first round

(9) David Foster, “love theme from st. elmo’s fire”
CAGED
(8) Baltimora, “tarzan boy”
194-192
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/11/23.

jeremy v. bennett on “tarzan boy”

If the sun hadn’t already burnt the tops of your feet, the asphalt would surely scald your soles. There were no treesno shadeand the jukebox was located inside the snack bar at the top of a long ramp covered in hot blacktop. It was the summer of ‘86, I was 11 years old, and I didn’t own sandals. All I wanted to do was play Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” and swing on the ropes. But even if I was brave enough to run and hop my way up to use my quarter, I was too scared to do the latter.
Northside Beach was a man-made attraction located in Zanesville, Ohio. It was built in 1965 and was the place to be during the summer. There were multiple slides and diving boards, with long lines of people waiting their turn; a metal carousel-like spinner that likely caused second degree burns if enough skin came in contact with the flat surface; a barrel that definitely knocked enough teeth out during a season to make a set of dentures; a long set of still rings that hung about ten feet above the water; and the rope swings. Oh, and three teenage lifeguards who probably didn’t have CPR training. There were also continuous rumors of people sneaking in at night and releasing baby alligators, piranha, and other aquatic predators. Most families had a season pass, but some for some families, like mine, it was out of our budget. Some of the older kids would sneak in through the trunk of their friends' cars. Once or twice a summer I’d have enough money saved up to buy a guest pass and enter legally with my cousin Shane, who was the same age as me. For us it was like going to DisneyWorld.
The rope swings were the coolest thing in my pre-teen eyes. You’d start at the top of a slope by grabbing a hold of a knotted rope before running down, swinging out over the water, and then letting go to splash down. The most expert swingers would often do mid-air somersaults after they dropped the rope at the apex of their swing. The novice swingers would smack their backs against the water with a loud clap. Occasionally, someone would refuse to let go and end up back at the start. My fear was that I would be a back-smacker or never-let-goer. Nothing in all of Northside Beach was less cool than those two and I was certain that if I tried the rope swing and failed it would somehow end up as beet red letter “A” on my back that would be seen for summers to come.
In addition to the jukebox, the snack bar also had a number of arcade games. After I’d make my Baltimora pick, I’d have plenty of time to kill until it actually made it to the speaker system that blasted over the beach. I’d try to pump myself up with a few games of Space Invaders, Burger Time, or Galaga while Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and other popular songs filled the air. Eventually, I’d work my way back down to where the rope swings were and the first beats led into that recognizable refrain…

*

Baltimora may be the unlikeliest of one hit wonders. Which, maybe means they’re actually the most likely of one hit wonders. A band that wasn’t really a band with a song that wasn’t really a song (there’s no chorus!more on that later). It was almost an extension of a novelty track, not dissimilar in theme to something you’d hear on Doctor Demento, but with a new wave vibe and serious pop appeal. They were founded by an Italian music producer (Maurizio Bassi), who recruited an Irish EMT (Jimmy McShane) with previous acting and dancing experience, Italian session players, and an American lyricist (Naimy Hackett). Speaking of lyrics, the title barely appears in the song (All alone like Tarzan boy shows up twice in the verses). Instead the non-chorus is just Tarzan’s primal yell, making damn near impossible for anyone to know what the song is actually called. Seriously, ask a friend if they know “Tarzan Boy” and they are sure to say no. But play the song and within 20 seconds they are nodding along and oh-oh-oh ing. The verses are akin to “Ape Man” by The Kinksa Western fantasy of leaving modern society behind and enjoying a primitive lifestyle. The video is about as low-budget 80s as you can get. McShane in makeup leaning into his West End aspirations in pixelated technicolor. McShane unfortunately died of an AIDS-related illness in 1985 and there are suggestions that the song was a call to other gay men to live out their lifestyles.

Burning bright
A fire blows the signal to the sky
I sit and wonder, does the message get to you?

Take a chance
Leave everything behind you
Come and join me, won't be sorry
It's easy to survive
Jungle life
We're living in the open

The band couldn’t replicate the success of “Tarzan Boy” in the US, but their album, Living in the Background, spawned two additional hits across Europe. One has to wonder if the song, and Baltimora, would have reached higher highs than number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart if people could remember the name of the song. It reminds me of Harvey Danger and “Flagpole Sitta”another song with a chorus that exists outside of its title. In an interview with Stereogum on the 20th anniversary of the song, singer Sean Nelson lamented:

The thing I really remember is, the one thing I didn’t have was the chorus. The chorus for most of the first year we had the song that we were playing it was just the backing vocal bits, which I always thought of as very much in line with the Turtles or something. But we had recorded the song and I thought, “Well, there needs to be words in the chorus. It can’t just be this.” So I went desperately flailing through my notebook and I found that line: “I’m not sick but I’m not well,” which was from another song, and then I basically just sang it and made up the other words on the mic. And I’m glad that I did, though I wish I had had the fucking sense to change the name of the song. “I’m Not Sick But I’m Not Well” is what everybody calls it. And if I had done that instead of thinking it was somehow less artistic, less honest, or whatever, to change the name of the song after we had already played it in front of the 87 people we were playing to in those days, we’d be having this conversation on my yacht.

