Tonight we will be among the old people gathered to listen to (and cheer for) Men at Work, Toto and Christopher Cross

 

Only one of these original members of Men at Work will be onstage this evening at Blossom Music Center.

I have long since passed the age when you fret over the fact that the music you listened to as a teenager is now regularly played on "oldies" stations. That happened years ago.

On the spectrum of musical fandom, I'm at the point where I willingly attend cheesy, nostalgia-laden reunion concerts. I revel in being surrounded by other mid- to late-middle-aged people whose enthusiasm is perhaps muted compared with what it once was but who can still be described as "spirited."

I also make no apologies that the average age of the crowd at the concert I'll be attending tonight (along with my brother Mark and sister Debbie) is likely to be older than 50 and possibly pushing 60.

That's the demographic I expect will turn up at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, this evening for a triple bill featuring 80s acts Men at Work, Toto and Christopher Cross.

I suspect most in the audience will be there because they're particular fans of one of those three bands. For Mark and me, anyway, the clear headliner is Men at Work.

I have been a pretty ardent MAW fan since 1983, when the first 45 I ever bought was their single "Down Under" and the first cassette I ever purchased was their album "Business as Usual." (Northeast Ohioans will appreciate the fact that I bought both of these items at Zayre's.)

The thing is, as is so often the case when bands tour decades beyond the peak of their popularity, the group performing tonight under the name "Men at Work" only has one original member. That would be lead singer and guitarist Colin Hay.

Mark (along with his son and my nephew Mark) and I have seen Colin perform live several times as a solo artist, and we saw this incarnation of Men at Work play a few years ago. You can say we're fans.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also looking forward to hearing Toto play its hits, notably "Africa" and "Rosanna." And there's no doubting the talent Christopher Cross brings to the stage with his "Sailing," "Ride Like the Wind" and "Arthur's Theme."

But I'm there for the Men, who actually now include two women. One is a wonderful musician named Scheila Gonzalez, who plays saxophone, flute and keyboards in a way that eerily recreates the sound and vibe of the late Greg Ham, Men at Work's original multi-instrumentalist. (NOTE: Since writing this, I've come to find out Scheila won't be there tonight, but is instead touring with Weird Al Yankovic. Darn.)

The other is Cecilia Noël, Colin's wife and a talented singer and performer in her own right.

We'll have a good time, I have no doubt. It will be 2-3 hours of letting the music take me back to when I was much younger and much dumber. And also skinnier. With more hair.

You couldn't pay me to actually go back to that era of my life and live it again, but I don't mind taking a temporary trip back in time. I look forward to the whole thing.

As long as the bands don't play too long, of course. I need to get home and get my sleep, you know.

My interactions with recreational fireworks as a kid were nearly disastrous

I don't know if kids still do this, but when I was growing up, my friends and I would play with fireworks any and every chance we got.

By "fireworks," I mean not only things that make loud noises, but also relatively innocent stuff like black snakes, smoke bombs, pop-its, and jumping jacks. If you could light it or throw it, and it did something cool, we were all over it.

In general, we were all over anything involving fire. I don't know what drove us to be such little pyromaniacs, but we loved us some flames.

The problem was, at least as far as I was concerned, the potential for injury was real and frequent. I never actually got hurt playing with fireworks, but that was only by the grace of God.

I remember once being with my friend Matt, who had gotten his hands on an M-80. These little bombs were the kings of neighborhood fireworks simply because of the explosive power and noise they generated. We couldn't have been more than 10 years old, yet here we were playing with something that could have blown our fingers off.

We decided to wedge the M-80 into a little crack in a picnic table at the playground. Matt lit it and we backed up a few feet. When it went off, splinters of wood flew in almost every direction, with one whizzing within an inch or two of my head. It could easily have gone into my eye.

Then there was the time Matt and Kevin were shooting bottle rockets across the street. I opened the front door to our house to see what was going on, and they very smartly decided to shoot one straight at me. I didn't get hit, but it did enter our house before exploding just inside the storm door.

