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 Big Fat Blonde hooked me. Big Fat Blonde in all its glory, playing mono from a single-speaker clock-radio settled on the kitchen counter tuned into KY102 on a freezing November morn in Lansing, Kansas while mom cooked oatmeal and we listened for school closings (please! Oh Please!).

I can’t remember for sure, but I’d like to think school had closed. And I’d romped in the snow. Rolling and tumbling in the white stuff with the gleeful call “Sew-weeeee!” echoing in my head.

What I do remember with certainty is that I received The Rainmakers eponymous tape as a Christmas gift, and was allowed to listen to it in our K-Car’s cassette player during our post-holiday ride back from St. Louis to Kansas (the I-70 series). Rocking good time! Until the last song, Information, came on with those quasi-PMRC lyrics.

The car’s mood chilled. Father promptly ejected the tape and replaced it with the new George Thorogood, just in time for Wentzville.

This sticks in my memories as I now know how Father (sadly departed - also way, way too early), whose parenting skills ran the gambit from Absenteeism to Bemusement, must have received those lyrics.

His alcoholic sister had died from liver cancer at an absurdly young age and his brother was put in a sanitarium after having a breakdown when his lover died from AIDS.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was just a wee-un who loved The Rainmakers for their Rock and Wit and – oh, did they just name drop Chuck Berry? My Ding-a-ling*!

It took years – decades – of catching snippets of slightly inebriated conversations for me to fit the pieces together. That song must have resonated with Father. How could it not? The lyrics were right from his diary, for fuck’s sake!

Anyway, by then it was too late. Divorce and distance had separated my father and I inexorably. When he called to tell me about his pancreatic cancer; he did not bother to ask me to visit and, since I was embroiled in my own Huntington’s Disease drama, I didn’t bother to offer. Six months later he’s dead. I could not even attend the funeral.

The only thing we ever shared – without ever acknowledging it – was the last track of The Rainmakers eponymous CD.

It was enough.

RIP Steve Phillips.

*some associate Chuck Berry exclusively with Johnny B. Goode. I do not like those people.