round 1
(1) whitney houston, “i will always love you”
SWEPT AWAY
(16) the gear daddies, “the tide is high”
325-115
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 3/2/22.
emilie begin on whitney houston’s “i will always love you”
When I lived in DC in my twenties, I participated in an adult competitive karaoke league. During that time period, I found myself at least twice a month at a karaoke night with janky microphones, a messy sign up sheet, and beer-stained binders filled with titles of former chart-toppers and inexplicable deep cuts. My favorite for a while was a live karaoke band night at a local bar/restaurant on Wednesdays where you could pick a song from the band’s roster and play lead singer for four minutes. I went to this live band karaoke night so often that I came to recognize the regulars.
From the months of May to August, you had at least one gaggle of Capitol Hill interns that would sing Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA'' every week or Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way,” featuring at least one intern attempting Nick Carter’s “don’t want to hear you saaaaaaay!” key change with varying results. Another regular was a teenage girl whose relative was one of the band members. Every week, her parents would drive her to the bar just to sing Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” and then she’d leave almost immediately afterwards. I’ll never forget the juxtaposition of a 15 year-old in a baggy sweatshirt singing a beautiful rendition with all her heart while drunk, sweaty twenty and thirty-somethings clad in Banana Republic or Ann Taylor Loft workwear yelled along and cheered her on.
The last time I heard this girl sing I was 27. I moved to California that year after spending months trying to find an opportunity that would force me to leave behind a life where I had always lived within the same 60-mile radius. Despite knowing three people who lived there at the time, I accepted a job offer in San Francisco in June of that year and one month later my sister Camille and I drove my Volkswagen Rabbit across the country.
There’s a term in astrology called the Saturn Return, which refers to the point at which the planet Saturn returns to the placement it was in the day you were born. It takes Saturn 27-29 years to return to that point and signifies a set of major changes in someone’s life. The first Saturn Return we experience in our late twenties is usually tied to feelings about adulthood and settling down, and often stirs up decisions around marriage, career paths and overall life direction. As a late bloomer to the astrology world, I learned this term not through a horoscope book but rather through No Doubt’s underrated album Return of Saturn, which features several songs Gwen Stefani wrote about her late twenties.
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Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” on the same day she wrote “Jolene” in 1973, the ultimate Capricorn move. At 27, she wrote that song to signify her Saturn Return, which meant branching out as a true solo artist and ending her musical partnership with Porter Wagoner, the man who had made her famous but controlled her career and wanted to call the shots. The song, though sad, is a feminist anthem in its own way, a one-sided farewell where the singer expresses all the best to the person on the receiving end but makes it very clear that she’s leaving. She leaves no room for the other person to protest her decision, maybe because she knows nothing will convince her otherwise or maybe because she’s afraid she’ll change her mind if she hears what they have to say.
Dolly was 28 when the song topped the country charts in 1974, and she was later approached by Elvis about letting him record the song that same year. At the time, it was customary to sign away half of the publishing rights to Elvis whenever he recorded a song written by someone else. Dolly, newly in charge of her career, tearfully apologized and said no to Elvis and his manager Col. Tom Parker. She couldn’t give it up.
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In the days after I signed my job offer letter I began the process of telling my friends and family I was moving and quitting my job at a company where I had worked for five years, the only job I had known outside of college. I accepted the offer verbally on the spot and signed the letter within minutes of receiving it, offering my resignation at work an hour later. I didn’t want to second guess my decision and feared that someone would try and talk me out of it if I asked what others thought.
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Whitney Houston’s own Saturn Return appropriately coincided with the filming and release of The Bodyguard and its soundtrack. In 1991, at 27, she was cast as the female lead Rachel Marron. Stakes were high, with the studio hesitating to cast someone with no acting experience but her co-star Kevin Costner insisted on her, going as far as to delay making the movie a year to accommodate her schedule. Always a Leo, Whitney fought to prove herself good enough for the role.
*
After accepting the job offer, selling off my furniture, and donating about half of my wardrobe, I took a quick trip to San Francisco a few weeks before moving to find an apartment. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on the ground floor of a skyscraper by myself, and for the first time the weight of this decision hit me. I had lived in or near the same city my whole life, a city where no building was taller than the Capitol and almost every street downtown was named after a letter, number, or state so it was always easy to know where you were. I hated not knowing the succession of streets, I worried about having no friends, and I wondered if I would get fired within the first few months of my job once they figured out I was unqualified.
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At the same age when the song became a hit for Dolly, Whitney recorded her rendition of “I Will Always Love You” in April of 1992 at 28. Maureen Crowe, the film’s music supervisor, suggested an arrangement based on Linda Ronstadt’s cover of the song in response to scrapping the originally-planned cover of Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” which had been featured in Fried Green Tomatoes. When David Foster, the soundtrack’s producer, called Dolly to tell her, she pointed out that Ronstadt’s version didn’t have the third verse and then proceeded to sing it for him on the phone so he could write it down.