I almost got in big trouble for that one.

My worst near-miss, without a doubt, was the time I nearly burned down my school with a jumping jack.

I've told this story here on the blog before. Here's how I described the incident in a post 10 years ago:

I was playing with a pack of jumping jacks I'd, um, borrowed from my dad. I was with my nephew Mark, who had to have been only 6 or 7 years old at the time. We were by the old Mapledale Elementary School, and ringing the building was a two-foot-high pile of dry leaves. My genius idea was to light a jumping jack and throw it into these leaves, so that's what I did. The leaves, of course, immediately caught fire, and the flames started spreading rapidly around the perimeter of the building. Mark and I ran away as fast as we could. Someone who was there told the cops I had done it, and by the time I got home, there was a Wickliffe police cruiser waiting in the driveway for me. My mother was, to put it mildly, not happy.

You'll want to know what I was thinking there. Heck, I want to know what I was thinking, but I don't know. Not even an 11-year-old boy can fathom the thought processes of an 11-year-old boy.

The only positive outcome was that the school did not, in fact, burn down. But that's only because the good folks from the Wickliffe Fire Department came and put out the mini inferno I had started.

Anyway, it's Fourth of July here in America, which means recreational fireworks will be out in abundance. If you celebrate in this manner, please stay safe and use a little common sense.

Like, for instance, make sure that when an M-80 explodes, it doesn't create projectiles that could potentially kill you and your friends.

That would really put a damper on the holiday.

The 40-year-old niece and the 50-year-old nephew

Here's a video from 1988 in which 18-year-old me writes my 3-year-old niece Jessica's name on a piece of paper for her. And she delivers a harsh critique of my work.

Last month my niece Jessica turned 40. Tomorrow my nephew Mark turns 50.

These are wonderful milestones worth celebrating, but they're also strange to me.

For one thing, when I think of a "niece" or "nephew," I think of a child. Having a nephew hit the half-century mark, and a niece who isn't too terribly far off, tends to knock one for a bit of a loop.

Also, it means it was 10 years ago tomorrow I wrote this post, calling Mark "The 40-Year-Old Nephew." I've always liked that one.

I remember relatively little about Mark's birth in the spring of 1975, to the point that it's funny to consider there was a part of life when he wasn't around. He has just always been there, whether it's coming with me to live performances of the 80s musical acts we both love, sharing texts with word-for-word bits from our favorite stand-up comedians, or just getting together for family holidays and spending most of our time laughing.

As for Jessica, I do remember when she was born in the spring of 1985. I was a freshman in high school and, while still mostly clueless, at least old enough to understand what was going on. She would quickly become my honorary younger sister. When she was little, I would take her around in my yellow Chevy Chevette on field trips ranging from Gold Circle to Geauga Lake. (80'S ALERT! 80'S ALERT!)

Mark is a good father of two and now a good half-centenarian. Jessica is a good mother of two and now a good...almost-half centenarian?

Whatever you want to call them, I welcome them both to the Society of Middle-Aged Parents. We old fogeys are happy to have you.

Revisiting the decade when you grew up...warts and all

 

Howard Jones playing a quintessentially 80s instrument (the "keytar") on August 31 in Cleveland.

Several weeks ago, my nephew Mark and I took in an evening of live 80s music at Cleveland's Masonic Auditorium that was every bit as fun and enjoyable as I thought it would be.

It was also a long show, or at least it felt that way to me. Three bands performed (Howard Jones, ABC and Haircut 100), and the changeout between each act took more time than I would have anticipated. While Howard was the headliner in my eyes, ABC played a deservedly long set as the middle act that helped push the whole event to nearly 4 hours in length.

The crowd, by the way, was exactly what you think it would be: Heavily older Gen X, with most people in their 50s and early 60s. At a spritely 49, Mark was one of the youngest people in attendance.

These nostalgia tours are lucrative affairs. People love to hear the music of their youth, and they especially like to see the musicians who created that music performing it live. It makes them feel like they themselves aren't quite as old as their bodies might otherwise suggest.

