No. 993 -- Shine On

Performer: Peter Frampton

Songwriter: Peter Frampton

Original Release: Rock On (Humble Pie)

Year: 1971

Definitive Version: Frampton Comes Alive!, 1976

I always liked this song, and when I finally did the background on it for this list and found out it was originally a Humble Pie song, I liked it even better.

For those of you who aren’t as up on Frampton Comes Alive! as you should be, Shine On was on Side 3, which was the last side I got into. (When you have a stack of albums on your record player, do you want to flip over side 4 and pass up Do You Feel Like We Do? I thought not.) By the time Side 3—and therefore this song—began to worm its way into my consciousness, I was on the verge of becoming a junior-high-school reject.

Depending on what you believe, I was either a misguided teen acting out due to my parents’ divorce or a lazy-ass jagoff too busy fantasizing about making it to the majors or whichever hot babe happened to walk past me 5 seconds ago—and that’s pretty much EVERY girl when you’re 13—to bother with something as tedious as schoolwork. Regardless, what I really needed was a swift kick in the rump. And one day in early 1977, when my grade card read like that of a Delta Tau Chi reject, Mrs. Goldsmith, my English teacher, gave it to me.

I remember like it was yesterday, but she took me aside after I was in detention one day and read me the riot act. Basically, she called me out on my b.s. and told me to shape up, pronto—and I did. I almost never again got anything less than a B. (The exception was high-school Calculus, which I barely passed and which wrecked my GPA. Being a baseball stathead, I loved numbers, but I just couldn’t get my head around conceptual math.)

At the end of the year, after I had gotten an A in her class and made the Honor Roll for the first time, Mrs. Goldsmith took me aside again and warmly congratulated me on my work.

When I would tell people that year that I had her for English, everyone would shudder and say that she was a real bitch. Maybe to some, and I suppose had I gone in a different direction, I might have agreed, but she’s one of my favorite teachers. Unfortunately, I never properly thanked her for straightening me out. If she’s still around and stumbles across this here blog, hopefully she would agree that it’s better late than never: Thank you, Mrs. Goldsmith, for caring enough to give me the (ahem) proper motivation.