A Music/News Flashback

I had a real gold-star kind of day yesterday. I passed my word count goal, outlined today’s writing, did some development work on other projects, did laundry, practiced my choir music and worked on the piano, did some yoga, and went to bed early.

This morning I had a dentist appointment (no cavities, not even the flossing lecture!), which kind of threw my morning schedule off, but I should still get all my writing work done, though I also have grand plans to bake something using the ton of blueberries I bought because they were ridiculously cheap. I picked up some more on the way home from the dentist, so I should have enough for a pie. I’m thinking of making mini pies in the muffin tin and freezing some of them, so I can have blueberry pie whenever I want it. Not that I have that much room in my freezer. A space to put in a chest freezer is on my wish list for my dream house.

The dentist seemed to be in a late 1970s groove today, because that’s the music that was playing. It took me back to when I was living in Germany and listened to the Armed Forces Radio Network on a little transistor radio. Their FM station was more “easy listening” (basically elevator music), but they did play some current music on the AM station, and the dentist office music today was the kind of stuff they played — Supertramp, Steely Dan, Kansas, etc.

But the funny thing was, the bits of songs that jumped out at me weren’t because of hearing those songs as songs. There was a thing they did on AFN that I don’t know if it was a syndicated thing, locally produced, or something someone did and released it as a comedy “song,” but they did “interviews” of various famous figures, using little clips of songs as the answers. Like, there was one that was interviewing some official about the energy crisis and asked what he was personally doing, and the answer was a clip of the line “I try to get undressed without the light” from the Kenny Rogers song “She Believes in Me.” There was also one that used a clip saying “take the long way home” from the Supertramp song.

So as I was lying there, having my teeth poked and prodded, individual lines of songs were jumping out at me as being interview answers, which reminded me of that thing I hadn’t thought about in years. I was a weird kid who read the newspaper, so I actually got the current affairs jokes (and in some cases, these “interview” segments made me look up info, so I was learning about current affairs from them), and I remember being really frustrated when I taped these things and played them for my friends or told my friends about them, and they didn’t get the joke.

Does anyone in my age bracket or older (remembering the late 70s) remember something like this? Was it just a couple of servicemen working at AFN goofing around, or was it a national thing?