I loved the 80s, but that's probably because I went from being 10 years old when the decade started to 20 when it ended. That's a memorable time in anyone's life.

To be fair, 80s music and fashion (and politics) aren't everyone's cup of tea.

There isn't a single perfect era in history. When oldsters long for "the simpler time" of their formative years, they usually whitewash the bad stuff that went on then. That's just human nature.

Mark and I had a lot of fun at that 80s-heavy concert, and while there was a certain cheesiness to the whole thing (it's difficult to pull off the rocker persona when you're pushing 70 years old), by the end of the night I decided that was OK. I was there with Mark, with whom I've been attending concerts since 1988, and we were loving virtually every song that was played.

We enjoyed it in the moment, and we enjoyed the way it took us back to a time when we were both considerably younger.

Which is more than enough. I'll continue listening to long-forgotten 80s music until the day I die.

Rock on!

When you're not someone who swears a lot, people find it either funny or disconcerting when you do

It's a minor miracle that, having grown up with Bob Tennant as my father, I'm not someone who swears particularly often.

(NOTE: We use the word "swears" here in Northeast Ohio in the same way those in other parts of the country might use "curses" or "cusses." It just means uttering what are commonly referred to as "bad words.")

It's not that I don't ever swear, I just don't do it often. And when I do it, most of the time it's in a joking or funny way.

At least a couple of my kids find it borderline disturbing when I use a swear word, though, even when they know I'm quoting someone else or doing it simply for comic effect. They're just not used to hearing it from me.

On the other hand, while my dad didn't go around cussing up a storm, he would routinely toss around many of George Carlin's famous Seven Dirty Words.

I remember one time when I was maybe 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark and I were in the living room with Dad. Dad told us both to kneel down and touch our faces to the carpet, and then to repeat after him. We complied.

DAD: "I suppose."

US: "I suppose."

DAD: "And you suppose."

US: "And you suppose."

DAD: "That my ass is higher than my nose."

MARK (who was 4 or 5 at the time): "That my ass is higher than my nose."

ME: "Ahhhhhhh! Mark, you can't say that!"

Dad and Mark thought the whole thing was hilarious. I, on the other hand, apparently had my delicate Victorian sensibilities gravely offended.

I don't think myself morally superior simply because I'm not someone who swears frequently or with any conviction. If anything, the fact that I don't swear, don't smoke, and only very occasionally drink makes me about the blandest suburban dad you can imagine.

But like Popeye, I am what I am.

And you can take that s**t to the bank.

The day is finally here! Yes, my nephew's birthday (what day did you think I meant?)

I don't know what year this was, but my choice of full-body thermal underwear suggests I was about to embark on an Arctic expedition of some sort. That's my nephew Mark on the right.

Oh, I guess it's also Eclipse Day for those of us fortunate enough to be in the path of totality. As I write these words on March 13th, I have no idea what the weather will be in Northeast Ohio for the big event. But even if it's cloudy, I'm hoping the sudden mid-afternoon darkness will at least be worth going outside for.

Anyway, what I meant was that my nephew Mark turns 49 years old today. Nine years ago, I wrote a tribute to him on his 40th birthday. Now, a year from his 5-0 milestone, I hope you have a minute to go back and read about an awesome husband, father and lover of Oasis. Click here to give that 2015 post a look.

As for me, I'm going to dig out those long johns and head outside this afternoon to take in whatever celestial spectacle the skies over Wickliffe will afford.

Happy Mark/Eclipse Day!

I don't go to a lot of concerts, but the one I'm attending tonight is special for reasons beyond music

By Derek Russell - https://www.flickr.com/photos/184778751@N03/48954387052/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83341876

If all goes according to plan, this evening I'll be joining The Marks (my brother and my nephew, who share that first name) at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio, for a night of music and storytelling offered up by one Mr. Colin Hay.

If you know Colin at all, it's likely as the lead singer of the highly successful early-80s pop group Men at Work. In the years since, he has forged a nice solo career, having released more than a dozen albums.