Baltimora, like Harvey Danger, may not have yacht money, but there is a lasting legacy to their song.

* 

That same summer of ‘86 my dad took me to my first professional wrestling event. The World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) was in Columbus, a 55 mile drive from my hometown. Hulk Hogan, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, and many of the other larger than life characters were there. I didn’t know it was scripted back then, or that it would eventually be akin to a rope swing back-smackersomething to be ashamed of. Wrestling in the 80s was huge. Wrestlemania III at the Silverdome in Detroit was just a few months away with (a disputed) 93,000 people in attendance. It was the largest indoor event until 1999. It would be the first Wrestlemania I would watch (from a VHS tape my cousin gave me). It became a ritual for my friends and Ia tradition we carried on for three decadeseven if we didn’t keep up with the week-to-week television shows like Monday Night Raw. When April rolled around each year, we’d gather at someone's house and chip in for the PPV and a buffet of snacks. It was a reunion of sorts. No matter how busy our lives had gotten and how little we’d seen or texted each other, we knew we’d catch up once a year watching grown men and women fake punch each other in the most ridiculous spectacle. Wrestling and I had a love-hate relationship that I tried to keep in the backgroundespecially when it came to meeting new people.
Amanda and I met a few years ago when, outside of those yearly Wrestlemanias, pro wrestling wasn’t really a part of my life. We connected over music: post-punk, midwest-emo, 80s/90s college rock, etc. She moved to Colorado and eventually I followed. I’d recently learned of a new wrestling organization called All Elite Wrestling (AEW) and one night, while we sat on the couch after dinner, I turned it on. I don’t know why call it serendipity, cosmic convergence, whateverbut I did. One of the wrestlers was about to make his entrance. There’s the familiar drum machine beat and guitar lick. And then the crowd starts singing: Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. They are waving their arms back and forth. It’s “Tarzan Boy” by Baltimora and the wrestler is “Jungle Boy” Jack Perry. Side note: Jack Perry is indeed the son of former Beverly Hills 90210 actor, Luke Perry.
Certain songs have the ability to take you back to a time and place. I hadn’t thought of Northside Beach in a long time. It closed in 1994, right after I’d graduated high school. No more monkey business on a sunny afternoon. There’s now a Lowes where it once used to be. Modern society. But hearing Jungle Boy’s theme song and seeing him in those loincloth trunks put me right back at the jukebox in southeastern Ohio, looking out over the beach towards those rope swings. I never got up the courage to do them and I felt a tinge of regret in that moment of recollection. But if I was afraid of looking silly back then, I was about to take the bold “mid-air somersault” of being a wrestling fan again. And by the look on Amanda’s face as “Jungle Boy” Jack Perry made his way to the ring, she was too.
We started watching AEW each Wednesday. Eventually, they came to Denver and we bought tickets. It would be her first live wrestling event. It was late December and we drove the hour plus from Colorado Springs to the arena. It was 50 degrees and lightly raining, pretty decent weather for the time of year. Along the way we passed the time talking about dream jobs and cities we were willing to relocate to when the move was right. Colorado is great for the sun, but snow is always a problem. And it was about to be a big problem that night.
Jungle Boy wrestled one of the last matches of the night and we got to hear “Tarzan Boy” and sing along with the crowd. It was silly in all the right ways. I looked around and there were just as many kids waving their arms and “oh oh ing” as there were adults. Grown men who wouldn’t look out of place at a Slayer show were joining in. If being a one hit wonder is considered a sin, but it leads to this…then I’m guessing Baltimora is living well.
 As we made our way to the exit we realized that it had snowed six inches in the three hours we’d been inside the arena. There was no way we were making it home that night. Amanda found a hotel five miles away and I drove for two hours to get there. Cars were sliding all over the roads. It’s a good thing she has a Subaru, the official car of Colorado winters. In the morning I cleared off the remaining snow and ice from the windshield and we made the slow, steady drive back home. Along the way we revisited the conversation from the night before. We don’t have to live here. We can leave everything behind and live where the sun burns the top of our feet and the asphalt scalds our soles.

Jeremy Bennett still hasn’t done a rope swing anywhere and is currently using his degree in pop culture to sell nostalgia at Leechpit Records and Vintage. He continues to watch wrestling with Amanda, their dog Calvin, and their kitten Max (who is named after AEW champion and all-around villain, Maxwell Jacob Friedman). This is his first foray into March Fadness and is disappointed he didn’t know he could have written 2000 words on hair metal five years ago during March Shredness, because someone needed to represent Quireboys.

