Sunday, January 3, 2016

Place Names in Rock Lyrics: Fire Down Below

For this feature we've previously done Sweet Little SixteenDancing in the StreetsNight TrainRock'n MePop Muzik, and Girls, Girls, Girls.

Tonight, let's do Fire Down Below, a song by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. It was released as a single in 1977 but didn't chart very highly. I'm not sure why not, it rocks pretty well and is one of my favorite songs by Seger. For our purposes, the chorus has a number of cities that aren't usually mentioned in rock songs, so we'll be adding several new cities to our list.

Here's how it goes:

It happens out in Vegas happens in Moline
On the blue blood streets of Boston
Up in Berkeley and out in Queens
And it went on yesterday and it's going on tonight
Somewhere there's somebody ain't treatin' somebody right

So the cities we can add to our list are
Berkeley
Boston (finally gets a mention after seven songs!)
Las Vegas
Moline (this is a city in Illinois, in case you didn't know, and one of the cities in the Quad City area on the border with Iowa)
Queens

Note that two of these cities, Berkeley and Queens, are suburbs or parts of larger cities. On the master list below, I'll list them with their parent cities.


_______________________________________________________________________
And here's our master list as it currently stands:

Notes: The biggest cities we haven't heard from yet, as least in the United States, are Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, and Seattle.

Atlanta x3
Baltimore x2
Boston
(northern) California
Chicago
Detroit
Ft. Lauderdale
Las Vegas
London
Los Angeles x3
Miami
Moline
Munich
New Orleans x3
New York City x3
--Queens
Paris x2
Philadelphia x4
Phoenix
Pittsburgh
Raleigh
Richmond
San Francisco
--Berkeley
St. Louis
Tacoma
(heart of) Texas
Vancouver
Washington, DC x2

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