Colin has always meant a lot to me, in part because Men at Work was the first musical act that really caught my interest. I bought their single "Down Under" on 45 in 1982, the first record purchase I made using my own money (from my paper route, of course).

I never got to see the group perform live before they broke up, but I've seen Colin in concert several times over the past 20 years. Nephew Mark is better at keeping track of this than I am – he has been there with me for every one of these shows – but I think tonight might be the seventh time I've been there in person to watch Colin work his magic.

And "magic" is actually a pretty apt word. Not only is he a wonderfully talented songwriter and musician, he's also a master of between-song banter. He tells stories and jokes in an understated Scottish way that holds audiences captive.

(Colin is known the world over for being from Australia, but he is Scottish by birth and lived there until he turned 14 and his family moved Down Under.)

Anyway, while I'm looking forward to the show, I'm more looking forward to spending some time with my brother and nephew. We probably don't get together as much as we should, but when we do, it never fails to be memorable.

Your takeaways today, then, are these:

(1) Make the effort to spend time with people you love.

(2) Colin Hay is still making music and is worth checking out if you've lost track of him.

I'm trying to remember how we planned vacations in the pre-Internet age

As I mentioned a few days ago, my family and I recently took a fun and relaxing vacation to Bethany Beach, Delaware. I booked our rental house through the VRBO app. We navigated the 9-hour drive using Waze. And of course we looked up information about local attractions online.

At no time during the planning or execution of this vacation did I speak directly with anyone. It was all facilitated by the little electronic miracles known as smartphones.

So now I'm wondering, how did we do all of this before, say, 1996? How did we plan vacations without the Internet? I simply cannot remember.

Here's a good example: At the end of my freshman, sophomore and junior years of college, I took trips to the beautiful city of Montreal. Each time I did this, I brought a friend (Kevin in 1989, Nate in 1990) or family member (nephew Mark in 1991) and we drove the 10+ hours from Wickliffe to Southern Quebec.

As I look back on it, I wonder:

• How did I make hotel reservations? That is, how did I know my hotel options, and where did I find the correct phone numbers to call? I couldn't just Google that information back then.
• How did I purchase (in advance) tickets for the two Montreal Expos baseball games we attended? Did I send them a letter or something? How did I know how much the tickets would be? Where did this information come from?
• How did I know the correct driving route to cover the 560 miles from my house to Downtown Montreal?

I can't remember how most of this was done, but I do know the answer to that last question.

The two options when it came to long drives back then were having a road atlas in the car with you and/or ordering a AAA TripTik. I always had the atlas handy, and at least once I remember getting the TripTik, which was a paper printout of very thorough driving directions provided by the helpful folks at the American Automobile Association.

Many of us back then had the special ability to decipher an absurdly detailed road atlas map while safely driving a car at 60MPH and trying to figure out exactly where we were and where we were going.

But what of the first two points? It's not like they listed Montreal phone numbers in the Cleveland Yellow Pages. How did I figure out who to call and what their numbers were?

I think the two answers were (a) library books, and (b) directory assistance.

Back when libraries mainly loaned out actual books, there was an array of destination-specific travel guides you could borrow when planning a trip. If these guides had been published in the previous 5-10 years, the phone numbers in them were probably going to be accurate. So those certainly helped.

There was also directory assistance. As long as you knew the area code of the place you wanted to go (in this case 514 for Montreal), you could dial <AREA CODE>-555-1212 and ask the nice person on the other end of the line for whatever phone number you needed.

There was a charge for this, of course, but it worked.

So I guess that's how I mapped out these trips to Montreal: Books, long-distance directory assistance, and large bound driving maps?

All I know is we somehow found our way there and back, and those vacations remain some of my most memorable.

But I'll be honest: I would much rather go the smartphone route. Fewer fines for overdue library books and no separate charges for each Google search. Technology has spoiled us far more than we probably realize.

