as random as lightning” and “have never been known to happen in the same place twice.”

Moving deeper down to the Earth’s core, scientists - basically - don’t know much:

• They know that there is liquid that causes magnetism (unlike the Moon and Mars, which don’t have magnetic fields). 
• They know that the magnetic field changes and was three times more powerful during the time of the dinosaurs than it is now. 
• They know the field reverses itself about every 500,000 years. We don’t really want to be around during one of these reversals because cosmic rays from space will do a serious number on us at that point. For now, the field protects us. I guess you could say we are one with the Force. 

In 1980, the world was captivated for two months while it appeared Mount St. Helens in Washington state was going to erupt. Finally it did and “it was the biggest landslide in human history and carried enough material to bury the whole of Manhattan” in about 400 feet of ash. Fifty-seven people died, which was lucky because it was a Sunday and many timber workers were not in the death zone. About 80 miles away, in the town of Yakima, Washington, ash turned the streets to dark in a place that had no emergency plan or emergency broadcast system because the Sunday-morning staff didn’t know how to work the equipment. Yakima was completely shut down for three days, and it had received less than an inch of ash. 

“Now bear that in mind, please," Bryson writes, "as we consider what a Yellowstone blast would do.”

Bob Pollard and Guided By Voices get the biographical treatment in Closer You Are, part 1

Considering that Guided By Voices ranks as my second-favorite band of all-time behind The Beatles, it's a quirk of life that I haven't yet read Matthew Cutter's 2018 GBV and Robert Pollard biography Closer You Are.

Here is Part 1 of a series on my favorite nuggets from the book:

• When young Bobby discovered vinyl records around 4th grade, his dad got him a Columbia House membership and he made his choices based on how cool the covers were, after noting that "in rock, you can judge a book by the cover."
• Also at that age, his teacher let him and three classmates perform in class (as I similarly did with a friend in 6th grade). The other three made the sounds of the instruments with their voices while Bobby sang the tunes. After that, girls chased them through the playground like The Beatles in A Hard Days Night.
• Bob still lived at home in Dayton, Ohio when he started at Wright State University as “a townie almost invisible amid throngs of imported East and West Coast brats.” He detected an air of “sameness.” Everyone wanted to get a job and get married and grow up. 
• He was a great three-sport athlete in high school. Now in college, he still didn’t even have to try that hard at baseball to be a standout and threw a no-hitter in 1978 for the university. He would later call baseball “a nine-man stand around” and thought he better focus on school as a backup plan. His major in elementary education and minor in physical education were harder than they would seem and made him work hard. His writing teacher encouraged his work and opened his mind further to the possibility of creativity. He had long been creating album artwork but now, not finding anyone who could play guitar, he started playing the instrument himself and had a credo of “fuck lessons.”
• Bob dabbled in some bands but nothing really stuck. Then some guys called him out of the blue to see if he would be their frontman because they had heard him singing walking through the college hallways. Future GBV legend Mitch Mitchell, who Bob had known from high-school football, would also join this band, called the Clones, on bass. The first show, in front of about 200 people, went well and Bob was instantly a dynamic performer. They soon were renamed Anacrusis. The band would try to slip a few originals into its sets but it was tricky because fans and bar owners wanted rock covers. When Bob and Mitch started getting into post-punk like Wire and XTC, the writing was on the wall that this classic-rock group was near its end. 
• Mitch and Bob kept imagining that they would soon have a new group to launch. They still couldn’t actually play music very well, but they would bang on guitars, go shirtless, jump around, and make up rules for their non-existent rock band. They were preparing themselves to look good so that whenever the other pieces would eventually fall into place, they would be ready to rock the world. 
• But first, Bob was about to embark on a 14-year career as a fourth-grade teacher.

Serving in tennis is tough, but it can at least be a little easier with good advice

It's downright strange that serving is so difficult in tennis. I mean, I almost never miss a serve in volleyball and I almost never play volleyball. But I play tennis all the time and the serve remains at least a partial mystery and I view it as a lifetime goal to improve it.

I can rocket my first serve but it often has a low percentage, so it’s not great. I used to dink my second serve instead of swinging hard through from the 7 o’clock to the 2 o’clock positions to get good spin and action. At least I'm doing that now and realize that swinging slow is a recipe for a double fault. 

I’ve been getting coached and watching and reading a lot about serving in recent years and I think my serve is finally becoming a weapon, which is an ultimate goal for someone at the 4.0 level like myself.

