the first round
(15) kylie minogue, “the loco-motion”
outdanced
(2) rod stewart, “tonight’s the night”
165-128
and will play on 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 closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 7.
justin carter on “Tonight’s The Night”
The record player in the family dining room was broken. It’d been that way as long as I’d been around, since before my parents even bought that house. My father’d insisted on bringing it with them when they moved in, even though it was one of those large ones that you had to sit atop a full-size cabinet, the kind that took up most of the space in whatever corner of the room you put it in. It never worked, & we never even tried to fix it, but it sat there for years, lingering somewhere between “symbol of how we’d made it, how we owned something so large” & “symbol of how, beneath it all, nothing was working.”
The record player’s gone now. After the divorce, my mother threw it out, & in that corner there’s a large trident that she got from a friend, large & foreboding & powerful.
My parents met in the mid 1970s, my father fresh back from a stint in the Navy & a first marriage that I didn’t know about until I was 22. One of their first dates was to a Rod Stewart concert. They made “You’re In My Heart” their song. They bought more Rod Stewart vinyls than I knew existed, though by the time I came around those records had become only relics of a past time, these things that sat on the shelf under that record player, that could never be used.
But we had the cassettes &, later, the CDs, & we’d listen to them in the truck on the way to school. Stewart’s live album. Stewart’s greatest hits, in which I’d skip around between four songs: “Maggie May,” “You’re In My Heart,” “The First Cut Is The Deepest,” “Tonight’s The Night (Gonna Be Alright).”
*
It would be fair to call Rod Stewart a champion of the bad song, but among the most prominent of his songs that gets that label is “Tonight’s The Night.”
The song, recorded in December 1975 for Stewart’s A Night on the Town album, was his longest number one hit, topping the charts for eight weeks between late ‘76 and early ‘77.
Clearly, the song struck a chord with the general public, staying at number one for longer than any song had in nearly a decade.
Maybe it was Stewart’s voice, the raspiness of it like a whisper that’s been soaked too long in a bourbon barrel.
Maybe it was the pure sex of the song, the way it exposed such an intimate moment & made the listener feel privy to something that they had no business watching.
Maybe it was the odd, seductive French part at the end, with Stewart’s then girlfriend Britt Ekland’s voice providing what seems like an answer to what Stewart’s been singing.
Maybe it’s all of it.
*
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get Neil Young’s song “Tonight’s The Night” into this essay, because it’s the opposite of Stewart’s song. Young’s is stark, a desolate journey through addiction & death.
I know there’s something to say about the way the language functions here, how the same title can reveal itself in so many ways. I know it’s there, somewhere.
*
My father used to sing a lot of songs while he sat at his computer desk. “Tonight’s The Night” was one of them. Or at least, I think it was, & if it wasn’t it doesn’t matter, because I can hear the chorus in exactly his voice, deep & southern & trying to emulate that raspiness that no one but Rod Stewart could ever get right.
*
The first time I listened to “Tonight’s The Night” after signing up to write about it was...an experience.
While many of Stewart’s other songs had endured into my adult life as things I encountered & still deeply enjoyed, this song wasn’t one of those things. At some point, I’d listened to it on the greatest hits CD one last time, & then I got my own car & my own CD player & my own music, & that was it. It had been so long that I’d forgotten nearly everything about the song, with only the chorus sticking around in my brain.
& so I had to confront something: how creepy the song is in parts. The way Stewart refers to this other person as “virgin child,” how he begs her not to “deny [her] man’s desire.”
While the song’s lyrics don’t age as poorly as some other songs from the era do, it’s pretty clear to me why the song fell out of my consciousness: it’s a song where Stewart’s devotion to cheesiness supplants all else. “You’re In My Heart” is cheesy, but there’s a beauty to that cheese. When Stewart compares a lover to soccer teams in that song, it’s both a moment of going too far & a moment of a certain kind of magic.
When Stewart says “spread your wings & let me come inside,” there’s just not that same magic.
*
My parents always told me that one of my first dates was to see Rod Stewart, but when I search for his tour dates to figure out exactly when this would have been, I see that his first Houston show was a month after they were married.
