Sunday, December 25, 2016

A Dazzling Way to Roll

Song 335: This week the playlist comes around to Skateaway by Dire Straits, written by Mark Knopfler. Following last week’s post about Snow, the mention of the falling white stuff might bring skates to mind, though this cut refers to the kind with wheels rather than the kind used to ride over ice. As a kid, I didn’t have any skates, and didn’t have any particular interest in them. At one point during my later HS years, some members of my church youth group planned an outing at a roller rink, and since I generally tried to take part in the group’s activities, I considered going, which led to some strange exchanges where I learned about the differences of opinion between the local fundamentalists who didn’t approve of roller-skating and those who considered it permissible. I didn’t actually put on any skates then, but a few years later, at the age of 21, I did try the rollers, but without much success, though perhaps some onlookers found my struggles amusing. At 24, I stepped into a pair of ice skates on a March afternoon and had just as little success with them as I had had with the rollers. With that history behind me, I couldn’t help but notice the roller skating trend that appeared on many East Bay streets around the time this record came out in the fall of 1980. The track perfectly encapsulated that era, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the skater who inspired the lyrics had been one of the roller aces who zoomed by me in a flash. Of course, these days, if someone in a big city like NY wants to torture taxi drivers just for fun they’ll probably do it with a bike, but queen rollerball could still be sailing through the crowd as well.

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