Returning your opponent’s serve is also part of this equation. I tend to think I'm fairly decent at reading my opponent's body language to anticipate where the serve is going to go. But I don't think I've ever consciously watched the toss to get clued into where it will go. This article online at Feel Tennis has some good pointers along those lines. The advice is also helpful in showing where I should be tossing the ball myself depending on whether I'm serving flat, with a slice, or with a kick/topspin (see image above).

For match play, the serve begins right at the coin toss. It’s been assumed forever that if you win the toss, you elect to serve. But Ian Westermann, in his, well, essential book (and website) Essential Tennis, says electing serve is the right choice “for about 20 percent of the tennis-playing population. If your serve is a weapon and you can consistently get it in, then by all means, serve!”

He says that if you are a skill level of 3.5 or below, always let your opponent serve. Even at 4.0 and higher, let your opponent serve unless: 

• your serve is a weapon
• you’ve had a chance to fully warm up your serve, and 
• you’re “on” and feeling great before the match starts.

Also, if you lose the toss and your opponent elects to serve, choose the side for yourself that will have your opponent serving into the sun to start things off. 

In a recent scenario, I played a guy who only took six warmup serves and I had gotten there before him and taken a couple dozen warmups, so I knew he didn’t need much warmup and would just get his serve in no matter what, plus I was warmed up, so I made the easy call to serve first.

On the actual serve itself, Westermann recommends stopping trying to serve your brains out on the first serve, which, as mentioned, I’ve done most of my life. He logically says to find the serve that gives your opponent the most trouble, which will be different from player to player, but that a kick serve that the returner has to try to hit at head level may be a good option for many servers. 

For a second serve, he preaches “up and away,” meaning to keep a quickness in your motion and a slice spin (moving your racket from 7 to 2 o'clock). Slowing down your motion, even though it seems like the right thing to do, is never the answer. I’ve been working on that a lot over the past year, trying to eliminate my tendency to dink my second serve, and I can vouch that this is absolutely the right advice. It just takes a little getting used to after a lifetime of having a bad habit.

Westermann says players are only as strong as their weakest link, which is often the second serve. His recommendations for getting rid of the dink - what he calls the pattycake - second serve are:

• to practice rolling the tennis ball on your palm with your racket up above your head where you would be hitting the serve (see the photo to the right), which will in turn give you a sense of feel for how you'll be putting spin on the ball
• then nice and casually flip the ball off your hand and turn your racket so the side that was rubbing the ball is flipped to facing the wall or fence behind you and the court, and
• then continue further on and have the racket go down around in front of your legs, so that your motion has completed almost a full circle.

Westermann says that after getting comfortable with all those individual parts of the full motion in his "curve the serve" technique, try performing an actual serve with that motion. The full swing should be mostly parallel to the baseline rather than towards the opponent and that you should hear an aggressive "clicking" or "brushing" sound rather than a flat "thud" sound. Once you see that your second serve is clearing the net by 4 or 5 feet, then you can start getting more aggressive with it since you know you have so much room to work with.

Westermann also recommends playing a set with an opponent and making it a rule that you both only get one serve each time. This will help both of you to make your serves tougher to return and more accurate at the same time.

Great Magazine Reads: Flying cars are the hottest trend in future transportation, just like they were on The Jetsons

Always thinking back to The Jetsons, we keep asking whatever happened to the flying cars we were promised. I was quoted about this alongside several other transportation experts in 2016 in USA Today and wrote about flying cars in 2017 for Mobility Lab.

The question lingers, but what exactly is a flying car? One definition given in "A Reporter Aloft: Flight of Fancy," by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, is "the 'perfect aircraft' — something 'that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.'"

The flying car has been part of our collective imagination for a good 100 years. Long ago, the article notes:

The aviation company Cessna ran magazine advertisements for the Family Car of the Air, a sensible little plane that you could park in your garage, with copy like “Remember, Mrs. America likes to go places and see things. And when she finds out that she can cover 600 miles in a morning, to shop or visit in any one of a dozen cities, she’s going to fly.”

By the mid-fifties, it was almost a given that some future sedans would come with wings. If we were going to live in mile-high space needles, how else would we move about? The title sequence of “The Jetsons,” which premièred in 1962, doesn’t show the ground once; George takes his wife and children to their respective floating platforms in his domed airship, and then heads to his offce at Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc. Some of this imagery was the standard-issue utopianism of the bright-eyed mid-century, but it really wasn’t that farfetched. After all, many of the era’s predictions came to pass: portable radios, televisions with screens “the size of a pocket handkerchief,” air-conditioning, plastics.

