It all started tonight because I came home after dinner with my parents and I flipped on the TV for a moment’s distraction, and there on the screen was a young John Travolta fighting to make it on Broadway in the 1983 Stallone dancing vehicle, “Staying Alive”. When I was a kid and that movie came out, my mom saw it and loved it, and consequently the record album came home with her one day and received extensive play on the record console for a year, and I grew to enjoy that soundtrack. Watching the movie tonight made me think about the artists and actors and actresses in it, like Travolta, and Stallone, and his brother Frank, and Cynthia Rhodes, Travolta’s love interest in the picture, and how long ago that film came out, and how young those artists were, and how life had happened since then. And curious about the film, I did some research on the internet, and learned today I had experienced “the Marx Effect”.

Well, it started before that- this afternoon really- when I saw a blurb on Twitter about Richard Marx and his wife, Daisy Fuentes, helping to secure a flipping out passenger on their Korean Air Line flight from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Seoul, South Korea. Marx, the musician, helped other passengers and crew keep a belligerent crazy kid strung up and subdued for three hours of the flight. I didn’t know the relevance of that revelation this morning.

But it started even before before that, when I became a massive fan of Vertical Horizon and of its front man, Matt Scannell, and his smart lyrics and heavy pop hooks.

And before that, it was when I first heard Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez and N-SYNC sing their song “This I Promise You”. Despite its popularity, I still anointed that song as one of my favorite pop songs ever, based solely on the music and lyrics.

When I was in high school and college, the boyishly charming Richard Marx leapt out of nowhere and took his searching ballads and power pop repeatedly to the top of the Billboard charts for a string of years, and deep inside my soul. “Endless Summer Nights” from his eponymous first album was my anthem for mowing yards and driving across town in the summer of 1988.

And when I Marx’s heard “Angelia” a year or so later, it was a song that would not let go of me- as it remains probably my favorite popular song of all time.

Richard Marx ended up marrying actress-model Daisy Fuentes after his 25 year marriage to actress-singer Cynthia Rhodes ended in 2014.

And Marx met Cynthia Rhodes on the set of “Staying Alive” in 1983, when he was hired to write a song for the film, whom he married in 1989.

Wouldn’t you know it, that the one guy Matt Scannell pairs up with to write an album and to tour with in 2013, outside of VH, would be Richard Marx. It’s no surprise that Matt’s musicianship would lead him to collaborate with similar artists of sizable talents.

And, oddly enough, the writer and producer of the song “This I Promise You”, that NSYNC song I love, is… Richard Marx.

Chances are, if it’s a pop song I hear and I come to excessively love, Marx has probably touched it somehow.

Because Marx sits at the nexus of my musical loves.

The Marx Effect.

[With, on rhythm electric guitar, Vertical Horizon’s Matt Scannell.]