I was reading a Hawaii-centric message board this morning that included a posted story on all of the "wonderful" changes ongoing on the beach at Waikiki. As usual, the oohing and ahing over the latest "improvement" to a raped land and a murdered people led me to thinking of the Eagles' song "The Last Resort".

The Henley/Frey study of both the white man's penchant for greedy destruction (read: improvement) and threatening promise of Heavenly reward for it is universal as a complete piece but the stanzas that always stand out to me in application to Hawaii (even though they appear to be about two different places in the song) are these:

Some rich men came and raped the land,
Nobody caught 'em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and Jesus,
people bought 'em
And they called it paradise
The place to be
They watched the hazy sun, sinking in the sea

You can leave it all behind
and sail to Lahaina
just like the missionaries did, so many years ago
They even brought a neon sign: "Jesus is coming"
Brought the white man's burden down
Brought the white man's reign

While searching for the lyrics I stumbled on several sites that talk about the back story of the band during this period and the album "Hotel California" that the song is from.

From there I spun onto Usenet looking for a lossless version of "The Last Resort" and finding instead a bunch of other 70's classics. Saving the songs led me back to the lyric pages for a few of them and then onto the several back story repositories on the web for info about the bands, many who shone brightly only briefly in my youth and have been lost to me since then.

For instance, nearly everyone of a certain age has heard the song "Dancing In The Moonlight":

We get it on most every night
When that ol' moon gets big and bright
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight
Everybody's feelin' warm and right
It's such a fine and natural sight
Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight

It's a good, harmless song but how many people who love the song know it was recorded by a keyboard-heavy New York City band called "King Harvest"?

Maybe I'm boring as hell but one of the things I like to do on occasion is download songs and then use the Winamp biography feature to find out more about the bands.

Again, everyone of a certain age has heard of Neil Diamond but how many of you know just how long he toiled as a contract writer before he released his own first hit? How many of you know that he wrote songs that became huge hits for bands as divergent as the PreFab Four, The Monkees (I'm A Believer), and UB40 (Red, Red, Wine)?

Currently, I'm reading about one of the finest singer/songwriters of any time, Jim Croce. I never knew how long and winding his road to stardom was. He drove a turck. He worked construction jobs. He taught guitar. He had a wife and a son and was taking off in bad weather in a rented private plane after performing a make-up show in Louisiana when the plane clipped a tree and crashed. The crash killed him, his lead guitarist Maury Muehleisen and the crew of the plane.

If anything I'm learning just how few "overnight sensations" there really are and how much work actually goes into that sudden spark of fame.

Backstory. Get some today!