There is no doubt that those predictions by The Jetsons and others were inspiring and have, after decades of stagnancy, taken hold again of entrepreneuers in the business startup world: 

Today, there are more than four hundred startups in what is called the “advanced air mobility” industry. The term covers everything from actual flying-carish contraptions to more traditional-looking airplanes, but it generally refers to eVTOLs (pronounced “ee-vee-tall”). For the most part, these crafts bear a greater resemblance to helicopterplane hybrids than to automobiles, and they can’t be driven on the road; they might better be described as electric aerial vehicles with the ability to hover and the no-fuss point-to-point flexibility of a car.

Those interviewed in the article make a strong and logical case that flying cars could have already been mainstream if the U.S. wasn't so hostile to innovation:

Flying cars were another victim of our unwillingness to bear the costs of progress. American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death. “Why can’t [the Federal Aviation Administration] say, ‘If you want to develop a flying machine, go out in the desert and do whatever you want’? I remember when Amazon was trying to test drone delivery they had to do experiments in Canada.” In the sixties, a heliport was built atop New York City’s Pan Am Building. After a period of inactivity, it was put back into use in 1977, with as many as sixty-four scheduled departures each day to local airports. That May, there was a landing-gear failure. Four people were killed by spinning rotor blades; a fifth was killed by a blade that careened to the street below. The heliport was permanently closed.

Of course, heliports and eVTOLs aren't the only option. We could choose to build our transportation in other ways that actually move masses of people efficiently and effectively.

Then there’s the sheer number that would be needed. Before the pandemic, about four hundred thousand people a day crossed the Hudson River into Manhattan. Aerial commuting would require tens of thousands of drone taxis operating on regular, reliable schedules, with flawless safety records. So all of a sudden you’re into the realm of, "Why didn’t we just build a train?"

It's a good thing nobody is asking us to hold our breath for aerial mobility. I'm happy to have my e-bike for my ever-reliable 20-minute work commute across Maryland and Washington D.C. That obviously isn't the solution for everyone. But at least we all have old episodes of the Jetsons we can watch.

Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true tale of whites against the Osage tribe

The fact that Killers of the Flower Moon is probably the best movie ever about the genocide by whites of Native Americans says a lot about how we as a civilization have buried this horror story. It’s a really great film that also puts on display how far Hollywood still has to go to truly tell the story of Native Americans.

This one is not really it. Probably eighty percent focuses on the gang of rich white oilmen, led menacingly by Robert DeNiro, and their systemic plan to wipe out the entire Osage tribe. Leo DiCaprio turns in his usual perfect performance as one of DeNiro’s main puppets.

I don’t want to hold it against this 2023 production that it’s more white-centric than Osage-centric because it really is an epic tale with phenomenal acting and, besides, it’s just really entertaining. That said, there are a lot of other relevant perspectives remaining for Hollywood to explore in the future.

Although Killers was nominated for just about every major category at the Academy Awards, it failed to win a single one of them. Martin Scorsese's film is based on David Grann's 2017 book. The true story places De Niro as a corrupt political operative who wrangles the oil rights out of the hands of the Oklahoma tribe in the 1920s. His nephew Ernest, played by DiCaprio, returns from World War I. Ernest genuinely falls in love with Mollie, an Osage whose family has lots of claim to the oil. DiNiro sees opportunities for much personal gain if he can get Ernest on board with killing lots of Mollie's family members. The Osage community begins to think the riots against Black people that happened in 1921 in Tulsa could very well be happening to them. 

Lily Gladstone as Mollie proves to be a breakout star. She is the first Native-American woman to win a Golden Globe for best actress.

The story is wrapped up at the end by a radio-show performance that lays out what became of all the main characters. A nice ending touch.

5 out of 5 stars

Great Magazine Reads: Squeeze aren't The Beatles but they're really good

In 1981, Rolling Stone proclaimed Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook as the next John Lennon and Paul McCartney. That definitely did not happen, but I love at least a dozen of Squeeze's songs and got to see the band's excellent live show when they opened for Hall and Oates in 2001. 

