Years Gone By

All this hubbub over 1988! That was the year Tracy Chapman released "Fast Car," a song about a fast car as a metaphor for getting away to a place of belonging. 1988 was a peak year for hair metal bands, with hits from Cinderella ("Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone"), "Close My Eyes Forever" (Lita Ford), "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" (Poison) and Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine" setting the pace along with Iron Maiden, Guns 'N' Roses, and Megadeth. 

Tracy Chapman was, in the early 80s, singing her songs at coffeehouses around Tufts University in Boston. She grew up in Cleveland, "raised by a single mom in 'a community of people who were struggling', where everyone was 'working hard and 'hoping that things would get better'," as she told the BBC a few years ago. One of the people who heard her songs was the son of Charles Koppelman, a music business bigshot who managed the Lovin' Spoonful and a host of other top names. When he heard Tracy's demo tapes, he had her signed to Elektra Records, and even though acoustic coffeehouse music was not the big deal in those days, the company trusted Koppelman's ear, released the record with "Fast Car" as the lead track, and found a way to move the hair metal people over for a minute. Tracy's first song was a good hit, reaching #6 on the Billboard chart.

Koppelman also had a daughter now known as Jenny Hutt who used to have a show with Martha Stewart's daughter Alexis in which they would play snippets of Martha's TV show and hoot and holler about everything that makes Martha what she is: her ability to excel at many endeavors, her perfectionism, her prison record, the entire Martha gestalt. 

Oh, and when Koppelman was the head of Artists and Repertoires for Columbia Records, he pronounced an album set for release in 1973 to be "unreleasable," and insisted that the artist go back to the studio and re-record it. The artist refused to do so and the record was released eventually without a lot of promotional assistance from Columbia. That album was called "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle," and was written and performed by a young man named Bruce Springsteen, who somehow managed to jump past the hurdle set in his path and go on to a certain level of success.

Another young man with a guitar, Luke Combs, heard that mournful ballad about the fast car and learned to play it as a young man, and finally released his own version of it last year, a version that reached #1 on the country charts, and gave songwriter Tracy the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year, the award given to songwriters, and that made Chapman the first Black woman to win a CMA award. 

And they performed it as a duet on the Grammys the other night, and it's about all anyone can talk about these days!

35 years ago, do you think Tracy even saw all this as a possibility? I'm gonna mark a big "NO" on my scorecard, and remind every young person reaching for the stars that sometimes it might take a while to get there, but getting there is all the sweeter for the effort.