We Were Idiots Once, and Young: Amorak Huey on “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire”

This essay is not about the song you probably think it’s about.
You probably think this essay is about John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” a glorious keyboard-heavy exemplar of 1980s inspiration pop that soared to the very pinnacle of the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1985. It was the main theme from the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, the song people remember from that movie, the one people assume you’re writing about when you mention to them what you’re writing about for Xness this year.
If I were writing about that song, I’d expect it to make a run in this tournament. It has all the ingredients, the right blend of nostalgia bait and the kind of dated self-importance that allows us to look back on it with both wistful pleasure and the intellectual superiority that comes from knowing you’ve matured beyond such trifles from your past. The song and the movie—they remind us of who we were and make us feel smug about who we are. But John Parr was not a one-hit wonder. A one-memorable-hit wonder, perhaps (with, I guess, apologies to “Naughty Naughty”), but “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” was not his only venture into the charts, making that song ineligible for this year’s competition.
This essay is about the movie’s other theme song: “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire” by David Foster.
All the pomp and bombast, none of the lyrics. It’s not the only instrumental song to hit the Billboard charts—its rise likely buoyed by Vangelis’ wildly popular “Chariots of Fire” theme from just a few years earlier, America at the time I suppose in the mood for lofty keyboards and videos full of movie clips—but it’s certainly in relatively rarer company.
The thing about this particular instrumental song is that, listening to it now, here in the 2020s, nearly four decades after its release into the wild, is that I can’t hear it. Not as itself, not as a standalone piece of music. Instead, I hear the movie—or at least how the movie made me feel. Even though the two songs sound nothing alike, sometimes when I’m listening to Foster’s, I forget and think I’m listening to Parr’s. Which I guess is the point of a movie theme, right? To evoke the movie without overshadowing it. In that regard, this song does its job perfectly—a tidy, radio-friendly three minutes, thirty seconds of saxophone and keyboards that remind me how pretty and angsty the Brat Packers were. Forty years later, that remains the exact effect of the song, at least if you’re around my age and recall that movie with a combination of fondness and chagrin.
So, let’s talk about the movie. I thought I was going to be clever and open this essay by noting how St. Elmo’s Fire was, to me and my Gen X cohort, the middle installment in a trilogy of guides for what to expect from life, falling between The Breakfast Club and The Big Chill. Turns out that exact observation was the lead to Janet Maslin’s review of the movie in The New York Times upon its release in June 1985. I learned on Wikipedia that one of the producers of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire called them “Little Chills” from the start. Oh, well. Nostalgia is like that—memories you think of as individual are, it turns out, collective. And vice versa. Experiences you imagined were universal are quite likely to have been specific to you, or least your demographic.
If you’ve never seen the movie—and it doesn’t seem like one that has had much of a life beyond its original Gen X audience, no Zoomer cult following on Netflix or anything—the quick recap is that it’s about a group of college friends going through all sorts of melodramatic turmoil upon graduating from Georgetown. It stars core Brat Packers Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Andrew McCarthy. It’s fine. Or it’s terrible. I don’t know. It wasn’t very well reviewed at the time, but everyone I knew saw it, and saw it more than once. I don’t even remember how—was it in heavy rotation on basic cable? Did we rent it over and over from our neighborhood video store? I know I bought a copy of it on VHS at some point, one of those “12 movies for a penny if you sign up for our monthly club” deals. However we managed to get a hold of it, when I was in high school in the few years after this movie came out, we’d all watched it and taken it to heart and thought it had something meaningful to teach us.
Something you have to know about us, though: we were idiots.
By “we,” I mean me and my friends specifically, but also maybe every other young White person chasing fading upper-middle-class dreams in Reagan’s America.
Some 1980s comedian had a bit that my friend Mark and I used to (and still do) quote to each other all the time about how when you look back at yourself from five years ago, you inevitably realize what a jerk you were back then—and when you consider the implications of that, it means you’re a jerk right now! Man, I would tell my younger self, just wait until you’ve been having that same realization for forty or fifty years. Knowing you’re an idiot doesn’t really make you less of an idiot. Maybe that’s the Gen X curse—self-awareness without the accompanying ability to make that awareness useful.