Classic Pop Magazine explores the legacy of Squeeze as the band officially turns 50 this year. Here are some things I learned or found interesting in the article:

• They formed in 1974 "after a 16-year-old Tilbrook answered an advert in a tobacconist’s window for a band into The Kinks, Lou Reed, and Glenn Miller."
• Difford and Tilbrook both grew up in the Blackheath neighborhood east of downtown London.
• John Cage of Velvet Underground was brought in to produce the band's first album, but they say he didn't want to focus on pop songs and so those tunes don't really sound much like Squeeze. They added in "Take Me I'm Yours" at the end after Cage's duties were completed.
• It was proposed that "Elvis Costello, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, and Paul McCartney would all work on what became [1981 album] East Side Story. In the end, the double album plan was scrapped and only Costello would end up working on it."
• Up until 1982, Squeeze was virtually a supergroup of sorts that also included keyboardists Jools Holland and Paul Carrack. Including Difford and Tilbrook, it's estimated there have been 31 different members of Squeeze over the years.
• During one of the two periods that Squeeze had broken up, Difford and Tilbrook created 1984's "Difford and Tillbrook" album that is a bit of a hidden gem.
• The band has two albums planned for release in the next year.

My favorite 12 Squeeze songs ranked:

12. "Take Me I'm Yours"

11. "If I Didn't Love You"

10. "Goodbye Girl"

09. "Annie Get Your Gun"

08. "Cool for Cats"

07. "Hope Fell Down" (Difford and Tilbrook)

06. "Is That Love?"

05. "Tempted"

04. "Black Coffee in Bed"

03. "Up the Junction" 

02. "Another Nail in My Heart"

01. "Pulling Muscles (From the Shell)"

RIP Dickey Betts and Pooch Tavares and welcome to more Taylor Swift music

I don't go super deep with Southern Rock. Sure, I love Lynyrd Skynyrd, Drive-by Truckers, The Black Crowes, and Jason Isbell. And I can't even remember which Allman Brothers show I saw way back when. The band played each year in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992 at the Fabulous Fox Theater in St. Louis.

I was definitely at one of those shows and it was definitely awesome. One of the best parts was the lead-guitar mastery of Dickey Betts, who passed away this week at age 80 in Florida from cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Beyond his head-shredding guitar licks, Betts wrote the masterpieces "Ramblin' Man," "Blue Sky," "Revival," and "Jessica."  

Arguably not nearly as monumental of a performer but still important in musical history is Arthur “Pooch” Tavares, who also passed away this week. He was the lead singer of the Tavares and that song on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack - oh my gosh, that song! - was "More Than a Woman" and it's one of my favorite disco songs. I'm not quite sure why there is a version by the Bee Gees and Tavares on the album, and the Bee Gees' rendition is frankly better, but Taveres and his smooth voice also makes it a magical tune. Pooch was 81 years old.

And of course, things always happen in threes, so I would be remiss not to mention that Taylor Swift's new album was released today. It's her eleventh studio release, it's called The Dead Poets Department, and it includes a whopping 31 songs. Looks like my weekend is booked!

Chuck Palahniuk's writing must destroy us before it can save us

Chuck Palahniuk may be our most beautiful, terrifyingly ugly fiction writer. I read Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Choke and, although they didn’t make my list of 60 favorite novels, they aren’t far behind. I felt it was time to revisit the Portland native’s work.

I started with an excerpt of Fight Club that appears in The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. It hails from the moment when Tyler Durden decides that fighting in a bar when away from his white-collar job isn’t enough; he needs to create Project Mayhem. This leads to a demon mask being painted and torched into a city high rise, a Jauguar being driven straight into a fountain, paint balls shot into an art museum's ceiling, and much more. Durden's aim is to destroy civilization so that the Earth can have time to repair itself. Kill the pandas and the highways. It’s not extinction; it’s downsizing. This excerpt, like the rest of the book and the David Fincher/Brad Pitt/Edward Norton movie (which had to be postponed for several months because Columbine has just ocurred), are all the places to start with Palahniuk: 5 out of 5 stars 

Next I headed from the three stories that begin his collection Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread:

“Knock-Knock” is about a little boy whose father loves to tell him heavily sexualized and racist jokes and whose mother has left the two of them for good. The boy doesn’t understand any of the jokes but knows enough that he needs to learn to laugh at them. Many years later, when his dad is dying of cancer, he tries to tell his dad the same jokes and his dad doesn’t laugh one bit. The boy (now a man) realizes that jokes are all about power. You tell a joke so you can make the other person laugh and show that you are the powerful one, the one in charge and exerting the control. It’s an offensive but pretty poignant short read. 4 out of 5 stars

