Ye Olde Hit Parade: Sledgehammer

1986: Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer

When you think of 1986, chances are you think of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding 73 seconds after launch. It happened in January and it especially hit home where I was living because one of the crew was a schoolteacher from New Hampshire. I was cutting through the student union building after a class and saw a big commotion around the TVs there; it had just happened. Other notable events that year included the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union and the Iran-Contra affair, in which the U.S. was accused of selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

As far as I was concerned, things were looking up. The second,  non-engineering, semester of my freshman year at UNH went much better. Grades went up dramatically and things were fun again. I had decided to pursue journalism as a major, and even then, I did so with the realization that I wasn't going to get rich doing it. But unlike engineering, it seemed like a much better fit for me, so that was my new direction. In the spring, I took some liberal arts pre-requisite courses and then started with my first newswriting class in the fall. This, of course, was a pre-internet world where newspapers were still hugely important parts of content delivery. There was TV news, but most people still got their news from a paper every day. So it seemed like a solid career choice to me.

The summer was spent working part-time at the Market Basket in Plaistow, NH, and going to see concerts. Van Halen had recently split with David Lee Roth, so the spring involved listening to the new VH album with Sammy Hagar and then in the summer picking up the new DLR album, with featured backing help from hard rock heavyweights Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan. I saw both bands coming through Portland, Maine that summer and DLR was the decisive winner.

In the fall, I had the same room but a new roommate, a good guy who had a lot on his plate: He was an engineer, in a frat, on the swim team and had a girlfriend. I had none of those things in my life, which meant I had a lot more time to goof off. So while he was doing homework on a Saturday night, I'd be next door playing quarters with my buddies. But he also had a nice stereo setup, which allowed me to make my first good-sounding mix tapes.

In addition to the DLR and VH records, I listened to the new releases from Metallica, Iron Maiden and Ozzy a fair amount, but there was a wide and interesting variety of music I was getting into. Albums from Public Image Ltd., R.E.M., Neil Young, and David + David were getting a lot of play, and I was also watching a lot of MTV when I was home, so I was seeing a lot of poppier stuff like Janet Jackson, Madonna, Billy Joel and the like.

But it was Peter Gabriel's album So that really hit home, and the song "Sledgehammer" (which had a killer video) in particular. I had been a Gabriel fan since "Games Without Frontiers" came out in 1980, but I had never bought one of his albums until So. I liked the prog stuff he did Genesis and his edgier early solo albums, but this was his commercial crossover record and it was well timed for me. I was becoming more tolerant of top 40 music, mainly because most of my friends were into that stuff so I heard it a lot. My neighbor Mike was on the hockey team and an infinitely cooler guy than me, and if he wanted to blast Nu Shooz and Falco while letting me drink his beer, who was I to stop him?



I still listened to metal when I would go home and work overnight shifts at Market Basket, cranking it on a boombox while we were locked in the store stocking shelves. But it was "Sledgehammer" that pushed me further towards both alternative rock and pop, because it was able to cross into both genres. And so was I.

Honorable mentions: Peter Gabriel - "Big Time"; Peter Gabriel - "In Your Eyes"; R.E.M. - "Fall On Me"; Robert Palmer - "Addicted to Love"; Cameo - "Candy"; Cameo - "Word Up!"; Prince and the Revolution - "Kiss"; Janet Jackson - "Nasty"; David Lee Roth - "Yankee Rose"; Metallica - "Master of Puppets"; Iron Maiden - "Wasted Years"; Pet Shop Boys - "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)"; Falco - "Rock Me Amadeus"; Public Image Ltd. - "Rise"; Crowded House - "Don't Dream It's Over"; Talking Heads - "Wild Wild Life"; The Smithereens - "Blood and Roses"; The Psychedelic Furs - "Pretty In Pink"; Julian Cope - "World Shut Your Mouth"; Big Audio Dynamite - "C'mon Every Beatbox"; Beastie Boys - "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party)"; Beastie Boys - "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn"; The Call - "I Still Believe"; Run DMC - "It's Tricky"; Run DMC - "Walk This Way"; David + David - "Welcome to the Boomtown"; Judas Priest - "Turbo Lover"; AC/DC - "Who Made Who"; The Bangles - "Manic Monday"; James Brown - "Living in America"; Ozzy Osbourne - "Shot in the Dark"