Oh, 1972… or, as I have often thought of it, the year I started to grow up — or pretended to, anyhow! (Well, let’s be kinder: maybe it’s not so much that I was pretending to adulthood; let’s say I started to imagine adulthood realities then.)
January ’72 found me halfway through my junior year as a Communications major at a state college in South Jersey. With three other guys, I was sharing the second floor of a two-story house in a nearby town. (I think but could not swear that it was one of these houses; I almost never saw the house from the street, since the only way to get to the second floor was via an exterior stairway at the back of the house, approached via a gravel driveway and parking area.)
As mentioned in the previous post in this series, I’d joined the staff of the campus opinion magazine a couple months before. (I’d debuted there with a faux-“investigative” piece about the tensions between the college’s established English department and the newer, flashier Communications one — the gods forbid that I pick a topic I might actually have an opinion on *cough*. The headline read something like, “He Useta Wanna Be an English Major.”) One of my favorite courses — it has profoundly affected why and how I read fiction, and how and why I thought about it, right up to this second — was called “Fantasy & Science Fiction,” taught by a brilliant eccentric named Richard Mitchell. (Add his name to the list of people I’ve known to whom I really need to devote future posts.)
Not at all incidentally, early in 1972 I met — and quickly proposed to — the young woman who would in 1973 become my first wife…
While the preceding paragraphs are written in orderly fashion — the material has outlines and edges, shapes — please note that the events chosen carefully trace only the outward course of my life. Inwardly, jeebus, I was a mess. Take that sentence ending with “my first wife,” for example. What the hell did I, of all people, know about dating, about sex, about proposing and actual marriage? Zero, or damned close to it. And yet I went blithely on. By the time the second half of ’72 rolled around, I was already in full-blown Spackle-Over-the-Cracks mode. It could all be figured out later, right? If I got something wrong, I had plenty of time to correct course!
And then I ran into 1973…
About the playlist…
By 1972, my musical tastes (and memories) had begun to shift firmly out of the familiar “If it ain’t on my car’s AM radio, does a song really exist?” groove. For starters, I’d begun to dip into FM radio — edgier, less (overtly) commercial, willing to serve artists and audiences eager to write, perform, and listen to longer, ever more elaborate (and sometimes more profound) songs. On the other hand, I’d started to really pay attention to the musical tastes — the curations — of people I knew (but wasn’t related to).
But this series of playlists specifically focuses on what I heard via AM. So be it. About this particular post’s selections:
- The release dates, as before, precede the start of the calendar year — “Brand New Key” from October ’71 — and end well before December 31, 1972 (“The Game of Black and White,” from August). The reasons for this are the same as before, too: music just took longer to attain “hit” — i.e., AM-radio-worthy — status, and therefore took a while to dislodge from the stations’ programmed rotations.
- I think 1972 was the first year in which the rhythm, the beat of music started to impress itself on me. Probably the best examples on this list: “Hold Your Head Up” and “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” — they made (okay, still make) me want to finger-drum along with them, y’know?
- The 1971 playlist included Chicago’s “Colour My World,” which would eventually serve as “our song” — the song we first danced to at our wedding — when I married Missus Number 1. Here in 1972, though, “Nights in White Satin” — already something like four years old — had suddenly become a hit again. And what forever earned a place in my mind about that song is that it served as the wedding processional song for “that girl” — the one back in New Jersey for whom I’d pined during my year at Wake Forest. She got married in mid-72; she had the innocent audacity to ask me to take their wedding photos, and I had the surprising nerve to say No, I don’t think so… but I never forgot that processional. That the two songs shifted back and forth in my emotional timeline is emblematic, I think, of my scrambled emotional landscape in general.
- I wanted to include a couple other songs I specifically recall hearing, repeatedly, but did not include them for different reasons. First, Bobby Vinton’s “Sealed with a Kiss”: I dropped it once I realized it simply covered an even bigger hit from years before… and that was the repeated play I remembered. Second, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”: it definitely deserves a spot on my personal playlist… but Mr. Young has pulled from Spotify (which hosts these playlists) all the music to which he holds copyright. So, not an option.
- Still funny to me: the way that songs of no particular long-term staying power in terms of cultural influence, cultural history, “the poetry of rock,” or any other grand scheme of things — such songs, even so, still managed to stamp themselves in my mind. “Motorcycle Mama”? “Popcorn”?!? Er… what the hell? Mission accomplished, AM-radio program managers!
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