DISCLAIMER: Music plays [aaargh, the puns!] a huge part in my personal life and the life of my family. As a result, I have many, many musical thoughts, questions, ideas, etc. to put out there. They are all to come. However, one music topic must take precedence above the others, for reasons I cannot fully articulate. This topic consists of my friend, my very, very good friend, Tom.
Tom actually is an acronym for “Take On Me.” I realize that if this essay ever appears online, or if it ever happens to waft its way into the public somehow, some readers will click off or carry on without reading further. Why? Because they know exactly what “Take On Me” means. It means the A-Ha song, “Take On Me.”
Grinches or folks in denial or people who simply don’t like pop will not really understand why a quintessential pop song, played ad nauseum to this very day since its debut in the U.S. in 1984/1985, will warrant any kind of serious discussion. I understand differences in opinion, so those folks can go on their merry way. However, if the rest of people who happen to read this note about my buddy Tom also happen to consider Tom a friend, then please, continue along.
I love radio: I listen to it while driving, and I hear it played in stores, etc. Radio, to me, possesses an otherworldliness that I find hard to describe — its siren-like quality may have something to do with the fact that I have very little control over what plays. So, on a daily basis, as I listen, I have to take what I get. Some days are better than others, let me just say. Some days the radio Gods have tapped into my mental playlist and decided to give it a spin; other days, the radio Gods have gone on a god-awful tangent which sometimes can get funny but usually brings me quite a bit of despair. Yet, that’s a whole other topic.
One consistency about pop radio: at some point during the day, one of those pop stations is going to decide we all need a little Tom. Thank gracious goodness that Tom is out there watching over us.
When this song debuted in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, at the height of the MTV era, I was 14. I loved pop music and pop stars, my favorite band being The Police. I watched MTV before school and after school, and then again, before bed, after I finished studying. I forced my parents to tune in to pop stations while riding in the car; I bought pop cassette tapes; and I watched MTV with friends. I disliked the hook-up I was in because my best friend at the time, Abigail, did not like pop music AT ALL and thought MTV was for, and I quote, “less intelligent people.” She may have had a point, but I was 14, and I wanted my MTV and pop music, and — outside of our hook-up — I pretty much got it.
So sometime in 1984/1985 I heard Tom and probably thought it was quite catchy, but the video had me hooked. To me, the A-Ha video, still to this day, qualifies as one of those elusive masterpieces we can only define as Art. The song — well, the song, too, has to go right into the same category. The song is no less than a masterpiece of pop music, with a shut-down-all-arguments upbeat intro, immediately identifiable and immediately uplifting, and never to be forgotten.
I pretty much had all my suspicions about this song’s juggernaut status when I was having lunch one day with my 11-year-old niece, in early 2018. My niece is no stranger to music. In fact, she IS music; lives and breathes it; she is USDNA-certified music. Her mother — my sister — is a former radio disc jockey with an encyclopedic knowledge of country music history, especially women in country music; my sister also knows a good deal about modern singer-songwriters, as she is a popular singer-songwriter, herself. My niece’s father — my brother-in-law — is a music programmer at Sirius/XM (meaning that he is actually one of those radio Gods who gets to decide what on earth we humans are going to listen to day-by-day) who also has an encyclopedic knowledge of rock, blues, etc. My sister and brother-in-law together make a powerhouse of know-your-music and know-what’s-good. So, if they ever had a child — well, there you go.
When she was first born, Bella, my niece, received, thanks to my brother-in-law, a steady diet of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. I thought that was a good move; I think a lot of new dads who are really, really into music start their kids off with Pet Sounds. As Bella grew and became more independent, she went through her Katy Perry phase, sure, but then, as she matured, her genes started firing up, and by age 10, she was a Beatlemaniac with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Beatles. Her love of the Beatles did not waver for over a year; she would not listen to anything else, and she could blow away any 60-something-I-lived-through-it Beatle aficianado in a Beatles’ trivia match. She could not be stopped. I, myself, was delighted to watch this passion pass through, because the Beatles — well, you kind of cannot argue with the Beatles. They are like Tom, except exponentially multiplied. I would contend that everyone on this planet can find at least ONE Beatles’ song that he/she likes. Everyone.
After over a year of the Beatle-battleline that no other song or rock group could cross, we all kind of gave up trying to suggest songs by other artists to Bella that she might like. I was okay with the prospect that she might travel through the rest of her life in the Yellow Submarine. She had other interests, anyway, outside of music. For example, she had started — rather randomly — a semi-infatuation with Norway; she was Googling Norwegian words and trying to teach herself Norwegian online. If she could translate “Hey Jude” into Norwegian, I thought, well, then, Let It Be.
