No, not the tv show. I've never seen that.

I thought I'd just write a few lines about the band Survivor. You know 'em...they're the guys who did EYE OF THE TIGER for Rocky 3, then strung together a series of hits on that AOR format radio in the 1980's, mostly.

I recently had my attention brought back to them when it turned out that one of my son's friends' father is a professional musician who worked with the founder of and brains behind Survivor, Jim Peterik. I mean, I always liked them. I bought their first album back in the days of vinyl, a collection called SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA, probably within a few days of its release, and followed up with purchases of PREMONITION and a couple other records before sort of losing track of them among the new wave 70's/80's stuff that I began listening to. (Stuff like Cars, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe...)

But I always appreciated their stuff, and as a musician I went back to listening to that excellent first album at times, playing around with the chord structures and trying to figure out the harmony vocal parts...stuff like that.

After finding out that Jeff Boyle had been associated with Peterik, I pulled out my old LPs and CDs and looked for references to Jeff's work with them. I found none on the older stuff I have (not surprising, it was a long time ago) but did some listening and found a couple songs I really enjoyed. The one I've been listening to a lot was not a hit, it's a tune called SUMMER NIGHTS off of PREMONITION. I like the story it tells, and I love the piano and harmonies.

I was looking up some YouTube videos and saw some comments suggesting that Jimi Jameson, the singer who replaced Dave Bickler (the original vocalist) when Bickler was diagnosed with (I believe) throat cancer, MADE Survivor. I had to laugh a little bit, because the poster obviously doesn't know much about Jim Peterik, their songwriter and driving force. Peterik is semi famous around Chicago for the band Ides Of March, which recorded the 1960's hit VEHICLE (you know it..."I'm your Vehicle baby, I'll take you anywhere you wanna go..."). And if you check the songwriting credits on a number of 38 Special tunes, you'll find that Peterik cowrote many of them, including FANTASY GIRL and ROCKIN' INTO THE NIGHT. Many of my favorite 38 Special tunes have Peterik's name in the songwriting credits.

One other quick story: The lead guitarist for Survivor is/was a guy named Frankie Sullivan. He's a pretty darned good lead player, in my opinion. Anyway, when I was at Loyola, there was a kid a year behind me who looked just like him. Turned out his name was Joe Sullivan, and he was Frankie's little brother. Last I heard about Joe he was going to Loyola's dental school (I went to the University of Illinois). So obviously by now he is a dentist, and probably practicing "Somewhere In America"...(sorry for the bad line...but I couldn't resist...)

Anyway, since I don't know how to embed YouTube videos in my posts (I'm sure it isn't hard - I didn't know how to do links until I just tried them) I won't link to one of their videos. But there are several of them on YouTube if you're so inclined.