No. 633 – Cuckoo Cocoon

Performer: Genesis

Songwriters: Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford

Original Release: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Year: 1974

Definitive Version: None

That last post was insanely long, wasn’t it? I wasn’t expecting that, but it was a document of insanity, so there you go. Today’s will be much shorter, I promise.

If someone wants to suggest that this song really ought to be part of the Fly on a Windshield suite, I wouldn’t argue with that. I just decided long ago that it was separate, which is why it’s listed as such here.

When I went to Northwestern, only a few students enter the Journalism program at Medill right away. The rest—some 95 percent—have to go through a simple pass-fail program, called, appropriately enough, Intro to Journalism. It consists of two parts—writing and copyediting.

For copyediting, you had a lecture and then were further split into “labs” one night a week for hands-on work. The writing was everyday, and it similarly was divided into smaller groups of about 15. The first half was almost entirely in the classroom, the second would be out in suburban communities on a beat.

Northwestern students called the program Boot Camp. Basically, it was where Northwestern professors—all professional journalists—would beat you up, break you down and shape you into the type of journalist who could hack it in the real world. If you couldn’t make it through Boot Camp, the thought went, you couldn’t make it in battle. From my quarter—fall quarter, 1986—only one student didn’t make it through Boot Camp. There was almost a second, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

My instructor for the first half was a white-haired gent named Bob McClory, who was a regular contributor to The Reader—Chicago’s formerly great free alternative weekly. (It’s still around and still free; it’s no longer great.) His claim to fame among the students was, as he explained on one of what seemed to be an endless string of rainy days that fall, his marriage. He was a former priest and his wife was a former nun—a real-life Thorn Birds, right?

He was a good guy, but I soon learned the hard way that Boot Camp was aptly named.

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