“Eleanor” is a wacky little tale told from the perspective of someone who utters lots of big words that are almost all used improperly. Even so, it’s still highly readable, although I’m not entirely sure where Palahniuk was trying to go with it. Eleanor is a fast pit bull who likes to gnaw on a rubber bloody hand. His owner moves from Oregon into a house that had been used as a porno movie setting. The new owner sets up a shrine to one of the more-known porn actresses who performed some of her roles at the house, but the neighbors don’t like this and run the owner and his dog out. Perhaps it’s a sad statement on how we try to monetize anything cultural that has come into contact with even minor celebrities. 3.5 out of 5 stars

“How Monkey Got Married, Bought a House, and Found Happiness in Orlando” is a brilliant little tale about the communications profession. Monkey has a communications degree and is adept at selling anything to anyone. She gets a job that has her offering food samples in an Orlando supermarket and she gets a cheese product that begins turning all the customers away with its unbearable stench.  Getting desperate, she finally samples the cheese and realizes the taste is the best thing ever. She becomes a zealot with the first product she’s ever truly believed in. Her company is set to dispose of the cheese but she keeps trying to get someone to sample it. While being removed forcibly by her boss, Gorilla, Monkey jams a piece of cheese into his mouth and he realizes she is right. The cheese is delicious. It’s a weird tale that features only animals and doesn't appear to have anything to do with the title other than the allusions to how products help sell the American Dream. 5 out of 5 stars

Finally, I ended my Palahniuk cram session with Fight Club 2, the graphic novel telling the story of the narrator 10 years after the time of the original book/movie. He's a burned out dad married to Marla with a kid when Tyler Durden returns into his life. They need to figure out a way to destroy much of the world so that humanity can save itself from itself. The book is all over the place, which Palahniuk clearly knows and which is why he goes super-meta with some scenes portraying him and his fellow writers discussing which directions to take the plot. In Palahniuk's case, it's ok to overuse the word "brilliant." 5 out of 5 stars 

As a postscript, I ripped through the quick-read Fight Club 3 graphic novel. This 2019 release is apparently the conclusion, although it sets up Tyler to return with a new narrative to inhabit in a decade or so, if that's what Palahniuk chooses to do. The story has Tyler and his minions making sure civilization nearly wipes itself out with just enough humanity left to carry on and forward. This is a lot of fun but less essential compared to Fight Clubs 1 and 2. 4 out of 5 stars

RIP Whitey Herzog

If you grew up in the St. Louis area in the 1980s like I did, then chances are you'll never have a more favorite Major League Baseball team than those St. Louis Cardinals ones from the early to the middle part of the decade. Likewise, you probably don't have a more cherished manager than Whitey Herzog.

"The White Rat" took the "Runnin' Redbirds" to three World Series over a span of six years and while he only one won of them, he was the perfect mix of old-school militant leader - with a perfectly square head and buzzcut - and innovative playcaller of "Whiteyball" who valued offensive speed and defensive craftiness over brute home-run power. 

Whitey Herzog has passed away at age 92. 

His Cardinals won the World Series in 1982 and those were some thrilling games. Even though they weren't champions, the 1985 and 1987 teams may have been my favorite teams. I don't think I ever watched more baseball that I did in 1985 with Jack Clark, Tommy Herr, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Terry Pendleton, Ozzie Smith, Andy Van Slyke, Joaquín Andújar, John Tudor, Bob Forsch, and Todd Worrell. Meanwhile, the 1987 team with many of the same players went back-and-forth until the very end in losing to the Minnesota Twins in seven games.

Whitey always felt like one of Cardinal Nation's own, which may have helped because he grew up near St. Louis in New Athens, Illinois.