Maybe their version made a better story than the truth, or maybe it was somehow their own version of the truth.
*
For as much as Stewart’s biggest hit fails in various ways, the chorus itself seems to transcend the mediocrity around it. There’s something universal about those four lines, something that says “this doesn’t have to just be some lines from a song about fucking.”
Tonight’s the night
It’s gonna be alright
‘Cause I love you girl
Ain’t nobody gonna stop us now
Take away the verses & what those verses signal about the motivations of the narrator & you get this intensely pure expression of love, one that seems as if it can endure anything.
& then put the verses back in & wonder this: is there even love here?
*
I was living in Ohio when my parents decided to divorce. When I came home for Christmas, his stuff was still there, the records still in their places.
& then I left. By the time I returned home 12 months later, the home was unrecognizable. The wood panels in the living room painted over. All the signs that my father had lived there gone. That record player vanished. The records themselves gone.
It would be a couple more years until I found a stack of CDs in my childhood bedroom, the Stewart’s greatest hits album among them. I wish I could say something grand about it, that I’d put it in my old boombox & listened to it in some new light, but that’s not the truth. Maybe I lingered on it a second longer than the other CDs before flipping to see what was next in the stack. Maybe I didn’t. I’m not even sure if it’s still there—my mother tore the flooring up in that room, moved everything from it out into the garage. Maybe that Rod Stewart CD is lost forever, melted down in the Texas heat.
Justin Carter is a poet and sports writer currently living in Denton, TX. His poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, The Journal, Redivider, & Sonora Review. His women's basketball coverage appears in numerous places online. He tweets about sports and, occasionally, not sports at @juscarts.
brian oliu on “the loco-motion”
Track 1
When one thinks of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, they think of trains—of how the low guttural whistle cuts through the humidity and the burnt rubber scent from the Goodyear Tire Plant a few miles past the West End. There is an Amtrak Station in town that services only the Crescent Line—while it snakes all the way up through North Carolina to New York Penn Station, the majority of passengers take the rail down to New Orleans where it is affectionately called “The Drunk Train,” though the mood is less joyous upon its return trip to West Alabama, as New Orleans has a tendency to suck the moisture from your bones. However, the most traveled route is on the Norfolk Southern Railway lines, which are hauling coal, steel, and automobile parts to and through West Alabama. The tracks cross Hackberry Lane, just after the brewery and the Chinese restaurant, and just before the massive track and field facility, where on a meet day, you can see the pole vaulters twist up and over the bar before crashing into the pads below. There is inertia here: the abandoned bowling alley stripped of its wood, the brake lights illuminating the wet pavement in the cheap curly fry drive-thru. I notice these things because I myself am stopped—the railroad tracks are 0.7 miles from my front door, and I need to get home to make dinner. I need to get to work. I need to finish this run so I can shower and meet a friend for lunch. There are a lot of things that I need, but there is always something in the way.
Track 2
Kylie Minogue’s first performance of “The Loco-Motion” was impromptu—during a charity event for the Fitzroy Aussie Rules Football Club, Minogue and her Neighbours castmates (which included Guy Pearce and Alan Dale) sang a cover of the 1972 Little Eva hit; a song that Minogue was familiar with because she owned a Carole King songbook. At the time, Minogue’s Charlene character was a fan favorite; her on-again/off-again romance with Scott Robinson launched the two actors into Australian superstardom. The characters were set to be married—the wedding was regarded to be controversial because of the ages of the two characters; the classic social taboo of young love had the majority of the country fearing that they would cause a pandemic of teen weddings. Greg Petherick, Minogue’s manager realized that this would be the perfect time to release the single: with interest in the Charlene-Scott marriage reaching a fever pitch, Minogue would drop “Locomotion” on July 27, 1987, two weeks before the Australian and British television wedding of the century. After the episode aired, Minogue and Jason Donovan (who played Scott), embarked on their “honeymoon,” which was a PR stunt—a massive tour of both Australia and the UK where Minogue would perform “Locomotion” at every stop. The tour skyrocketed Minogue to superstardom and was the death knell of her acting career. Her story had reached a definitive end with her wedding; soap opera producers always lament the finalization of a couple because the joy is in the chase—the will they or won’t they moments that make for intriguing television. Upon Charlene and Steve’s return to the show, writers kept trying to find ways to throw wrenches in their marriage: money problems, an affair with a school tutor, an affair with a driving instructor. Of course, the writers could see that Kylie was not long for the soap opera world: Locomotion was the first artist to reach #1 on both the British and Australian charts, and she would leave Neighbours almost exactly a year to the day “Locomotion” was released. Good, inherently, is boring.
