A song that came to embody the summer of 1976, Starbuck’s one and only hit, “Moonlight Feels Right” took its sweet time getting there.
The song was written by the band’s lead vocalist and keyboard player, Bruce Blackman. Blackman was a Mississippi boy who was instantly smitten with a picture he saw of a young girl that was posted on someone’s dorm room at Mississippi Delta Community College. He was so obsessed, he demanded to know the girl’s name and where he could find her. Her name was Peggy Denman and she was enrolled at the school.
Blackman immediately enrolled at the college himself, purely to see if he could meet her. He did meet her, but she was less than thrilled with him. He asked her out. She turned him down. He asked her out again. She turned him down again. Not discouraged, Blackman asked a third time while she was walking across campus on a very windy day. This time, she said yes.
Not only did Blackman have a date with his dream girl, he also had the beginnings of some song lyrics: “The wind blew some luck in my direction…” Eventually, he had a whole song worked out. He didn’t think a community college sounded very romantic, so he moved his lovers’ alma mater to Ole Miss in the lyrics – the school both he & Peggy had wanted to attend, but couldn’t afford. He also moved the song’s location up to Baltimore hoping that might encourage airplay in areas outside the south.
Blackman took his band, Starbuck, into the studio in the fall of 1975 to record it. One of his bandmates, Bo Wagner, improvised a very unusual solo for the record, playing the marimba – a percussion instrument like a xylophone not normally associated with rock & roll. Starbuck’s record label liked the song, but hated the marimba. They told Blackman to cut it out. Blackman refused. Instead, he and the band loaded up a car with a box of the singles and took off, crisscrossing the South, dropping off their song at radio stations and lobbying DJs to give it a chance.
Only one station told him they really liked the song, WERC in Birmingham, Alabama. But the program director thought it sounded more like a warm weather song, so he told the band he would give it shot in late spring. They thought he was just finding a polite way to blow them off, so Starbuck went on their way. Discouraged, the band gave up on promoting the record and returned to performing around the South.
But WERC had been serious. As the weather turned warm in 1976, they played “Moonlight Feels Right.” The response was immediate, positive and heavy. Before long, the song had become a regional and then a national hit, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the magazine’s Easy Listening chart.
While the band never had another hit record, Blackman has continued performing and also producing other musical acts. Oh, and he eventually married Peggy Denman. They remain married to this day.
Never underestimate the power of lucky wind.
