Just What I Needed

A while back I tagged D Cup at Politits with a music meme. She graciously complied and wrote about some songs that were big when she was a high school senior. I teased her saying that she chose all sappy sugary songs. She replied that she had been handcuffed by the meme and that she had written about the soundtrack of her life already and that I should read it one day, so I did. I read it yesterday and I enjoyed it. She mentioned one song in it that played a huge part in my life so I decided to write this post about that song. Yes, I am stealing ideas for a post from D Cup, but I've found that I've gotten most of my good ideas in life when I look at women and their boobs.

The first time I experienced culture shock was when my Mother passed away and we were sent to live with my aunt and uncle. I had lived all of my young life up to that point in Detroit, but after Mom died we moved to Howell, Michigan where my aunt and uncle and their savages, oops, I mean children lived. Howell was only an hour out of Detroit but it was worlds away to me. I had known only the city life up to that point but there I was living in the country, with cows, and horses, and hay fields, and big ass gardens, and ponds, and forests, and wide open space.

I also stopped being a Roman Catholic over night and I became a United Methodist, so that meant my church no longer talked so much about Mary and Jesus and eating the actual body of said son o' God every week after we had confessed our sins, instead now we got cubes of Wonder bread and grape juice once a month and we heard oodles and oodles about how neat it was going to be when Jesus came back. It took me quite some time to get used to all those changes.

But wouldn't you know it, by the time I was just settling in and getting used to life in that racist part of the Michigan countryside, it turns out that Howell was a big hub for KKK activity in Michigan, they pulled the rug out from under my pre-teen feet and my aunt and uncle packed us all up, except for one of my older brothers who ran away so he could stay in Michigan, and moved us south to Lee County , Va.

That is Lee County in the extreme southwest tip of VA. If moving from Detroit to Howell was a culture shock, then moving from Howell to Lee County, VA was a seismic culture shock. All the images I had heard or seen about the south were negative. I had seen many documentaries in school about the south and all of them had been shot in black and white and they showed people living in tar paper shacks that were drenched in fog all the time. I actually believed for a time that the south was in black and white for real and that everyone went around barefoot while toting a rifle and a jug of moonshine. But what I found was a landscape that looked like this:

In addition to the mountains there were valleys where people lived and farmed. We lived on a 100 acre farm where we raised cattle and corn and tobacco. The area where we lived though seemed like it was about 20 years behind the times. This was the mid 1970's when we moved to Lee County but some people's attitudes and beliefs were mired in the 1950's, but I have since found that there are people who are stuck in the past no matter where you go. If one expressed an admiration for Sanford and Son, then one was a damn dirty n**ger lover. If one wasn't a rock ribbed right winger then you were a Communist. If you didn't go to church two or three times a week then you were a damn dirty Jew or a Communist or a n**ger lover or all three combined.

Other things were bizarre to me as well. The accent for one. It was in Lee County that I learned that a word like 'bell' was not one syllable but two or sometimes three. Flowers were not called flowers, they were 'flairs.' One of my new friends kept telling me about a great wrassler he loved named Ric Flair, I kept correcting him and telling him the man's name was Ric Flower. That is until one day he showed me a photo of Ric Flair and I saw the caption beneath and I saw that his name really was Ric Flair.

Ladies and gentlemen, Ric Flair!

The food was different too. I learned to eat things like pinto beans, collard greens, biscuits and gravy, and red hot dogs.

Red hot dogs freaked me out for awhile then I got used to them. Soft drinks were no longer called 'pop, they became 'soda.' We no longer shopped for groceries at IGA or A&P. We went to Piggly Wiggly or Cas Walker's. Cas Walker had two great TV ads that ran constantly, one was of some kids whacking on watermelons with sticks while someone sang in the background that Cas Walker's melons were 'thumpin' good' and the other was an ad that proclaimed to the world that 'You can beat our prices but you can't beat our meat.' I swear with all my heart I am not making that last one up, I nearly died laughing the first time I heard that commercial.

So it was into that cultural backwater that I, a young impressionable and somewhat smartassed and inquisitive lad, was tossed to live. Gradually my midwestern accent began to fade and I accepted my fate for a time. I had TV, Rolling Stone magazine, and National Lampoon magazine, to keep me abreast of what people in the civilized world were doing. So I fell into a kind of stupor. I went along with what was going on and I just plugged along.

That is until the day that I heard the first single off this album:

It was spring/summer of 1978 and I was riding around the back roads of Lee County with my cousin in his mother's baby shit brown Ford Granada and both of us were high as kites. We were listenting to the AM radio in the car and we had it tuned to the station out of Pennington Gap, which was the biggest city in Lee County. From out of nowhere a song came on called 'Just What I Needed.' It was unlike anything I had ever heard or was hearing on the radio at that time. It was catchy, sounded unique, and so, and I do not use this in a bad way, weird. It was not the typical bombastic rock song of the day, like so many of the songs by Boston, Kansas, Styx, Rush, and others were. It also was not disco or folky singery songwritery. It was so shockingly different that I almost was knocked out of my pot induced haze.

I knew that after I heard it nothing would be the same in my life. I knew on some deep level that 'Just What I Needed' represented a new path, a new direction, and that it meant that I would not be stuck in Lee County forever. It was like I had just heard the way out. I had no idea how I was going to get out but somehow then I knew that I was on my way.

It was a little later that I signed up to go into the Air Force right after I graduated high school, which thankfully I did not end up doing. The day after I graduated a little over a year after I heard that song, we packed up and moved out of Lee County. I was never so happy to see that place in the rear view mirror. Getting the hell out of there was just what I needed.

So to the guys in that incarnation of The Cars, I just want to say thanks and that your song did more for me than you will ever know. You rock Ric. Ric Ocasek lead singer of The Cars that is.