The US Festival at 40: an oral history

Lead singer Colin Hay still tours a lot and I've heard his live shows are actually pretty good. He'll be a member of Ringo Starr's All Starr Band for its fall tour.

 

Men at Work were as big as it got in '82-'83.

They had 5 immense songs and videos.

And then they were gone.

 

And some of his solo work is really, really good.

 

All pretty good to outstanding. I've always thought "It's A Mistake" was one of the best top 40 songs of the 80s. Their only clunker I recall is "Dr. Heckyll and Mr. Jive", but I listened to that again, and while it's nowhere near the rest of these songs, it's not as bad as I remember it being.

Funny thing is, watching those videos, I'm reminded that at age 11-12, I thought the Kinks were kinda like Men At Work. Probably because Colin Hay resembled early 80s Ray Davies, especially in the "Come Dancing" video. I wouldn't have used the word at the time, because I wouldn't have been able to express it, but they both came off arch to me.

That was all I knew of the Kinks at the time. I lumped them in with the rest of the UK/Australian bands. Pretty funny in hindsight how you view things through the prism of your own experience.

 

He toured with the Barenaked Ladies a few years back. He would save “Who Can It Be Now” for BNL’s set and come out to jam with them. And the guy from the Violent Femmes would play sax. It was very well done.

It’s on one of BNL’s live albums.

 

I've seen Colin Hay live twice. Men At Work were great and his solo career serves as the perfect coda.

This came on the radio a bit after a group I was collaborating with on a play about the NAMES Project emotionally and creatively crashed and burned. At the tail end of "Overkill" one of the people who was in group AND the workshop with me in the late 80s called.

"You're listening to it, too?"

"Overkill" came on the radio late one night after a very emotionally wrought evening of talking to families and putting together panels. It was already considered old when we sang along with it. He said he could tell something was percolating in my head and he'd hang up and let me write.

 

Colin Hay's first cameo on Scrubs and its utilization of "Overkill" was perfection.

"I have other songs."
"Yeah you do."

Also cameoed in the otherwise awful JD and Kim don't love each other but have a baby anyway arc as well as in the finale, when he's one of the faces JD sees as he walks out of the hospital for the last time. Until a few months later, when the Scrubs reboot aired but let's not talk about that.

 

Stance might not be Overkill.

 

I had always thought Triumph headlined the hard rock/metal day but it was VH. Turns out I was conflating US Festival with the big metal festival in Michigan a year later at Timber Ridge Ski Area that my parents wouldn't let me go to (I was 13). Triumph headlined that one with Ratt, Accept, Motley Crue, Night Ranger, Quiet Riot and Ozzy on the undercard. Back when everyone wore jeans or ultra-short Hobie corduroy shorts in the heat and nobody ever wore shirts.

 

Late summer of 1982 was pretty fertile ground for musical artists. Not a lot of chart dominance later in the year, as opposed to the early part of the year where where were no less than 7 (!!!) songs that spent 3 or more weeks at No. 1 before Men At Work peaked for their one week on 10/30/82.

 

I don't know what's more unbelievable in hindsight, that we didn't know Rob Halford was gay or that we would have cared. What an incredible performance. Diamonds and Rust at 15:53 is so much better than the version on Unleashed in the East.

 

Late summer '82 is when I discovered actual rock music. At the start of the summer, my record collection consisted of an unofficial Star Wars soundtrack album by something called the "Electric Moog Orchestra" (all synth -- my mom was either too cheap or too poor to get us the real one), a version of "Another One Bites The Dust" recorded by the 1980 Lions when they started out 5-0, soundtrack to the Village People movie "Can't Stop The Music" (co-starring Bruce Jenner -- what we didn't know then...) and singles of the Chariots of Fire theme song and Centerfold. Then in August we went on a family vacation, where a cousin who was in HS by then played the Stones, Who and Bowie for me and it all changed.

I don't remember much about what was popular that summer before that point except forAsia and and a lot of absolute shit like "Ebony and Ivory." '83 seemed like a bigger, more consequential summer for music -- everyone had MTV by that point, Synchronicity, Thriller and 1999 were out, metal bands like Maiden, JP and Scorpions were breaking through into the mainstream (as much as MTV or radio would allow, at least), new wave was at its peak and the LA metal scene was about to blow up.

Yeah -- at age 12, Halford struck me as "manlier" than other rock stars at the time because he had short hair (same with the very straight Roger Daltrey). Cracks me up to think about it. Not sure it would have made a difference if I knew -- that's around the time I figured out why a close family friend had a "roommate" and it didn't faze me.