Some interesting facts about Herzog:

• His real name was Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog.
• A broadcaster covering his games in the minor leagues nicknamed him "Whitey" because of his light blond hair. 
• He was in the Army Corps of Engineers for two years.
• Herzog was mentored by iconic New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel as a Yankee minor leaguer and said, "Instead of thinking about girls, I would be thinking about what the hell he talked about all day. Casey broke it down into the hundred little things that would make the difference. Once I began coaching and managing, I kept passing them along to my own players. In Casey, I had an Einstein."
• He played eight seasons in the majors, with the Washington Senators, Kansas City Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, and Detroit Tigers.
• He didn't last a full season in his first MLB managerial stint with the Texas Rangers in 1973.
• Before joining the Cards, he was hired to manage the Kansas City Royals and lost to the New York Yankees three years in a row in the AL Championship Series.
• Royals fans are not likely to forget Whitey either. He surpringly called his 1977 team the best he ever coached, and they finished 102-60 in the regular season and featured Darrell Porter, Frank White, Amos Otis, George Brett, and Dennis Leonard.
• Bruce Sutter, the Hall of Fame closer on that 1982 Cardinals team, told The New York Times, "How many managers can you blow a game for and go out fishing with him the next morning?"
• He was the second-oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame behind Willie Mays.

Great Magazine Reads: Adam and the Ants were savage in their pop-punk glory days

Adam Ant was one of the first MTV music stars who I remember melding with my pre-teen worldview of wanting to like popular music combined with something a little weirder, a little more alternative, and a little more of what at the time was called "college rock" because it was mostly only heard on those low-wave types of radio stations.

He and his band were always on music TV with his classic "Goody Two Shoes." The song and video had it all: super catchy, glammy, an upbeat and pulsing horn section, beautiful women in crazy makeup, and swashbuckling Adam in full rock-star gorgeousness.

The March/April 2024 issue of Classic Pop Magazine tells the story, starting with the release of 1980's Kings Of The Wild Frontier: it's "less an album, and more a call to arms. And an extremely compelling one at that. For something so inherently bizarre, it’s shamelessly self-assured, so brimming with confidence and laden with swagger that it’s literally drunk on its own hype." The album "shifted the paradigm from punk to New Romantic."

Some of the most interesting information from the article includes:

• "Early reviews were scathing, and the band suffered much hostility from the music press. To cap it off, their new manager, Malcolm McClaren – who had been brought in to revive their fortunes – delivered the ultimate stab in the back by dumping Ant and poaching his bandmates to form Bow Wow Wow."
• "McClaren’s mutiny proved to be the key turning point. Rather than ceding defeat, Ant quickly assembled a new band [and was] ready to do battle, flanked on either side by his new secret weapons: Marco Pirroni on guitar and producer Chris Hughes on drums. Pirroni introduced a distinctive twangy guitar style, combining 1950s rockabilly with influences from Spaghetti Western composer Ennio Morricone. What’s more, Pirroni became Adam’s writing partner, a relationship that extended well into Ant’s solo years. Meanwhile, Hughes [brought] the whole chaotic mess together. Hughes’ ear for pop hooks is attested by his later work with Tears For Fears, co-writing their worldwide smash, 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World,' which Roland Orzabal had previously cast aside."
  
• "Their sound totally bucks the commercial trends of the era. The Ants avoid the temptations of synth-pop, with neither synthesizer nor drum machine in sight. While nothing else really sounds anything like them, they form part of a niche that included Siouxsie And The Banshees, and (yes) Bow Wow Wow – blending post-punk with tribal rhythms and layers of complexity. Their two-drummer line-up was integral to the sound."
• "Ant went from obscure punk to Michael Jackson’s fashion advisor. Compared to the fanfare in Britain, Ant didn’t quite conquer America in the way he deserved to."
• "Demonstrating the breadth of influence, there are echoes in phenomena as varied as Disney’s Captain Jack Sparrow through to the rubber-masked nu-metal band, Slipknot (that may sound a stretch, but check out their uniform dress code, gang mentality, parent-baiting and primal dual drumming)."
• "Some today might class Adam’s fixation with Native Americans as cultural appropriation, but arguably he was extremely progressive in his support of indigenous cultures when it wasn’t in fashion, highlighting their plight at the hands of the white man. He ... apparently declared during one live performance: 'They are human beings, and we are the savages.'"
• Oh, and Ant's real name is Stuart Goddard. He is alive and well, living in London at age 69, and still touring.

Adam Ant's discography does not go super deep for me; however, even much of what I would consider inessential is pretty interesting to revist today. Of his essentials, here are my absolute 7 favorites:

7. "Deutscher Girls"

6. "Antmusic"

5. "Stand and Deliver"

4. "Picasso Vista El Planeta De Los Simios"

3. "Wonderful"

2. "Strip"

1. "Goody Two Shoes"