“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain.
If you’re not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain.”
Bay Area radio struggles to have decent music. I tend to cycle through the few stations that may have something of interest. A recent addition to the dial focuses on 60s. 70s, and 80s. As a competitor points out, the new comer tends to repeat the same track several times a day. Recently the song Escape (The Pina Colada Song) has been playing quite a bit. The funny thing to me is that yoga and health food seem to have been dating and compatibility differentiators for more than 30 years. The style of the song and especially the attire, however, may not be as timeless; just reminders of the end of the seventies and the start of eighties (It was the last number 1 of the seventies and first of the eighties). Oddly that decade seems a bit more sane regarding taxes.
It took more than two years to produce that tax code overhaul. During that time, Reagan went on the road to plead his case for the plan. At a high school in Atlanta, Ga., in 1985, Reagan said they were going to “close the unproductive loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.”
Meanwhile in Congress, Democrats and Republicans worked together to merge competing proposals for tax reform. Still in office today, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont was there during the passage of the bill. He says it was a different era.
“We had a lot of grownups in both parties, people who actually wanted the government to work,” Leahy says.
All of which makes me wish there was a world where I could write a personal ad seeking a new politician and find that the one who turned up was already in place. Now that is a fantasy.
Anyway, enjoy the song. Oh as moment of who knew: The song was released on September 21, 1979. The movie — which is a rather similar story and also a huge hit of the era was released October 5, 1979. As far I know they were not connected directly; yet they stuck together in my head because of the story lines.
Does the demise of pop and AOR Bay Area radio mimic the demise of those genres everywhere? I’d bet that it does, and of course it has to do with commercial radio networks, changes to music publishing and recording, iPods etc., and Internet services.
Yet I absolutely get the point about missing distinctive local radio. How many Bay Area natives of a certain generation (or two) remember great stations like KFRC (on the AM band!), KSAN (before it went country), KOME (San Jose’s contribution to the genre, with its borderline obscene on-air promos), KMEL (in its original incarnation), and the early (early 1980s) days of KFOG? And let us have a moment of funky country peace for the long lamented KFAT, for all of you Fatties out there.
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