101. Fondue Styx

101. "Miss America" by Styx

I don't remember how or when it happened, but an 8-track of Styx's "The Grand Illusion" somehow made it into the house.

You want to hear it when? Baah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

During high school, I claimed it as my own property and played it until I had memorized the album. It wasn't because I liked all of the songs on it. It was because 8-tracks had the most frustrating way of navigating the album.You couldn't just forward ahead to the start of the song you wanted and listen to it. Instead, there were four "Programs" that you could skip around to, but if you skipped in the middle of a song, it would put you into the middle of some other song on another program. Here's the tracklist for "The Grand Illusion" 8-track:

Program 1 (9:46)
1 The Grand Illusion
2 Miss America

Program 2 (9:46)
1 Superstars
2 Man In The Wilderness

Program 3 (9:46)
1 Come Sail Away
2 Castle Walls (Part 1)

Program 4 (9:46)
1 Castle Walls (Part 2)
2 Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)
3 The Grand Finale

You'll notice that "Miss America" started in the middle of Program 1. This meant that I either had to listen to "The Grand Illusion" first, or listen to the song that came first in some other Program. I usually listened to "Come Sail Away," but not all the way to the end. If I wanted to skip to hear "Miss America in its entirety, I could only listen to part of "Come Sail Away" and then skip at just the right time to Program 1. Then if I wanted to listen to "Miss America" again, I had to first listen to either "The Grand Illusion," "Superstars," or "Come Sail Away" again.

Why not skip to Program 4 and listen to "Castle Walls (Part 2)? Because the idiots that invented this format would only allow 9 minutes and 46 seconds of music to be on any one program. Since "Come Sail Away" is a long song, they couldn't get through all of "Castle Walls" in Program 3. This meant that somewhere in the middle of the "Castle Walls" song, the music would stop for a second and...ka-chunk...it would advance to Program 4 where the song would continue where it left off, thus ruining the song completely. That is why I don't know the lyrics to "Castle Walls"--the incomplete Part 1 of the song was always competing with "Miss America." And do you know why Miss America is called Miss America? Because she blew away all the competition! If she hadn't eliminated the competition, she'd be called Miss Ohio!

Miss America 1985 -- Charlene Wells

Miss Ohio -- Charlene's closest competition. And yes, this is the best (and only) picture I could find on the interwebs.

Of course, the limited space for each Program on the 8-track also meant that the producers would often have to rearrange the order of the songs on the album so that they could have the fewest number of songs with the jarring split-program ka-chunking. Good idea, right? WRONG! Bands like Styx often created these concept albums where the ordering of the songs was an important part of the listening experience. The order of the songs created an extended story or message that gave the entire album a meaning that was more than the sum of the meaning of its individual songs. By dicing up and rearranging the songs on the 8-track, the original concept of the album got lost or, even worse, so screwed up that you got a different album-level message than what the vinyl album gave you.

And some people wonder why 8-tracks died.

Of course, at this point you may be asking, "Why would anyone go to all that trouble to listen to 'Miss America' over and over and over again?"

Well, Greg, if you must know, sometimes when you're a teenage boy, you get a crush on a girl that treats each day of her life like a beauty pageant. And she starts up a relationship with you because either (a) she's interested in how good it might make her look to others (mostly other girls) if she's with you OR (b) she wants to avoid having to be with a boy that she thinks will make her look worse than if she's with you. She won't be really interested in how good you make her feel about herself. She'll care more about what others think--even more than what she thinks about you in her heart.

Your relationship with this girl will last exactly as long as she thinks you make her look good. But if she thinks being with you makes her less attractive to others (mostly other girls), then she'll dump you so fast you won't even realize it's happened yet. You'll think you're still in a relationship with her, but she's already moved on to some other teenage boy that she thinks will make her look better. And because she's really self-centered and doesn't care about your feelings, you'll have to hear about how your relationship is over from one of her girlfriends, who will accidentally say something about how she's dating someone besides you, and you just overhear it and realize you've been dumped.

Most likely this event will occur during a date you had planned well before your girl dumped you, and she's just out with you on the date because she doesn't want to have to tell you it's over to your face, but you'll be sitting next to her thinking you're on this date because she still wants to be with you. You'll be holding a fondue stick with something stuck on the end of it that is fully submerged in a pot of boiling cheese, and that's when your girl's girlfriend lets it slip that your date for the evening is now dating someone else behind your back. And that's when you'll decide to pretend like you didn't even hear what was said because you were talking to someone else at the time it was said, but you still overheard it.

Then you'll try to fake them all out by keeping up the conversation you were having with someone else, and you then make a joke about melted cheese to the group just to make everyone think you're having a great time and didn't actually hear that you've been dumped. And then you'll pull out the fondue stick and take whatever it is that's on the end of the stick (you don't remember anymore because your brain is reeling) and jam it into your mouth. And as you chew on it without even caring that its damn hot cheese, you will realize you've played the fool for the past month of your life.

But because you don't want to ruin the date for your friends that are on it with you, you don't confront her about it. You just sit next to her on the couch while you watch Ponyboy and his fellow greasers meet a tragic (and hopefully violent) end. And you'll wish to yourself that you were actually in the movie so that you could take Johnny Cade's switchblade and plunge it through your own right eye socket into your brain so that you can somehow stop thinking about what just happened.

After that, you'll drive home after the date with your friends, because she is staying behind to sleep over at her friend's house, and you'll lay on your bed and play the events of the past month through your head over and over and over until you fall asleep from exhaustion.

But the next morning you'll wake up super-pissed, and that's when you need a song like this to make you feel better. And you'll want to listen to it over and over and over, because once you get super-pissed about something, you tend to stay that way for a long, long time.

Of course, that's all just a hypothetical scenario. I made it up as an example of a possible reason for repeatedly listening to "Miss America" on a stereo system with the world's most frustrating piece of music technology--the 8-track player.

Fortunately, with today's technology, you don't have to use your finger to punch a button anymore. We have now advanced so far technologically that now all you have to do is use your finger to click a virtual button--like the one in the middle of the video below.




During my senior year, I liked to play "Miss America" and immediately follow it up with "Those Shoes." I did that so often that the two songs became pretty much inseparably connected in my mind. Of course you hardly ever hear "Miss America" or "Those Shoes" on the radio anymore. That's why about five years ago, when I was driving at night on the interstate by Mountain Home, I got really excited when "Miss America" came on the radio. I cranked up the volume and sang/yelled along with James Young without missing a single lyric. It had been a while since I heard it, so I was more than a little proud of myself for remembering it all. And at the end of the song, just as "Miss America" repeated and the guitars faded, I said aloud to myself, "Oh, man, I wish they'd play 'Those Shoes' now." And guess what--without even taking a break for a commercial or annoying DJ talk, "Those Shoes" began to play! I yelled "YEAH!" and sang/talk-boxed my way down the road in complete radio-induced ecstasy.

Truth be told, I probably like "Miss America" much more than "Those Shoes," but I wanted them to be listed next to each other in my Top 200 because in my mind, both as a teenager back then and even now, so many (too many) years later, the two songs are inseparable. The only thing that might possibly split them apart is a song about some damn hot cheese.



Mmmmmmm....after seeing all that glorious gooeyness, I can't help but hanker' for a hunka!