Though she brought back the third verse to stay truer to the source material, Whitney made the song her own, beginning with an a cappella rendition of the first verse, a stylistic choice David Foster didn’t agree with but she and Kevin Costner insisted on keeping. Whitney’s version also gains momentum over time, softly singing Dolly’s words at the beginning with unbelievable control and slowly getting louder over the chorus and following verses. Then, at 3:08, after she sings the third verse, almost tricking us into believing she’s going to end on “I wish you love,” her belt punches through, accompanying arguably the most famous key change of all time.
*
Much like the scene in The Bodyguard where the song plays, I had my own tearful goodbye at the airport as I dropped my sister off to fly back to DC after driving out to California with me. A true Pisces through and through, my emotions were only compounded by a residual hangover stemming from a drunken night of karaoke. Driving away from SFO, I decided I would just give it a year, and if I hated it, I could always move back. No one would think any less of me.
*
Released November 3, 1992 when she was 29, Whitney’s cover spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, won two Grammys, and helped The Bodyguard soundtrack become the best-selling soundtrack of all time. Dolly was always supportive of Whitney’s cover, and when she died, she wrote that she would, “always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, 'Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.'"
Today the song gets lost in Soft Rock station shuffles while you’re waiting to get your teeth cleaned and the cheesy saxophone interlude is dated, but it represents many important choices made by two women at pivotal points in their lives. Dolly’s choice to professionally split from Porter Wagoner, write a song about it, and then deny Elvis the chance to record that song resulted in reportedly $10 million in royalties in the ‘90s alone (or as Dolly has said, “enough money to buy Graceland”). Whitney’s choice to record “I Will Always Love You” made her an even bigger star and gave her a signature song so ubiquitous that most people don’t know it’s actually a cover.
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Almost seven years later, I’m still in California. I can easily rattle off the succession of streets in downtown San Francisco and I can tell you the best place to sing karaoke in the city. It’s The Mint for entertainment value, Martuni’s for live piano and showtunes, and Silver Cloud if you want to hear a gaggle of Marina Girls sing “Party in the USA.”
Emilie Begin graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in Creative Writing in 2010 and currently lives in Oakland. She co-hosts the Old Millennials Podcast and occasionally writes an essay here and there (most recently for the RS 500). You can find her on Twitter talking about how underrated some forgotten '90s power pop band was @emilieabegin.
The Sharks Have Always Been Red: chris fischbach on gear daddies’ “the tide is high”
"The Tide Is High" is a 1967 song written by John Holt, originally produced by Duke Reid and performed by the Jamaican group the Paragons, with Holt as lead singer. The song gained international attention in 1980, when a reggae version by the American band Blondie became a US/UK number one hit.
That’s from Wikipedia.
Minnewashta Elementary School, circa 1983.
We weren’t allowed to bring radios to school. This was probably before the Walkman, and any small portable device would have been a little transistor radio with a puny single-ear headphone—tinny sound, staticky, very lo-fi.
Brandy and I broke apart from the tetherball and four square games up the hill and walked down toward the long-jump pit, along the fence that ran next to the soccer field. This was the first time I heard Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll,” the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” and Blondie’s “The Tide Is High.” It was my first experience with the illicitness of rock and roll, and these songs still resonate with me.
Circa 1983–1990
I heard “The Tide is High” probably a couple hundred more times on the radio, at parties, as background noise in restaurants, shopping malls, hardware stores.
I saw Debra Harry on The Muppets, but she sang different songs.
1989, Heathers was released, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. Iconic Gen X movie.
1990, Pump Up the Volume was released. Not exactly Gen-X canon, but close. Again with Christian Slater.
1990, Northfield, MN
My freshman year at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. That same year, a band I’d never heard of before, the Gear Daddies, released Billy’s Live Bait. It was, like a lot of other albums of the time, a blend of rock and country. Think Wilco, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks—but the Gear Daddies didn’t take themselves as seriously. This was good-time party music, lending itself to dancing and singing along, loudly. The most iconic song on the album is the extremely Minnesotan “I Wanna Drive the Zamboni.” They play it at hockey games. I hope the band gets royalties from that.
1993, True Romance was released. This movie really clicked because not only was director du jour Quentin Tarantino involved somehow, but again with Chrtian Slater, co-starring alongside Patricia Arquette, and a very stoned Brad Pitt.
1993. This was the first time I saw the Gear Daddies live. It was outside on either a very beautiful fall or very beautiful spring evening. They played all the usual hits from Billy’s Live Bait, and a couple covers, including “The Tide Is High.”
