MEMOREX MINUTE: 'Life in a Northern Town'

a revelatory moment on a drive with Rick Dees

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

If you grew up ensconced in Reagan-era Top 40, you likely know the song I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of weeks, but just in case, let me sing the memorable, um, “lyric” of the chorus (and, I apologize in advance for the ear worm that will now affect you for the next 24 to 48 hours) :

A-hey-ah-ma-ma, doobie doobie dye-ah. A-hey-ah-ma-ma-maaaahhhh…..”

That’s how I sang along to it as a fourth grader and still do today — worrying that I’m butchering it — when, it turns out from a recent Google check, that’s more or less what it actually says. (Phew!) Hopefully by now we’ve established the song I’m talking about, but here is the video¹, (which comes complete with some awesome 80s hair on the strings player, and some lively tympani playing!), just in case. I learned something surprising about the song on a recent Saturday morning when I encountered one of those “retro” Top 40 countdown replays on the car radio.

Click to watch.

Usually I find myself landing on a Casey Kasem countdown, complete with its cheesy long-distance request and dedications and Casey’s noting that a song has “fallen another notch.” But this time the familiar voice bringing me back to my childhood bedroom and my off-brand cassette “Walkman” was that of Rick Dees. (Sing it: “Rick Dees and the week-ly top fort-y!”) Often, when I was growing up, I’d listen to both Casey and Rick’s versions of the countdown— sometimes feeling cheated if their versions of the top 10 didn’t match.

I was driving from the Quad Cities down to Monmouth (IL) to meet my parents for lunch. Normally I play podcasts or stream current music, but I’ll often compulsively press the scan button on the car radio (the old fashioned, non-satellite kind) to see what’s playing. If it’s an “80s rewind,” as it often is on a Saturday morning, I’ll stop to see which year and which precise point of my childhood we’re flashing back to. The time machine happened to land that morning on 1986, and as soon as I heard that chorus, I was back in grade school. I wondered how much I’d ever carefully listened to the lyrics (the ones with actual words).

But as I headed down the bumpy one-lane, a little bit lost in my reverie about fourth-grade, Dees said something at the end of the song that caught my attention: the name David Gilmour.

“Huh?” I thought as I drove along. “The Pink Floyd guy is on the ‘hey-ah-mom-mom-mom doobie doobie dye-ah’ song? No way!” I made a mental note to Google it later. I ended up going a week or more thinking that “Life in a Northern Town,” which I’ve always kind of filed away as an 80s’ one-hit wonder, featured Gilmour of the legendary and beloved Pink Floyd. Finally when I fact-checked it as I was writing this, I saw that no, Gilmour wasn’t IN the band, but he produced their album. Still, though!

Then, a couple of weeks later, a Facebook post from a page called Daily Rock History happened to pop up in my stream, noting that “Life in a Northern Town” had peaked at #7 on that day (Feb. 22) on the US Billboard Hot 100 — but perhaps more interestingly, that it was written “as an elegy to British folk musician Nick Drake² who passed away in 1974.”

Some of you out there who are even nerdier than me when it comes to this stuff (wow, are you?) might be like, “Sure, I knew —what’s surprising about this?” But it’s always fascinating to me when I learn, or even just notice, something for the first time through my adult brain about the very air that I breathed as a child. (Like that time when I, as a fully formed adult, first put it together what “She-Bop” is about.)

So, “Life in a Northern Town,” which I’ve sung along to a million times but pondered about as deeply as I might think about “Hey Mickey!,” turns out to have a Gilmour connection and it honors another legendary British musician, albeit one I’d definitely never heard of as a fourth grader.

You can thank me (or thank Rick, I guess) for these tidbits next time you’re at music trivia night. But if you still lose, just do as this lovely song says in the last line: “Take it easy on yourself.”

1. which (video) I’m seeing for the first time just now, upon Googling it. Farm girls like me didn’t get MTV out in the country! (Hence my obsession with what was on the radio.)

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I’m putting things out for free, but also readily welcome $5/month paid subscriptions as nods from you to keep going. Occasionally I’ll throw a freebie of some sort for those elite subscribing peeps.

In the meantime, please know that I am part of a group called the Iowa Writers Collaborative, and you will be astonished if you check out the list of who’s on it and what they’re writing about, (and you might also be a bit sad that they’re on Substack rather than your local paper…. but you also probably know why.) Check us out!

2. P.S. Late edit, (and a bit of lazy “reporting” on my part — thanks to

Justin Conn

— I dind’t think to link to the story behind the Nick Drake connection. Here’s the story from MOJO magazine.