The song “Crazy Love” was a hit single in 1979; the year I began my first full-time job (at the railway), and the year before I’d buy my first car, a silver 1980 Ford Mustang: I bought it for $6,467 in a year when bank car loans were at 16.25% interest, so with interest, the final tally came in at around $8,400. People had mortgages with that kind of interest rate, too. It was bananas! It was also a time where pay increases of 15% in one year were not unusual for union-contracted workers. It was also a time when many had to make do with a heck of a lot less.
I remember the Top 40 tune, as it wove itself into my life, attaching itself as a background soundtrack to connections and disconnections with the various relationships in my life growing into adulthood. Each time I hear it, I think back to what was a pretty tumultuous time for me; I suppose it may have been the same for my male and female friends at the time, too. I just don’t remember us talking much about such things, at the time.
Back then I was somewhere in between my high school friends and “friends 2.0”; I still saw the former, hadn’t yet met the latter and, in the meantime, the smaller group I mostly hung around with at the time was living faster than most of my friends cared to.
We filled our nights by going out to the pub (usually the Norlander on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, Canada) to hear bands every night, after meeting up in someone’s apartment for what would be referred to nowadays as “pre-gaming.” After the bars closed at about 12:30 am, we would drive to the Country Kitchen, also on the Pembina strip (almost across from what is now my favourite bike shop, Alter Ego Sports), for a late-night breakfast. I’d creep into my parents’ home at around 1:30-2:00 am, then get up at 6:15 for work. Every. Single. Day. Sometimes when I arrived home from work, I’d go down the basement and turn on the TV and let the sounds of the House of Commons Question Period quickly lull me to sleep for an hour or so, before I’d get ready to go out and start the whole ridiculous cycle again.
The song was a constant reminder of my first serious girlfriend relationship; one I mentioned in my post on David Bowie’s “A New Career in a New Town” for the terribly long time I pined over it. I doubt I was much of a partner to the young women I met in the meantime.
Anyway, it’s a lovely song, with magnificent harmonies and soft instrumentation. Poco had a number of popular songs in the 1980s but none grabbed me quite like this one.
“Tonight I’m gonna break away
Just you wait and see
I’ll never be imprisoned by
A faded memory
Just when I think I’m over her
This broken heart will mend
I hear her name and I have to cry
The tears come down again
It happens all the time
This crazy love of mine
Wraps around my heart
Refusin’ to unwind
Ooh-hoo, crazy love
(from “Crazy Love,” by Rusty Young)
Now you know a little about why this is my song of the day for today. Thanks for joining me here, and please enjoy.
Here’s the audio for the song from the Poco YouTube topic channel:
Song of the Day for Today 