999,867: .38 Special — Rockin' Into The Night

Rockin' Into The Night - .38 S...

The other day, on a late-night run to the grocery store for ice cream and cat litter, Leah and I nearly missed out on fantasizing that we, like the young lovers in “Rockin’ Into The Night,” were instead zooming down the highway to a cheap motel to get sleazy for the night. We spent the first two minutes of the song trying to figure out who was playing it.

They stopped telling you what the songs are, on Classic Rock Radio, a long time ago. Maybe they figure that after a hundred-thousand plays anyone who cared would already know their Foreigner from their REO from their Foghat from their Boston, but 97 percent of the time, I have no idea who’s on the air.

And I care a lot.

The problem is, now, what the problem was then: Rock from that mid-70’s to early-80’s era became so homogenized that you could’ve just called everything ROCK SONG by ROCK BAND. Legally, of course, they couldn’t. The Band owned the rights to the name “Band” and was still sitting pretty high on the hog in those days.

Just because there may have been a lack of originality in tone and structure doesn’t mean that these ROCK SONGs were bad. Every Motown song for 10 years had the same group of guys playing the same basic things, but we revere the crap out of it.

ROCK BAND (and their ROCK SONGs) are in need of a non-ironic reappraisal. If one were to experience “Rockin’” outside of the context of Classic Rock Radio, without the weight of everything that came before it, it would be considered a skull-crushing jean-jacket-dream of teenage sex and law-breaking (albeit, kinda tame law-breaking at 80MPH), instead of just another four minutes on the light rotation playlist of your local fireworks sponsor.

Thank the Demons of Rock that we now have the futuristic readout on Leah’s car radio to tell us that “Rockin’ Into The Night” is not, in fact, Bad Company or Billy Squier, but the normally sub-Skynyrd .38 Special; otherwise, we'd have argued right through to "Stairway." If the DJs aren’t gonna throw the love out there, I’m glad something does.