The song is from 1979 -- the penultimate year of Carter. Of course those were bad times for the US and I remember them well. I chose to escape to Italy for the summer and for part of the fall -- so long that I missed the registration deadline at UW-Madison and had to sit out a semester working full time. But enough of that.
This song goes out to all the old-enough-to-vote-but-dumb-enough-to-vote-for-Carter people. We know who we are. We missed the Reagan bandwagon.
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Sure, I voted for Carter with my first vote back in rural PA. I though it was the obvious thing to do, but I also thought the government was just trying to help everybody. I grew up fast over the next four years - went to college, quit before my senior year, became a Reagan voter, and moved to California. It was a time of great experimentation and growth, not to mention fun as hell. I only regret that I never served in the military, and that's really the only regret of my life. All my other mistakes were worth it.
I also saw Molly Hatchet in concert in Pittsburgh soon after this song came out. They opened for Uriah Heap or Kansas... it's a blur now, but I remember watching them play this song from the balcony of, I believe, the Shrine auditorium, a great venue. It probably cost 6 bucks.
I just read there was a new particle discovered.
That is all.
There's a piano bar in downtown Denver I used to call "The Hatch" it even caught on with friends. That name was short for "The Molly Hatchet" bar. That name in turn was a play on the name the "Molly Brown Bar" (Molly Brown was a famous Denver resident and owned a house downtown). The real name of the bar was "Charlie Brown's." Chip is probably familiar with it. It appears to still be there.
Like Cockney rhyming slang, the logical progression went:
Charlie Brown --> Molly Brown --> Molly Hatchet --> The Hatch.
Lem, if it looks like a particle and quarks like a particle, it is a particle.
[ducks]
Back around this time in the late 70's, there was a bar in Pittsburgh called "Alexander Graham Bell's". It was a nice trendy place for young urbanites in the city after work. The motif was all late 19th century, and their thing was that the place was full of old phones: on the walls, at every table, and at the bar. I can't remember how you knew the right number to call, but you could call direct to any phone in the bar and talk to the person near it. The place had a fun and exciting dynamic, but far too intimidating for this tragically shy kid. Although it was a very short-lived concept, to this day, when I talk to someone from the time and the area, they all remember it. The invention of the telephone used to be a seminal accomplishment of history back then, but even though phones are more central than ever to our lives, Bell's contribution seems almost lost now.
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