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Duran Duran: Rio
I’ll be honest and admit I don’t remember when I first heard Duran Duran’s music. I’m guessing it was near the end of high school but at the time it didn’t make a solid impression in the way it later did. I do recall that I first heard the Culture Club song “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” on BBC’s World Service radio, probably my junior or senior year of high school. I thought it was a woman singing at the time I heard it first. Boy was I in for a surprise when I finally saw the video months or maybe even a year or so later. :D
Duran Duran was part of the movement referred to as new romantics, a sort of off-shoot of new wave and featured mostly pop songs, many lending themselves towards dance mixes. Kind of funny since I was not much of a dance person and felt pretty self-conscious dancing in public, something that hasn’t changed much.
Rio isn’t the first album released by Duran Duran but I think it was the first to get much traction in the US and the one that came to my notice first. I suspect this may have had as much to do with their video releases as the music at the time. I think this was near the beginning of video as an art form and this band took advantage. The band did a video version of the album although I don’t remember ever seeing it. I’m going to include links to the videos on this one since they form an essential part of my fandom.
The first song that caught my interest was “Hungry Like the Wolf” and the video almost always comes to mind when I hear the song. I later came to know the video was filmed in Sri Lanka, birthplace of the Scientist. I didn’t know him then but I was able to make that association with the video later on. The video is done in a sort of Indiana Jones theme and features members of the band searching for Simon LeBon (lead singer) while Simon LeBon was hunting an exotic, tiger-like woman through the jungle. It’s very much a dance song and I recall there were quite a few different mixes available for purchase back in the day.
Rio was the second song I remember and I also associate this to some extent with its video. There’s a yacht with the band members dressed in suits and there are lots of beautiful women, some painted in bright colors, presumably referencing carnivale? The song is about Rio, a beautiful woman with a smile too difficult to resist.
Save a Prayer was Duran Duran’s first ballad of sorts. It features a strong electronic presence and the persuasive voice of Simon LeBon. I think even this song had some alternate mixes, I guess for the extended slow dance? The video is another I saw quite a lot back in the day. It was also filmed in Sri Lanka and is very much worth a look for the beautiful scenery of the country as much as the “story” of the song.
The Chauffeur is the last song on the album and it’s a song I could listen to repeatedly, given the right mood. Apparently the lyrics to this song were written by Simon LeBon as a poem many years before he joined the band and supposedly were a key to him being hired as the singer. It’s a slow number that feels a bit dark and haunted at times. I’m not sure if there’s a definite meaning to the song but I’ve found some amusement reading various interpretations online while looking up information. I should advise the video for this has a bit of nudity near the end but it’s kind of an artsy sort of video. Nothing at all like the band’s famous Girls on Film video from their first album which has a totally different feel.
Writing about this really takes me back to my first year at college when I started buying a lot more music, thanks to the Record Exchange on Tate St. Back when vinyl was still mostly king if you wanted to seriously listen to music. Early in 1984, I found myself camping out for concert tickets on a bitterly cold night. I was with two friends and another girl who I only knew briefly due to that experience. It was the only time I’ve ever camped out for tickets and it’s a fond memory. It can be fond now when I am sitting in my warm house but it really was cold that night. Our tickets weren’t too shabby and one of my friends even caught a bunny rabbit that had been thrown on stage, picked up by a band member and then thrown back out into the audience. He gave that to me and I still have it all these years later. I only saw them once but I still enjoy their music and this is an album I revisit every once in a while. The Scientist even gave me a dvd of one of their concerts, which was a big thing seeing that he is definitely NOT a fan. :D
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It started with my dream
I woke up from a dream a couple days ago and remembered very little of it. But in part of the dream I ended up in an old discount department store, Zayre, that was popular in my childhood. I haven’t thought of the store in many, many years so it’s strange it would appear in my dream. I’m not even sure that really was the store in my dream. But the sign on the store was like the old neon Zayre signs in the 60’s and 70’s. So maybe something about the sign on the store triggered my memory of the store’s existence. I couldn’t really remember when Zayre disappeared from the landscape of my life so I went searching online as one does. I found out all I wanted to know and more. (This is the first website I found. There are several photos of old Zayre stores in the middle of the page with signs as in my dream.)  I discovered heaps of websites dedicated to old chain stores, be they department stores or grocery stores. And on the blogrolls of some of the websites were links to other similarly nostalgic websites. I’ve found it quite fascinating taking this stroll into the past because I read about many other stores that I’d also just as easily forgotten.
For example, what I consdered the local Target where I grew up actually started out as a Richway. And I knew it as Richway far more years than as a Target so it’s kind of interesting that I didn’t think about the fact it had been Richway most of my growing up years. I’d even forgotten that Richway was a discount offshoot of Rich’s department store in Atlanta. And apparently that store has now been taken over by Macy’s if I remember what I read correctly. Then there is the Treasure Island department/grocery hypermarket where my family shopped when we lived in Georgia. I think I only ever went to the one store but I have fond memories of ice cream treats from the front of that store. I was fairly certain it had closed down at some point but I also learned that the original Home Depots were housed in old Treasure Island stores not far from the one where we shopped. That’s where I learned that Eckerd drugs no longer exists because apparently Treasury drugs, which was part of the Treasure Island/Treasury chain, either bought it out or vice versa. And CVS eventually bought out the entire conglomerate. This kind of clears up my curiosity that there only seemed to be two standalone drug store chains while I was in Texas. I have strong memories of the Eckerd’s chain through most of my life before moving to Australia. I still have a box of Christmas ornaments that my family bought there thirty-five years ago. It was a ncie set of ornaments although most have broken over the years.
There were many more tidbits of information I learned while trawling through various websites. I ran across one on dead malls which I had run across once before. On that previous  occasion I discovered that Carolina Circle Mall in Greensboro, NC had closed many years ago. It’s not so much I had any particular attachment to the mall but it was one of the shopping centers I used to visit during my college and early work years so it was truly weird to think it had gone. I eventually even found a link to a website dedicated to that old mall started by a teenager who is now probably about twenty years old.  I read about the old Eastland Mall in Charlotte, which was the local hangout during my teenage years. It closed just a few weeks ago after many years of decline. I must admit that left me feeling very sad since I spent a lot of time there during my teenage years. I was aware of the mall closing because of a fan page created for it on Facebook. Otherwise I might very well have learned of its demise from the dead malls website. And today I found a website dedicated to Charlotte (NC) eateries that are no longer around. That made me sad, too, because I recognised many of them. And I’d even eaten at some of them.
It’s made me rather sad for the loss of such a diverse range of retail outlets as once existed. I know change is a fact of life. But it really seems as though the limit has nearly been reached for the smaller and/or weaker fish being swallowed up by the big fish so I wonder what happens next in the overall picture.
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Instant gratification
While progressing through a series of links from the iTunes podcasts, I came across the BBC’s language podcasts. This reminded me of listening to my shortwave radio over 25-30 years ago to hear the German language learning program on Radio Deutche Welle. I used to listen quite often to the program and enjoyed the format at the time. Like many shortwave programs back then, a booklet and sometimes other complementary items to accompany the program were offered to listeners who wrote in. I requested the booklet and eventually did receive it a couple months later. I remember being very impressed to get something from Germany (actually West Germany at the time). The fact it was from another country was far more important to me than the actual content, which was pretty basic and limited.