The night before, my roommates and I had a shark-themed party in our dorm room. Some musician friends had written an album of electronic “shark dance music” and we had a few TVs hooked up playing various shark videos from the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week.” I don’t know how, but we somehow obtained a huge bag of plastic red sharks, maybe a thousand, and we scattered them all over the party, tossing them into the air as we danced.
The next night, we brought the bag of leftover sharks to the concert. The crowd helped themselves and soon the little red sharks were being tossed everywhere, including on stage. Let’s say it was during “The Tide Is High.” I don’t think I need to tell you how glorious this was.
1995, Kicking and Screaming was released, but Christian Slater was not in it. A lot of the actors had been in Whit Stillman movies prior to and after, and he was another director du jour.
To me, there hasn’t been another movie that so perfectly captures this era for a very specific demographic. That is: the mostly white humanities students and recent graduates from small, privileged liberal arts colleges graduating in the mid-nineties. The banter, the endless cigarettes, the cleverness, the over-intellectualization of pop culture, the Simpsons references, the driftless feeling and desire to remain or go back to the safe cocoon of college life, to continue the ironic distance forever. The irony, the irony, the irony.
Kurt Cobain had just died, and I remember my friend Adam sticking his tongue through a magazine photo of Kurt Cobain’s face.
There is a part in Kicking and Screaming that I find beautifully awkward and perfect. We’re witness to a scene in an underclassman’s dorm room. There’s a poster of Bob Marley on the wall (because of course there was), and two gangly awkward young men dance to “The Tide Is High” with a young woman. Everyone is badly drunk, and badly dancing. It was sincere and ridiculous, and the audience, slightly older, can look back on them with both pity and nostalgia.
You couldn’t dance authentically to “The Tide is High” in 1994—you were dancing with air quotes around yourself. You were dancing to a different generation’s music, but you weren’t, you were too self aware, too ironic, “dancing.” It’s how we were about a lot of things.
2014, Northfield, my twentieth reunion.
In each of the successive reunions I attended, which came at five-year intervals, The Gear Daddies were hired to play in the student union. I’m sure they played at all the ones in between as well.
Rumor had spread around campus that Christian Slater was there. Apparently he was dating or married to woman we speculated was ten or fifteen years younger than us. Scandal! Opportunity!
We created a fake Twitter account for Christian Slater and started to gather followers, using hashtags and the like. We were still super clever and hilarious.
But I gotta say, it was a lot of fun.
In the student union, later, the Gear Daddies were, of course, playing. There was a live Twitter feed above the stage being fed all the various Carleton College reunion hashtags. “Christian Slater tweeted that he was locked in the radio station in the basement. A bunch of people went to let him out. Did they play “The Tide Is High”? Probably.
2018
I read Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. As I understand it, current thinking in physics is that there are no things, only events, and events are only made possible through something to do with entropy and gravity and the sun. I am not sure I understand this completely, to be honest. Time isn’t how we understand it to be. It’s not that time is an illusion, exactly, it’s just that everything always is. That we’re just to myopic to see what’s actually going on around us. Or something like that.
Around the same time as I read Rovelli’s book, I got really into a strange kind of YouTube phenomenon. Go ahead and Google “Toto Playing in an Empty Mall.” I’ll wait. Ok, so, isn’t it like the greatest thing you’ve ever seen? There are tons of variations of different songs in different malls. I LOVE THEM.
Similarly, there is a subgenre of a person filming outside of a party, or outside of a club. Here is one. There are dozens more.
Do I have to explain to you how wonderful these videos are? I’m not going to. You either get it or you don’t. You either have seen the movies I reference in this essay or you have not. But you probably have heard Blondie’s version of “The Tide Is High.” You have probably not heard the Gear Daddies’ version.
2019, My twenty-fifth reunion.
One night, I stood outside the student union where, you guessed it, the Gear Daddies were playing.
Quietly, muffled, I could make out their cover of “The Tide Is High.” Like Toto in the empty mall, or from outside the club.
It was also a moment of time collapsing, of living all the above at once, of becoming small, insignificant. Disappearing. I was me, but I wasn’t anyone, I was a speck, I was one person, one student, one alumni at a single reunion, sitting on a bench, by myself, half-drunk. I was someone, I was no one, and it was fine. I was disappearing, and I felt fine.
Chris Fischbach is a literary agent, consultant, editor, and producer at Fischbach Creative. Prior to that, he was at Coffee House Press for twenty-five years serving as editor, and then publisher for the last ten years of his tenure there. While at Coffee House, he edited and published Valeria Luiselli, Ben Lerner, Hernan Diaz, Eimear McBride, J.M. Ledgard, Laird Hunt, Kalia Yang, and hundreds more. He lives in Minneapolis, and serves on the board of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the Grand Marais Art Colony.