[Another short list (details below, under “About the playlist…”). Given the events of my life just before 1977, and on through the rest of the year, it’s a bit creepy how on-the-nose some of these songs were…]
Some bloggers (including Substackers, Medium-ites, Patreonists, Mailchimpers, etc.) slip naturally into self-revelation mode, almost from the start. I’ve never occupied a niche among them, and don’t plan to carve one out now. That said, if anything could bring me to the baring-my-soul state, it’d be telling you about my 1977…
I’m not there even now, will probably never be, but I’ll tell you this much, anyhow.
To recap: in 1976, I was reeling from my first exposure to something like heartbreak. (I didn’t really experience it until a few years later.) But by the start of the school year, in September, I’d sorta-kinda recovered — thanks to work.
That school year, I was given an unusual responsibility for someone who didn’t yet have tenure. The English Department at that high school had something like 40 teachers, roughly 10 per grade level. This made the job of the department chairperson difficult, to say the least; to simplify it all, he came up with a plan to designate one teacher as each grade level’s unofficial “assistant chairperson.” (I don’t remember if he called it that.) No extra reward was offered, and no extra “authority,” just extra responsibility… and even that was pretty lightweight: making it easier to communicate to everyone, for example.
And I, I am pretty sure, was the only untenured designee — in my case, for the junior-English teachers. As I said, this was no big deal… but it felt like a big deal to me. A vote of confidence, from a respected source.
I’d also embarked in my English classes on something like an ambitious experiment, certainly ambitious for me: a year-long syllabus I called “What Is Man?” I proposed to help the students answer this question during the year, by way of a non-chronological series of works by American authors.
[Yes, yes, I know: “Man” as a gender-specific placeholder for “humanity.” In the mid-’70s, at least in suburban New Jersey, even those of us who knew better were all still catching up to the realities of language vis-a-vis actual human fact.]
Somewhere around here in 2023, buried under the rubble of multiple relocations during 40-some years, I’ve still got a ditto-machined course outline for “What Is Man?” Off the top of my head, though, I know only that one book was Catch-22; another, Moby Dick. I’m certain Poe oozed his way in through the cracks at some point. It included some American poets; it included Thoreau; the film adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd was shown over the course of a couple days. And the kids seemed really stirred by it all. (I’ll never forget one girl — and yes, I remember even her name (Hi, Louise, wherever you are!) — for this one moment: without raising her hand, she spontaneously stood up, gripped her desk, and announced, Mr. Simpson, I don’t know what you’re doing to us this year but if it takes me the rest of the year I will figure it out! Possibly my favorite moment as a teacher.)
But this golden-glowing account really distracts from the main point, which is this: I was falling apart, inside.
That October, the public-school teachers throughout that sprawling, populous town went out on strike — a strike which lasted weeks (and broke various public-employees labor laws in the process). I worked in the union office, on press releases and such — was interviewed once, for local television, and also wrote a one-off op-ed column for the area’s daily newspaper. The point of the latter was, effectively, “Come on, School Board: don’t be such stubborn, bad-faith ‘negotiators’ — I want to get back to my classroom!”
In reality, though, what was going on in my head was: Wow, I’m writing… I can’t believe how much I’ve missed writing…
So within a couple months, well into 1977, suddenly the shine of teaching had worn off for me. I wasn’t drinking; I wasn’t “doing drugs.” I succumbed to no external addictions at all; instead I became addicted to not-teaching. I started calling in “sick” (not exactly a lie, I told myself). I was out a lot of days, eating up all my accumulated sick days and then some. I’d get up in the morning, shower and get dressed, and leave the apartment I shared with my sister, and just head out the door… to a nearby diner and a breakfast leisurely enough that I’d return only after Sis had gone off to her own job.
By March 1977 I’d backed the school’s administration into a corner: could they grant tenure to somebody so obviously unreliable? They decided that no, they couldn’t. But to NOT grant me tenure the day before I’d have acquired it would be a subversion of the very principle — the ethics, the laws — surrounding tenure itself. So they sweetened the pot: We’ll not give you tenure, but for the remainder of the school year, for three months, we’ll pay you your full salary and benefits.
Got that? They paid me to stay away from the kids. (Still shaking my head.) And I was deliriously happy — I had time to become a writer! (Head practically whipping about and jumping off my neck.)
So by mid-year, I had betrayed the kids in my classes; I had betrayed my colleagues and supervisors who’d trusted and come to respect me; I’d betrayed the student teacher who’d partnered with me in January (and who, of course, depended on my cooperation as a mentor to help her graduate with a teaching certificate). But I wasn’t done yet, no no no: I still had family and my closest friends to betray…!
Everything left inside me fell apart in the second half of 1977. I doubt that I’ll detail it all in the “top songs of 1978” post to come; for now, please just accept that I was blessed with a very, very forgiving set of family and friends that year (and, alas, in later ones).
About the playlist…
I really wasn’t paying a lot of attention to AM radio in 1977 and as a result, this is a kind of spotty list (on Spotify, ha). For one thing, I was almost exclusively riding my motorcycle everywhere — spending almost no time in cars, hence no time in an enclosed space with only the AM radio for company. (Also: my last summer of cabdriving was in 1976.) For another, I was listening to albums — vinyl LPs — a lot, and that of course entailed re-listening to the same music, repeatedly. Of the songs on this list, a few notes:
- When I looked at 1977’s Billboard “Hot 100 Year-End Singles” list (Wikipedia), I was struck by how unfamiliar I was with so many of the titles. But I was equally dismayed by how much stuff — stuff which I (even then) regarded as junk — I still remember now. Let me tell ya, here in 2023: there was no way I was going to include more than one song by Leo Sayer.
- The last song on the list, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Carefree Highway,” was not actually a hit in 1977. It came out in 1974, on his Sundown album, and was the last song on his double-album “greatest hits” set Gord’s Gold in 1975. Those two albums received especially heavy attention from me that year; “Carefree Highway,” I now recognize, is one of those songs whose lyrics inadvertently summed up for me the whole blessed time span.
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