Saturday Flashback: The Police

This was a huge year for The Police, and it all started with "Roxanne".  It had been recorded a year earlier, but didn't enter the charts here until February of '79.  This really was one of those songs that jumped out of the speakers the first time you heard it.  Their first LP was already out and later in the year, they'd hit gold again with their second release, "Regatta de Blanc".  This is where it began, tho.  Enjoy!

Hello/Goodbye: February

Born, February 1979
Feb 3rd - Guthrie Trapp, American guitarist

Feb 7th - Jon Leicester, American baseball player


Feb 8th - Aaron Cook, American baseball player


Feb 8th - Josh Keaton, American actor and singer


Feb 9th - Akinori Iwamura, Japanese baseball pitcher


Feb 9th - Zhang Ziyi, Chinese actress


Feb 10th - Daryl Palumbo, American musician


Feb 10th - Ross Powers, American snowboarder


Feb 11th - Brandy [Norwood], singer (Moisha)


Feb 12th - Matt Mauck, American football player


Feb 12th - Jesse Spencer, Australian actor 
(House)

Feb 13th - Mena Suvari, American actress


Feb 17th - Josh Willingham, American baseball player


Feb 19th - Mariana Ochoa, Mexican singer and actress


Feb 21st - Jennifer Love Hewitt, actress

Feb 25th - Jennifer Ferrin, American actress


Feb 26th - Corinne Bailey Rae, English singer

Died, February 1979

Feb 2nd - Sid Vicious, [John Simon Ritchie], bassist (Sex Pistols), OD's at 21

Feb 7th - Josef Mengele, concentration camp doctor, drowns
 at 67

Feb 9th - Dennis Gabor, Hungarian physicist, Nobel laureate, 79

Feb 12th - Jean Renoir, French writer/director/actor dies at 84


Feb 14th - Adolph Dubs, US ambassador to Afghanistan, murdered
, 58

Feb 15th - Mehdi Rahimi, Iran general/milt governor of Teheran, executed


Feb 16th - Nematullah Nassiri, Iran general/head of Savak, executed


Feb 28th - Mr Ed (Bamboo Harvester), talking horse, dies at 30

Gentlemen, Start Your Cash Registers

Prior to 1979, NASCAR was still a regional, almost niche attraction.  That all changed on February 18 that year with the running of the Daytona 500.  Many racing historians cite this day as the birth of the marketing extravaganza we know as modern NASCAR.

The '79 Daytona 500 was the first racing event of its kind to be nationally televised live, pole to pole.  (Even the Indy 500 was shown on a tape delay that was edited back then.)  Coincidentally, the President’s Day Blizzard had locked down most of the northeastern and mid Atlantic US, which significantly increased the size of the audience.

And those viewers weren’t disappointed.  A tight race, it finished with an epic fistfight between leaders Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison resulting from a last minute crash which allowed Richard Petty to slip through for the victory.  That video is still watched today:

This race has been called the “first water cooler race” and elevated NASCAR into the sports big time in the US.  It also "introduced two new innovative uses of TV cameras: the 'in-car' camera and the low angle 'speed shot, which are now considered standard in all telecasts of auto racing."  After this, NASCAR--  and its cultural impact--  would never be the same.

1979 was also the rookie season of the man who would become the face of modern NASCAR, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Saturday Flashback: Cheap Trick

Cheap Trick released their "Live at Budokan" LP in February of 1979.  They'd already put out three records that did  little in the US, but, as the saying goes, they were huge in Japan.  They recorded "Budokan" in the spring of 1978 and released it there later that year.  When it came out here, it was a huge hit, going triple platinum and making them stars in the process.  Here they are with the big hit from that record, "I Want You To Want Me".  Enjoy!

St. Valentines Day Massacre

On this day in 1979, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was brutally murdered by extremists opposing the regime that had recently come to power via a coup sponsored by the Soviet Union.  From Wikipedia:

In 1978 Dubs was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan following a coup d'etat which brought the Soviet-aligned Khalq faction to power. On the morning of February 14, 1979, he was kidnapped by four armed militants posing as police. Dubs was held in Room 117 of the Kabul Hotel. Afghan security forces and Russian advisers swarmed the hallway and surrounding rooftops, but negotiations stalled. Shortly after 12:30 p.m., an exchange of gunfire started between the terrorists and the Afghan security forces, and the ambassador was killed.

Documents released from KGB archives in the 1990s showed that the Afghan government clearly authorized the assault despite forceful demands for peaceful negotiations by the U.S., and that the KGB adviser on scene, Sergei Batrukihn, may have recommended the assault, as well as the execution of a kidnapper before U.S. experts could interrogate him.