Watching St. Elmo’s Fire now, it’s clear that the movie knows exactly what it is. It’s slick and pretty like its youthful stars. It’s shallow and overwrought on purpose. The characters aren’t nice to each other, and they’re not especially likeable, and they behave terribly. They are rich and White and ridiculously privileged, and their lives are just so hard, the world so unfair — and that message was like catnip for us, the teens who weren’t so pretty as Hollywood stars, not so rich as Georgetown graduates, entering high school with the sense already that we’d come along too late, already being labeled as the Slacker Generation, not so hard-working or patriotic or pragmatic as our Boomer parents or Greatest Generation grandparents. Even the name Brat Pack was a reminder of the gap between us and our predecessors—Judd Nelson was no Frank Sinatra. Like I said, we were idiots. But when you’re fifteen or seventeen and someone tells you the world sucks, what a relief—a lifesaver tossed to help you deal with the turmoil and trauma inherent in that age.
My sense of St. Elmo’s Fire as offering a primer for how to transition into adulthood is not something I’ve superimposed with the benefit of hindsight. It was very much an explicit part of how I watched the movie at the time. My friend Mark and I found our analogues in the movie — he was Emilio Estevez’s Kirby, I was Andrew McCarthy’s Kevin. This is, to be blunt, embarrassing. In the movie Kirby’s main trait is that he’s pursuing (to a degree that is so stalkerish even a movie from 1985 has to acknowledge it) an unavailable love interest, and in eleventh grade, Mark had a crush on an unavailable girl from our trig class a grade above us. To Mark’s credit, he is really nothing like Kirby, and didn’t do anything untoward because of his interest in the girl, certainly nothing resembling stalking. We just talked about her a lot, and maybe he eventually asked her out once?
To my, well, less credit, I might have been more like Kevin than it feels good to admit. In the movie, Kevin is a mopey aspiring writer in love with Ally Sheedy’s Leslie (who’s in a relationship with Judd Nelson’s Alec; I told you it was melodramatic). I was definitely mopey, and I already wanted to be a writer. I didn’t so much have an unrequited crush on a particular friend’s girlfriend—it’s more that I had an unrequited crush on everyone. This is one of those nostalgic feelings that I’m not sure how universal it is—the sense that I went through years of my life as this ball of yearning and hope and undirected want and unfulfilled ambition based on ideas from the movies. That description seems to apply to both my nonexistent teenage love life and my life as a writer ever since. If I was Kevin five years ago or thirty-eight years ago, I’m Kevin now. Like I said: embarrassing.
Back to the song. David Foster was no stranger to hits—he was part of plenty of them as a producer, a writer, and a studio player for acts like Earth, Wind, and Fire, Chicago, Toto, Boz Scaggs, the Tubes, Kenny Loggins, and others. Rolling Stone labeled him the “master of bombastic pop kitsch.” As a solo artist, “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire” was his one venture into the charts, and maybe that’s appropriate—it’s a near-perfect distillation of an entire thread of 1980s pop, no lyrics to get in the way of the soaring, a song intended specifically to make you think of the word “soaring,” a song tied to the move it’s named after, inseparable from the film and its cultural associations. It’s sort of a perfect one-hit wonder, in other words. I don’t expect it to make a deep run in this tournament because no one remembers the song on its own; maybe they remember the movie, or the movie’s other big song, but it’s hard to imagine having nostalgic associations for this song in particular. Again: the quintessence of a one-hit wonder, entirely a product of its kairotic moment, a song that could have been a hit at no other point in the history of the universe.
It’s a little weird that the song is called “Love Theme,” because the movie is not a romantic one. There are crushes that the characters mistake for love, to be sure, but the movie isn’t about love in any real way. The most generous reading is that it’s about friendship, and the particular intensity of friendship when you’re young, and how unsustainable that intensity is. Perhaps the one-hit wonder is a good metaphor for such friendships — burning hot, burning out.
After high school, I ended up going to the most Georgetown-like nearby college, but surely that wasn’t because of the movie’s influence on my expectations, right? Surely not. Anyway. Mark went there, too, and we were roommates, and our experiences were nothing like the ones depicted in St. Elmo’s Fire, except in all the ways they were exactly alike: hookups and breakups, intense friendships that fell apart, sometimes in melodramatic ways, right around graduation. Maybe the movie had lessons for us after all.
I mentioned earlier the comedian with the bit about looking back over your life and realizing that you’d been an idiot all along. I’m pretty sure that comedian was Richard Belzer—I could be wrong, but don’t correct me, in my mind it’s him and I’m okay with that even if it’s not verified. Belzer died in February, after I’d already written about that bit in the initial draft of this essay, but before I finished it. He was 78. That made me think about the Brat Packers. They’re older than I am, but how much older? I looked it up to confirm, and they’re all in the range of five to ten years older than me—old enough already that it won’t be an enormous shock when one of them dies, old enough already that if one of them dies tomorrow, people will nod and think, well, a little young but it makes sense. Which, you know, if people your age are that age, it means you’re that age. I didn’t mean to write about mortality, but maybe it was inevitable. Maybe that’s the lesson of a tournament of musical acts that peaked once and only once. Maybe we’re all one-hit wonders.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.