Sometime around 9 p.m. Saturday, the Montana Lady Griz go toe-to-toe with Vanderbilt in the first round of the NCAA women's basketball tournament in Albuquerque, N.M.
Vanderbilt University is located in Nashville, Tenn. - aka “Music City USA,” aka “The Home of Country Music.”
Missoula?
We have at least that many who hum in the shower.
But Missoula does have the distinction of being the answer to the question: What do Peter Gammons, Jimmy Buffett and Paul Revere and the Raiders have in common?
In widely disparate decades, each saw fit to insert Missoula into the opening line of a song. None of the three turned them into hits, but the Raiders' “Just Seventeen” in the 1960s, Buffett's “Miss You So Badly” in the '70s, and Gammons' “She Fell From Heaven” two years ago are etched somewhere in the bowels of the halls of rock.
Gammons, sportswriter extraordinaire and baseball guru for ESPN, traded in his typewriter for a Stratocaster (as his publicist termed it) to cut the album “Never Slow Down, Never Grow Old.”
It was “a rousing set of vintage classics, originals and rock obscurities” and it received surprisingly upbeat reviews. Gammons, it turned out, has some licks and a “ruggedly soulful” voice (again, the publicist's description).
“She Fell From Heaven” was the one song on the album he wrote, reportedly as a tribute to the late Lowell George of Little Feat.
It begins, if memory serves: “She came out of Missoula, Montana Š”
And after she fell from heaven, she landed on her face.
Gammons was presumably at a baseball diamond somewhere in Florida or Arizona on Friday and couldn't be reached for further illumination.
Buffett's whereabouts were similarly unknown. He's getting ready for yet another spring-summer tour that doesn't look as if it'll come within 1,000 miles of Missoula.
“Jimmy's not doing any interviews,” a spokeswoman from his management company said.
Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band have sung other songs about Montana - “Livingston Saturday Night” and “Ringling Ringling” among them.
Back in the late 1970s, Buffett played Missoula at least three times, at the Adams Field House and the Aber Day kegger up Miller Creek.
“I guess it all blew up in Missoula,” he wrote for an opening line of “Miss You So Badly” in 1977.
The lyrics don't make it clear what all blew up, but one verse serves to lend a glimpse of Missoula of that era. Buffett sings about “staying in a Holiday Inn full of surgeons” - no doubt the first Holiday Inn in town, on West Broadway.
“They exchange physicians' stories and get drunk on Tuborg beer.” If memory serves, students of the day were more into Burgie, Schmidt and the Holy Grail of ales - Coors, which was available only across the state line in Idaho.
“Then they're off to catch a stripper Š” That would likely be at Rawhide Night at the Trading Post Saloon on Brooks Street. Or so we're told.
Gary Hughes, longtime manager of what's now the Adams Center at UM, said Paul Revere and the Raiders played the first rock 'n' roll concert in the fieldhouse.
It was the spring of 1966 or '67, just about the time the Raiders were featured artists on Dick Clark's “Where the Action Is.”
The arena didn't look like it does now.
“It was the old dirt floor, and we had the raised basketball floor that we covered. The stage was on the east end of the building,” Hughes said. “I remember it very well because of the mess that was left after it was over with.”
Paul Revere and the Raiders had a string of hits throughout the late '60s. “Just Seventeen” - which had a harder edge than most of their songs - wasn't a smash, reaching only No. 70 on the Billboard Pop Chart.
“Early in the morning, up in Missoula, it was just about a quarter to 4 ...” it begins.
“Layin' on my bed, treatment in my head. There'd come a knock on my door.”
We need go no farther than that.
Mark Lindsay, lead singer of the Raiders, reportedly wrote the song. He's alive and well in Portland, Ore., by the way. He recently opened a restaurant, Mark Lindsay's Rock and Roll Cafe on Sandy Boulevard, from which he broadcasts oldies shows on a local radio station.
As Bruce Micklus points out, Gammons, Buffett and the Raiders don't have a corner on music about Missoula (thank goodness, perhaps).
The proprietor of Rockin Rudy's says Nanci Griffith's “Midnight in Missoula” and “Goodbye Ol' Missoula,” first sung by Willis Allan Ramsey in 1972, are two others that come to mind. A punk rock band named Falling Sickness recorded “Missoula's Gonna Get You” in the 1990s.
“Goodbye Ol' Missoula” has been covered by a host of singers, including Emmie Lou Harris and, most recently, Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
“It seems to be the one that keeps coming up again and again,” Micklus said. “It got air play here, I know, and just as far as people coming in and asking for something, that's been the No. 1 requested Missoula song.”
Gilmore, by the way, is a Texan who once had a fling with Nashville. Griffith, also from Texas, is sometimes identified as a Nashville singer.
But come tipoff Saturday night, Missoula won't hold it against either one of them.
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