By David Simmons
NORCROSS, Ga. | Music can rekindle old memories. A flashback hit me listening to my song list on Spotify. Lyin’ Eyes by The Eagles came around on the rotation and it reminded me of a weekend during my college days.
Simmons
It was January 1976 when I was a junior at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. This weekend started off bad, got really, really good, then ended on a ridiculously scary note.
Friday morning I took a test in my 9 a.m. class, and was in my ’70 Mustang headed east on the Interstate before 10 a.m.
After a five hour drive I was in East Lansing, Mich., to spend the weekend with my girlfriend and had time to kill before she finished up with her classes.
I found a campus bar in to have a beer while waiting for her. That bar had a live band scheduled that weekend and they were doing their sound check before going on that night. This was a college town cover band, just doing the best they could, and were working up their version of Lyin’ Eyes.
Lyin’ Eyes is a great song. It actually made it to No. 2 on the charts. The chorus is melodic, a four-part harmony.
As I sat in the bar, I was subjected to a nightmare of starts and stops. The band would begin the chorus and then get stopped by the lead singer yelling “Stop, stop, stop!” and rant over how they had messed it up…over and over for two hours. It ended up ruining that song for me. For decades now, I hit the skip button whenever it comes around on the rotation.
Then the weekend got better. My girlfriend arrived and we got out of there, and I spent the weekend with her. That night we had tickets for Jethro Tull, my favorite band at the time, in concert. The next day we got to see the Indiana Hoosiers, the soon to be undefeated NCAA champs, beat Michigan State on their home floor.
I had to drive back to ISU late Sunday afternoon. And that is where it got scary. We had a big snow storm that weekend and Interstate 69 was covered in slushy ice. The right lane of the highway had just two lines of dry pavement where the tires of the majority of the traffic was driving. The left lane was still covered with a layer of ice. There were a lot of trucks on the road, moving slowly. I was carefully weaving out into the left lane and back as I made my way southward.
But then I began to fishtail. I had a lot of practice in snowy conditions and I fought it with everything I had. Steering the wheel into the skid, I must have cut the wheel both ways two or three times before I went into a spin. My car did three 360 degree spins before miraculously coming to a stop headed perfectly straight ahead in the right hand breakdown lane. The semi truck I had just passed went by, tooting his horn.
I just sat there for probably 10 minutes, contemplating just how lucky I was and how bad it could have been. Then I pushed back in my 8 track tape of Joe Walsh’s, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, and drove on back to Terre Haute. A little slower and more carefully. But maybe a little wiser.
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