THE PATHOS, THE MISSED CONNECTION, THE ...

Okay, not really.  Most people who remember Walter Egan at all actually remember one song, Magnet and Steel, from 1978.   This was while I was making the transition from listening to the only Cincinnati AM station that still played any popular music, WKRC, to the FM pop and rock stations, WSAI, WKRQ and WEBN.  This song, because it was produced by Lindsey Buckingham and had Stevie Nicks singing backing vocals, got airplay all over.

Like Pilot's Magic, this song was an incredibly durable one, for me.  I never grew to hate it like I did so many of the others, probably because the song itself was the hook -- there weren't any annoying lyrics or phrases to eventually touch off my gag reflex; it resorted to neither bathetic sentiment nor pathos to reach out to the people who heard it; it didn't have a lot of execrable and unnecessary keyboard or orchestra wanking.  It was a simple R&B-pop song.

This would seem to be relevant.  The members of Pilot were from Britain.   Walter Egan is from New York.  Most of the California bands (and those from other places that wound up recording in that vast wasteland of LA studios, subject to the same limiter/compressor extruded, fake Phil Spector pap, of which the best was the Eagles, as bad as most of their crap was, and everything else was much worse) were interchangeable with any project containing either Don Henley or Lin Ronstadt, since it all sounded pretty much the same.  It didn't matter what kind of drums, guitar, bass or amplification these bands used, they all had the gloss (taint?) of LA studio recording on 'em.  The word 'monolithic' comes to mind, if they in any way stood tall or were unadorned.  Serpentine might be more appropriate.

Walter Egan, however, even though he became allied with the Cali scene by proxy through Buckingham and Nicks, managed to hang on to some of that basic dirty-street funk that East Coast bands (other than some from Florida) generally display, even now, though polish isn't exactly the hallmark of Cali bands either, in the modern era (and this is a problem how?).  I don't mean, literally, 'funk' as in the Ohio Players, George Clinton and Bootsy Baby, of course.  They're all from southern Ohio, for that matter, so funk had only so much to do with major metro areas, in reality.  And by 'funk' I mean more 'essence' or, probably the original definition, 'odor.'

What was I saying?  Oh, yeah.  Magnet and Steel was a cool tune.  It still is.  Congrats to Walter Egan for writing something that could survive that kind of airplay carpet-bombing and still be pleasant to hear.