Track 3
The song, inherently, isn’t bad. While most people recognize the track as a cover of an older song, the version that we are familiar with is actually a cover of Minogue’s original 1987 mix that was rushed out and released in Australia in time for the Neighbours wedding. The original is more of a clomping stomp, with a multiple orchestra hits and more of a focus on Minogue’s vocals, in which she is attempting to do her best Little Eva karaoke. The recording sounds like someone who was asked to do their best Bananarama impersonation, but the only Bananarama song they’ve ever heard was a three-second snippet during a shampoo commercial. There is an odd instrumental breakdown about halfway through the track with an intense drum breakdown, a guitar solo, and a section where Minogue’s vocals are run through a synthesizer as she repeats “chug chuga chug” over and over. As a result, the song sounds super aggressive: do the Locomotion or I’ll kill you.
It sounds much more like a demo, especially compared to the overproduced polish of the 1988 version, where Stock Aitken Waterman, a sound engineer who was responsible for Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Right Round,” and an actual Bananarama song, made the song into what it is today: a completely innocuous and outdated mall bop that is insanely repetitive and goes on for too long. Despite the song having a much faster BPM than Little Eva’s original, it adds a full minute to its run-time; presumably to get more shots of Kylie in a multitude of outfits in the music video. The video, hilariously, was filmed at an airport. By the end of the song it is less of a demand by Minogue and more of a plea: do the Loco-Motion with me. I know you’ll get to like it if you give it a chance now.
It is a song that leaves us begging for reprieve; whether that would be in the return of the bizarre vocoder section, or a guitar single, or, with how Kylie Minogue was marketed as an Australian Princess, a didgeridoo would suffice. Instead, it drones forward with no end in sight—a line of railcars crawling like a snake, with occasional blips of graffiti from a Memphis railyard breaking up the slow blur.
Track 4
I started writing this essay in early December of 2019. I had the framework of the train interrupting my morning commute to class or early afternoon run—how I would drive the extra few miles down towards Queen City Avenue to avoid the tracks altogether, or how I would start my runs from the other side of the tracks, driving to the park next to the river so that my day would not be halted. I would talk about the trains in my life: the fact that we are always being propelled forward despite paths laid out in front of you hundreds of years ago, of how trains never deviate and when they do they bring nothing but torn up sod and disaster. I was going to honor my mentor, Michael Martone, and his retirement from teaching—how he finds joy in every station stop. I was going to talk about how I learned to love Kylie Minogue—the white jumpsuit with the impossible cleavage in the “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” video, of how I downloaded an illegal .avi and attempted to learn the dance moves of Minogue and her scarlet-adorned backup dancers to wow the women at Rootie Kazooties, or 723, or Have A Nice Day Café, or whatever shitty Fell’s Point bar that would accept my friend Adam’s brother’s old ID, but I could never get the moves right—of how I stay rigid and without motion; a slight shimmy and wobble to my steps like I am a car full of coal buzzing up and over a hill—a forward motion with a lack of deviation. There are facts to be utilized: of how the preferred mode of transport by Australians is by air, or how The Ghan is a 1,851 mile stretch of rail that goes from Adelaide to Darwin through the most barren parts of the continent—documented by many Australian redditors as the worst 54-hour trip they’ve ever been on.
