The Love and Rockets song “So Alive” has entered the playlist of about 200 songs that the local “Most Variety” radio station runs through in roughly the same order but at different times during the day. Almost as though making the programming run on an 18 hour cycle will mask the fact that it’s canned and looping.
I don’t particularly care for the song and didn’t when it was on the radio as a hit; I remember hearing it come on as I was up late on summer vacation, typing computer programs from magazines into a computer room at the house on the gravel road deep in the Heads Creek valley between House Springs and Otto, Missouri, after the rest of the household had gone to bed. The reward was seeing a terribly low resolution ball bounce in a terribly low resolution maze if all the typing matched the checksums at the end of the line.
Now, I hear the song on the radio, and I quip to my children, “It’s a shame when they broke up, because neither Love nor Rockets had much luck solo.”
They don’t get it.
And back in those Commodore 128 summers, we didn’t actually have a way to easily look up whatever happened to those guys. They cut a couple records after the one that spawned their biggest hit, but did not have the same success and they broke up in the 20th century and briefly reunited in the 21st century for a bit of nostalgia.
This book is a picture book sold at the House on the Rock to help you remember your visit. It does more than that, actually, as the photographers used lights in taking the pictures. You can actually see the rooms.
