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Not all the records profiled on this blog are rousing rockers. In the late 1980s, a pop station could play a Kenny G instrumental alongside Guns N' Roses. Back then, everyone got it.
At least most people did. I sort of admired Kenny G, because he seemed to run afoul of people who I dealt with daily whose attention spans were too narrow to care about more than one or two acts. Pop stations had variety. You could hear Mötley Crüe, Bobby Brown, U2, Enya, Henry Lee Summer, and Tone Loc all on the same station. But some folks were obsessed with just one performer. I remember someone in high school being absolutely spoony over Richard Marx - to the complete exclusion of everything else. At the end of a Walk-a-Thon one fall, I heard the opening notes of "Right Here Waiting" blaring from a boom box, and I knew my schoolmate was nearby.
The variety might not have been as wide as a decade before, when Kermit the Frog was on the chart at the same time as Kiss, but the point stands.
But even Kenny G was probably completely full of shit sometimes.
One Sunday, I heard one of the big countdown hosts - like Casey Kasem or Shadoe Stevens - tell a story about Kenny G. According to this story, Kenny attended a rough high school in Seattle.
I've figured out that Mr. G would have attended high school in the early 1970s. How rough could a high school in Seattle in the 1970s possibly be? Did Bill Gates throw calculators at him or something? There is no way - not a chance in hell - Kenny's high school was any worse than mine. Absolutely zero.
It's like the local sysop who complained about how rough he had it because he attended high school in Minneapolis at the same time as Prince. He used this terrifying experience as an excuse for all his extreme right-wing views. Grow up!
Also, when I was working on this entry, memories of sophomore geometry class came rushing back. I remembered how my teacher purchased a very expensive electric pencil sharpener, but kids kept using it to try to sharpen pens and batteries - which evokes a vastly different image from a gentle Kenny G tune.
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