Track 5
On December 13, my grandmother died. Oma, as she was known, had always wanted to travel to Australia—a fact that we found fascinating because of her hatred of snakes, spiders, bugs of any kind. She loved trains: traveling across the United States for vacation—looking out the window, knitting baby blankets, reading ¡Hola! Magazines, and singing to herself. I wrote a small eulogy—about her love of music and how she constantly sang along to every song, despite not knowing the words in English, or Catalan, or Spanish, or German. I have been unable to write anything worthwhile since: every sentence coming out wrong.
Track 6
Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 at the height of her worldwide star power. She has been open about her health, famously saying that she had been given the all-clear by doctors before getting a second opinion when she felt as if something was truly wrong with her—that there was something in her heart that told her that things just weren’t right. I have this fear as well—that there is something dormant inside of me that will malfunction at the worst possible time; that the right combination of internal and external forces will converge to stop me dead in my tracks. I will never truly trust my body in the same way I am constantly wary of being interrupted—the days that I am late for a meeting are the days where the train breaks down on the tracks. I feel as if I have a bad motor; that at some point I will lose the ability to propel myself any further, that the system could shutdown at any moment. The easiest dances still need to be done.
Track 7
The cause of death was a bacteria that attached itself to foreign objects—it was first discovered when it surrounded her knee replacements; the doctors removed both knees and replaced them with temporary spacers; a long thin piece of rectangle plastic. She was going through physical therapy to try to find a way to get home when we found out the bacteria had attacked her heart valve. I think of the abandoned railways leading into Tuscaloosa; of failed projects or tracks that have been forgotten and fallen into disrepair, of how they scar the earth—of lines that tear through swaths of farmland, the backyards of rowhouses, of how regardless of where we are we can still hear the ghost of a whistle cutting above the trees.
Track 8
After the cancer diagnosis, Kylie Minogue was forced to cancel her Showgirl tour. In 2006, however, she recommenced the tour with the moniker Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour. What a beautiful concept: we can choose to live in a world where we can subtract by addition—remix it in a way that makes it seem new yet familiar. That somehow we have the power to cut out everything that is rotten and start anew.
Track 9
What if I choose to think of a train as less of an interruption—we regard the slow-moving cars as a hindrance because we are outside of it. The trains are bad today. Oma loved the train because it reminded her of her times on the train—that a change in viewpoint can somehow turn a bad thing good—that instead of staring at the coal car, it is us on top of it, admiring the view of the countryside as it slips through and through—that there I am, dragging my body that at this instance is running as it should toward the flashing lights before stopping my watch and waiting for the cars to rumble past. What a sight that would be. What a good thing.
Track 10
Kylie Minogue still performs the track. It has been a mainstay on every one of her setlists, along with the song, “Especially For You,” a duet she performed on Neighbours with Jason Donovan. In August of 2019, Minogue famously performed the song from an actual train, surprising riders on the Scarborough North Bay Railway, complete with backing dancers. The dance has always been the least important part: swing your hips, jump up, jump back, make a chain. In most performances of the song it breaks down into a conga line that bounces up and down. Carole King admitted that the dance never existed—Little Eva was forced to come up with a few moves as she performed. In the video, Kylie does this too: there is a lot of running in place with the occasional hip swivel. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at it—the most important thing is that you’re doing together.
Track 11
There’s one other difference between the original Australian mix and the refitted version for world audiences that I have not told you about—the name. The original rushed out version was titled “Locomotion,” whereas the official and new version uses the proper nomenclature of the original: “The Loco-Motion”. I have been thinking too often lately of the hyphen as interruptor when it is the opposite: a linking of two things, a way of bridging the gap between one thing and another. Something that delivers us instead of halts us—a way to bring us to where we need to be.
Brian Oliu currently teaches, writes, and fights out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections of non-fiction, including the lyric-memoir i/o, and So You Know It's Me, a collection of Craigslist Missed Connections. Essays on topics ranging from 8-bit video games, to long distance running, to professional wrestling, appear in Catapult, The Rumpus, Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney's, DIAGRAM, TriQuarterly, Runner's World, Waxwing, Gay Magazine, and elsewhere.