Destinations editor Eric Moya was a guest of the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya last week, attending the AIC Hotel Group's first Showstopper Awards for its top-selling agents and tour operators.
For the past couple of days, I've had a song stuck in my head -- or, more precisely, restuck after more than 20 years. I imagine it happens a lot for guests of a certain age at Hard Rock Hotels, if the all-inclusive Riviera Maya property is the norm.
Common spaces pipe in hits of the '60s, '70s and beyond (a sample track list from the Toro buffet one afternoon: the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women," Boston's "More Than a Feeling" and Fiona Apple's "Criminal").
The memorabilia, too, must trigger some long-lost memories for guests. That was certainly the case for me as I entered the Bret Michaels Suite, named after the Poison frontman and the venue for the Showstopper Awards' opening-night cocktail hour. From my teen years I fondly remembered items like Michaels' "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" guitar and "Unskinny Bop" motorcycle, today on display at the suite's entrance.
But actually, most of the music and memorabilia lean heavily toward the baby boom generation: Cover bands in the property's Hacienda (families) and Heaven (adults) lobbies play tunes by Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles and CCR, while hallways are lined with black-and-white images of predominantly old-school rockers like the Doors, David Bowie and Queen.
The Showstopper Awards attendees spanned several generations, and appropriately, AIC chose entertainment that might appeal to a broad range -- though surprisingly, it seems the boomers were left out. The first night saw a performance by rapper Ja Rule, who with DJ in tow ran through his hits, mostly from the late '90s and early 2000s, in the property's See the Show Theater. With his hit-making peak about a decade behind him, he's arguably close to being what was once known as an oldies act but today is more euphemistically known as a "legacy artist," in music industry parlance.
But holding to the 20-year rule of nostalgia, the next night's act was squarely of the legacy variety: the Gin Blossoms, whose jangly, midtempo pop tunes were in heavy rotation on the radio and MTV from the early to mid-1990s.
Chatting up the crowd at the resort's convention center, singer Robin Wilson noted that the band plays a lot of corporate bookings these days, about 20% of its gigs (they recently played for Samsung, he told us). It makes sense; even in the Gin Blossoms' heyday, the Tempe, Ariz., band's music wasn't especially edgy, particularly in comparison to the day's Seattle grunge or SoCal gangsta rap. Perfect for a corporate crowd -- now and perhaps even back then.
I was enjoying their polished performance, but before that night, I hadn't thought much about the Gin Blossoms over the past two decades. However, the opening line of their signature hit, "Hey Jealousy," kicked my heretofore-vague feelings of nostalgia into overdrive: "Tell me, do you think it'd be all right if I could just crash here tonight?"
No longer was I a middle-aged journalist at a Riviera Maya resort covering a travel industry event. No, it's a late afternoon in fall 1993, and I'm a University of Florida sophomore walking down 13th Street with a navy-blue JanSport full of the day's textbooks when the cute redhead in John Lennon glasses from English lit/comp (her analyses of William Blake are insightful) pulls up and offers me a lift in her aqua Suzuki Sidekick, her stereo tuned to the station that always seems to be playing this or Billy Joel's "River of Dreams," and I'm working up the nerve to ask her out. I do, and she says yes, but anyway ...
Momentarily snapping out of this rush of reminiscence, I looked around at the 30- and 40-somethings lining the front of the stage, who with seemingly every word grew more confident singing along. We rode the wave of nostalgia for the next four minutes or so, till the band exited stage right.