Not a bad idea

People often ask me where journalists get our stories. Obviously a lot of them are things that happen. Others are tips we get from people. And sometimes, it's just a matter of the neurons firing just right. That's what happened for me Tuesday.

That morning, like every other morning, I sat in the newsroom with Good Morning America playing on a TV above my desk. As the show came back from a commercial break, it showed a live shot from the Goodyear blimp of the Statue of Liberty and played the song "Summer in the City" as Diane Sawyer talked about the sweltering day already underway in the Big Apple. I didn't think much of it then. But about an hour later, the song came up again. As I read a TV industry gossip site, the writer, in New York this week, also described the city heat by using the opening lines of "Summer in the City" and giving credit to John Sebastian and The Lovin' Spoonful.

The Lovin' Spoonful?!?

The neurons started firing. I remembered that a couple members of the old rock group The Lovin' Spoonful had been on Good Morning Carolina about a month ago to promote a concert at Brunswick Community College. I also remembered that one of them, bassist Steve Boone, lives in Leland. So I shared an idea with our assignment editor Ashley Talley. I suggested that because "Summer in the City" gets so much airtime whenever it gets really hot, we should do a story with Steve about how he might be the only guy in town who really likes the heat, because it means a resurgence in interest in his music and maybe even royalties. I did a little research, and sure enough, Steve actually cowrote the song with John and Mark Sebastian. So I found Steve's phone number, called him and woke him up just hours after he had returned home from a gig in Las Vegas. An hour later Marcy Cuevas and I were at his house across the river.

Steve sat at his piano and played "Summer in the City" a few times as I recorded. I realized later Marcy and I had just been treated to a private performance by a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You can't beat that. And in the end, I got a pretty cool story about a 42-year-old song with some serious staying power, and how it came to be.

Doing that story reminded me of some of the best parts of my job. There's nothing like getting to know interesting people you might otherwise meet. And watching an idea travel the path into a full-fledged story can be very rewarding. Yes, inspiration comes in some pretty randoms forms and from some pretty random places, but that's half the fun of working in a creative medium.