This seems as good a time as any to once again mention that my mom once hit me with a bag of Fazio's Italian bread

My mom passed away one year ago today, so my choice here was either to write about how much we miss her and how wonderful she was, or to bring up the time she smacked me with a baked good.

I'm going with the latter.

For the record, though, we do miss her and she was wonderful. One of the best human beings I ever knew. You can't say enough about her.

But even Kathryn Tennant had her breaking point.

This is a story I relayed at her memorial service, but I love it so much I'll recap it here, too.

I'm guessing it was maybe 1978 or '79. That would have made me about 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark maybe 3 or 4.

My mom would often watch Mark while his mom, Mary, went off to work, so he was around a lot and, as I've often said, was more like a little brother to me than a nephew.

It was late afternoon and Mom was busying herself getting dinner ready, probably nearing the end of an exhausting day taking care of the two of us and trying to keep the house in some order.

I was doing something to irritate Mark. I don't know what, but it was enough that he kept crying and whining. We were in the living room, and Mom repeatedly yelled from the kitchen for me to stop it.

But apparently I didn't stop it. I kept right on doing whatever it was that was upsetting Mark, and he was making no secret of his displeasure.

Then, suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, Mom came storming out of the kitchen yelling at me to STOP IT. I looked up at her, and the next thing I knew, she had taken a full swing at me with a bag of Fazio's Italian bread. I don't know where it hit me, but the bag made solid contact and burst open, sending slices of bread flying around the living room.

I was stunned. Mom never hit me. It didn't hurt, but it was so out of the ordinary and so scary that I started crying. That, in turn, started Mark crying.

So there we were crying, and there was Mom, flustered and tired and on her hands and knees, crawling around the living room picking up pieces of far-flung bread.

In retrospect, it's one of the funniest things I have ever seen, though I obviously couldn't appreciate it at the time.

What I wouldn't give for some video evidence of that moment.

Boy, do I miss her.

When your niece or nephew may as well be your sibling

There are two people in the world to whom I could text the words "goony goo goo" and get a laughing/crying emoji in return.

One is my high school classmate and track teammate Ken Beavers.

The other is my nephew Mark, who as I've documented before is only five years younger than me and thus has always served much more as my surrogate little brother than as a nephew.

Mark turns 46 years old today. He would immediately recognize "goony goo goo" as a line from Eddie Murphy's "Delirious" comedy special, which came out 38 years ago when Mark was a grade-schooler, but which he and I quote back and forth endlessly.

It doesn't have to be an Eddie Murphy quote in these random texts we send each other, by the way. It can be almost anything that strikes us both as funny: a comedy bit (often from Eddie or Norm MacDonald, but we draw from a wide range of comics), a line from a movie, or just something funny one of us has said or done at some point.

We have similar comedy and musical tastes along with our shared last name and ancestry. Mark and his wife Tiffany are expecting their second child this year, which means that increasingly, we also share parenting stories.

I don't know if you have a niece or nephew who is very close in age to you—I've known a few to be older than their uncles and aunts—but it really is fun. Mark has been a blessing in our lives from the moment he was born way back in the Dark Ages (1975).

So to my little nephew, I have only two things to say today. One is Happy Birthday!

The other, of course, is goony goo goo.

The 40-Year-Old Nephew

Today my nephew Mark turns 40 years old. When something like this happens, you are forced to deal with the fact that you yourself are not quite as young as you like to think you are.

I remember when Mark was born, sort of. I was 5 years old, hadn't started kindergarten yet, and spent most of my days in the kind of brain-damaged haze that is the domain of accident victims and 5-year-old boys.

I had some vague idea that another human being was about to become part of our lives, and that my brother Mark was apparently going to be this person's dad, but that's about it. Mark Sr. was only 17 years old at the time and still pretty much seemed like a kid to me (as I'm sure he did to himself).

So then Mark Jr. was born and it didn't take long for him to seem more like a little brother to me than a nephew. When you're 5 years old, you shouldn't have anyone calling you "Uncle _______."