Dubs was not replaced by the US government and the embassy was closed in 1989.  The US did not post another ambassador to Afghanistan until 2002.


This was also the day of the first Iranian assault on the US Embassy in Tehran.  From PBS:

The attack occurred at 10:15 a.m. on February 14, 1979. It was carried out by hundreds of supporters of the communist OPFG who climbed over the walls of the large compound on Takht-e Jamshid Street. Here is how Nicholas Cumming-Bruce of the Guardian reported on the incident:

As (the attackers) dropped into the compound they opened up with everything from G3 rifles to machine guns, spraying the main Embassy building and other offices with bullet. The Embassy's U.S. Marines returned the fire with bird-shot to give official time to destroy secret documents and coding equipments, but were then ordered by Ambassador William H. Sullivan to unload and discard their weapons.

The Embassy staff, about 100 to 150 (down from more than 300 before the Revolution), were taken to the communication room on the first floor, while marines filled the ground floor with teargas. But, this had only a temporary delaying effect. Gunmen eventually broke into the Embassy, forcing many of the staff at gunpoint to lie on the floor. Others ransacked the East Wing, broke up communication equipment and smashed the main switchboard.

 One Iranian employee of the Embassy was killed, and U.S. Marine and three other Americans were wounded. ... (After) an hour armed men led by the deputy prime minister of the provisional revolutionary government, Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi, arrived at the embassy and convinced the attackers to leave the Embassy.

U.S. State Department spokesman Hodding Carter, III, thanked the provisional government for its efficiency and speed that ended the embassy seizure. Through Iran's embassy in Washington, the Bazargan government relayed a message to the Carter administration, expressing deep regrets for the incident, and promised complete security for the Embassy and its staff.

Al Gore is Fat

Actually, he wasn't back then... that's just the attitude of our anti-science friends on the right when man-made climate change is discussed.  That conversation started on a global basis on this day in 1979 as the first World Climate Conference began in Geneva, Switzerland, sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization.  The evidence had been mounting for a while, but this was the year that global warming was brought into the public spotlight.  Since then?  I report, you decide...

1979 was also the year NASA began assisting the reality-based scientific community by providing data on polar ice generated by Micowave Sounding Units aboard NOAA polar orbiting satellites launched the previous year.  To wit...

It's amazing that over thirty years later, there are many people--  including the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country--  who still argue this point. 

Punk Is Dead

Well, it was in England.  By this time in early '79, the whole punk thing was over in the UK.  (Later in the year we'll see Goth rise from those ashes.)  And on this day in 1979, the Clown Prince of Punk was dead.  John Simon Ritchie, better known as Sid Vicious, died of an overdose on February 2nd, the day after he got out of Riker's Island where he was being held after an arrest for an assault on Patti Smith's brother.  His mother gave him the heroin. 

He had also been charged with murder in the death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon which was still hanging over his head.  We'll never know what really happened.  He did, however, leave a suicide note, which his mother found after he'd been cremated:  "We had a death pact. I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motor cycle boots. Goodbye".

He was sanctified after his death, with grafitti and t-shirts proclaiming, "Sid Died For Your Sins".  Whatever.  He has remained a, if not the, punk icon.  As Malcolm said in Sid and Nancy:  "Sidney's more than a mere bass player. He's a fabulous disaster. He's a symbol, a metaphor, he embodies the dementia of a nihilistic generation. He's a fucking star."  That he was.

Bonus trivia:  I got the report when I turned the evening news on that night... from Walter Cronkite.

Iran: The Imam

On February 1, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in the wake of the shah’s abdication two weeks earlier.

Born in 1902 the son and grandson of mullahs, he had been a theologian, philosopher and poet. Khomeini rose to prominence by opposing first the shah’s father and then the shah himself for bringing a modern, Western approach to ruling Iran. Specifically, he spoke out against the shah's "White Revolution" in 1963, getting arrested then and again in 1964, after which he was exiled.

He settled in Najaf, Iraq and stayed there for another 14 years until October 1978 when he was forced out by Saddam Hussein, who was then nine months away from his own ascent to power. Khomeini then spent the next several weeks in a Paris suburb, sending taped messages to his supporters during the final months of the shah’s reign.

Wildly popular, his return was greeted by some five million people, over 10% of Iran’s population at the time. He would solidify control by the end of February with the help of sympathetic military defectors, and by April the monarchy was abolished in favor of an Islamic Republic.