One day she was visiting Nashville from her home in Queens, and I took her to a local deli which has a New-York-Delicatessen-wannabe vibe. I was very busy chatting away (can you imagine that??) at her when I noticed that she was kind of bopping in her seat with a wide, happy grin, looking like she had just gotten a text from Paul McCartney. I wondered what the deal was — when it hit me. Bella is plugged into the amp of the Universe, and she had caught it before I had: the opening bars of Tom had started up on the deli’s in-store speakers. And she was happily dancing along. Folks, believe me when I say I was floored. I halfway shrieked to her, “You know this song?” Bella: “Yeah.” Me: “You like this song?” Bella: “Yeah. It’s pretty cool.”
??? And here is our miracle: Tom was flitting at the fringes of the Fab Four Fog, telling Bella: “I am your fun, faithful friend.” And Bella, with her innate musical divinity, understood Tom and allowed him to be that friend.
But back to the booth at the deli. Still halfway shrieking, I quickly said, “This song is one of the best pop songs ever. Did you know that the group, A-Ha, is NORWEGIAN?”
“I think they’re from Sweden.”
“Uh-uh. Don’t doubt Auntie Julie on her ‘80s pop, Bella. They’re from Norway. I’m going to Google them.”
“Okay.”
“A-HA! They are from Norway! Look:” (Auntie Julie brandishes her phone in Bella’s face. Bella then gets out her phone and pulls up the Wikipedia site.)
“This says that the lead singer, Morten Harket, has a 5-octave vocal range,” Bella informed me.
“Well, that’s obvious,” I replied. Then I added, “That’s an octave more than Freddie Mercury of Queen had, and he could really go up and down the scale.”
We both pondered what I had just said for a moment. Somehow, it seemed slightly irreverent to compare Freddie Mercury unfavorably to anyone, so I added, “But Freddie Mercury had that grit.” And then I gratuitously (VERY GRATUITOUSLY) started to try to convey my meaning by imitating Freddie Mercury singing part of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In that restaurant, at full volume, I sang, “Momma, life had just begun/But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away,” with a heartrending growl added to the word, “thrown.”
“Oh, he was the greatest.” Over Bella’s shoulder, in the adjoining booth, a stranger — a man with a 5-year-old little boy — couldn’t help himself. Bella’s and my conversation was way too important to ignore, and he had turned to face us and had spoken up.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to barge in on your conversation,” the next-booth-guy said, “but I heard you talking about music and Freddie Mercury, and I couldn’t help but comment.”
In my head I was thinking, delightedly, “Come one, come all.”
“Oh, I understand,” I said to the guy. “This is important stuff.” Because it is.
He replied, “Yeah, I grew up listening to Queen and that guy — Freddie Mercury — he’s legendary. Anyway, I just had to say something; I didn’t want to seem like I was listening in.”
“Hey, I’m happy you did.” Because I was. I felt that Tom was spinning his magic all over the restaurant, even if he had politely tipped his hat to Queen and let us unite ourselves around a whole other band. Tom is generous like that. He’ll put a crowd into a happy mood, and all at once, no matter what walk of life we’ve walked, what road we’ve taken to get to where we are, we hear Tom, and, simply, we feel better.
Meanwhile, the Goddess of music was still pondering the feats of a-ha outside the U.S. via her Wikipedia information. She informed me that the band had achieved a world-wide popularity that the U.S. had never quite grasped (imagine that). We were becoming more and more impressed. However, the basics of the situation remained the same: it all boiled down to Tom: my very, very good friend Tom.
Armed with enthusiasm over our deli experience, Bella and I went home to inform my father and her father about our Tom moment at the restaurant. We played the song for my dad (who claims not to “get” pop music), and I cannot say for sure, but I sensed he caught on at least to Tom’s benevolent spirit, if not also to Harket’s massive vocal range that will never, ever be topped, at least not in a song so damned perfect. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law, who was present at the introduction of Tom to my dad, seemed to approve of our musical love-in at the deli. Then my father, out of the blue, decided that, when my 73-year-old mother returned from work, we — Bella, my mother, and I — should all dance to Tom. That suggestion totally energized my brother-in-law, who was dead-set on taking a video of this ad-libbed dance moment. So, when my mother did arrive from work, dead on her feet, she reluctantly agreed to dance. We turned up the volume on my computer to Tom’s fullest effect, and Bella, my mother, and I did something akin to dancing. [My brother-in-law caught this on video, and I cannot really define the movement directly as “dancing,” but, anyway.] If you have no dance ability, no rhythm, no coordination, Tom does not care. Tom just gets you moving with a smile on your face. And he doesn’t charge you an admission price, either.
In sum, this is the short story of my friend Tom. I daresay Tom has LOTS of friends, around the world. We are all more than happy to share that friendship. And Tom also had some serious help from other friends in his early years, friends who supplied him with a music video that ranks with critics as #2 of all time behind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” As I said at the beginning of this little story, music means a lot to not only my family and me, but to the world at large. And I cannot think of a better place to begin future stories/thoughts on/opinions about music than with Tom.