Mark spent a lot of time at our house growing up, which was generally OK but got a lot better when he became a teenager and was more fun to be around. In those few years when I was working at the newspaper and still living at home while in college, I would sometimes come home from my job around midnight, and Mark and I would go out for a late-night meal at Denny's.

Occasionally I would let him drive my high-powered, chick-attracting 1979 Chevy Chevette, which was technically a violation of the law given that he wasn't yet of legal driving age, but turned out OK in the sense that he didn't actually kill anyone. This was 2 o'clock in the morning, remember, so the streets were pretty empty (I wasn't so stupid as to let him drive in rush hour or anything.)

Then I got married and started having kids and I saw less and less of my little brother/nephew. We still see each other on holidays and we still laugh about the same stupid things, which makes 1990 not seem like such a long time ago.

And now "little" Mark is married with a daughter of his own, and like I said, he's 40 years old today. All of which blows my mind and makes me wonder how my mom feels as her "baby" (me) creeps closer and closer to 50.

That's the whole Lion King circle-of-life thing, I guess. We get older. It happens. We grow up. It happens. We stop driving Chevy Chevettes. Thankfully, it happens.

So at the risk of making this occasion about me (yeah, I know, too late), let me just say happy birthday to Mark, my nephew, substitute little bro, fellow Sting fan, and long-time Denny's connoisseur. Here's hoping you get at least 40 more.

And here's hoping you're still around when your little daughter turns 40 so that you can feel as old as I do right now.

Meeting famous people and looking stupid

You see that distorted photo above? (I can't seem to fix it. Sorry about that.) The man in the middle, wearing the black T-shirt, is Sting. The musician, that is, not the wrestler. He looks cool and happy.

Now see the guy just to the right (Sting's left) wearing the goofy round glasses? That's me. I look happy, too, but not especially cool. I look like someone standing in the back of a group of people straining to be seen so that he could later say he had his picture taken with Sting.

Which is exactly what I was.

This photo was taken in July 1996 backstage at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Sting was less than a half hour away from taking the stage for a show in front of 15,000 people in the middle of his "Mercury Falling" tour.

The kid wearing the backwards hat on the far right is my nephew, Mark. He was working security in a retail store and made friends with one of the cosmetic counter girls. That girl happened to be the cousin of Sting's drummer, Vinnie Colaiuta (the other guy in the photo wearing glasses besides me). She got us the backstage passes.

Sting has always been my favorite musician. He's immensely talented and I love his songwriting, his bass-playing, and his singing. I think I have virtually every song he has ever recorded.

Getting the chance to meet him was a wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He came over and shook my hand, and I responded by saying to him, "BLAHOODA MUFIGOLOWICH!" Or something like that. All I know is that it was loud and unintelligible, and he responded with a very polite, "I beg your pardon?"

Sting and other famous people are used to this, I'm sure. People get tongue-tied around them, and they learn to be very smooth about it. I was trying to tell Sting how much of a fan I was and to ask him some questions about a couple of his more obscure songs.

But instead, all I could muster was two minutes' worth of variations on "BLAHOODA MUFIGOLOWICH!" Sting did his best to make conversation with me until he had to move on to the others who had snagged backstage passes and were waiting for their opportunity to talk to him.

Sting is easily the most famous person I've met, but in later years when I met other celebrity types (hockey legends Mario Lemieux and Gordie Howe and Men at Work lead singer Colin Hay among them) I got better at calming myself and speaking clearly.

And I'll admit it's silly that I even have to do that. These are just people, after all. Well-known people, but still, just people. And I've invested in them some sort of glorified status that makes me nervous when I get within 10 feet of them. It makes no sense, and they themselves probably find it all a little tiring.

Celebrity worship is an interesting human phenomenon. I admire people who are genuinely nonplussed around stars. I'm embarrassed to admit what a fan boy I am about certain writers, musicians and athletes, but even at the age of 45, it happens.

So I'm interested to know: Who are the most famous people you've met? And were you at all nervous when you met them? Feel free to post in the comments below.