So here’s the situation as of January 1974: I’ve been married for about six, seven months; I’m still casting about for a career, not just, y’know, a job; I’ve actually gotten fed up with cabdriving (thanks to New Jersey winter weather, thanks to the boneheaded decision-making of a temporary dispatcher); and, in consequence, I’m now employed at a local hospital as… a housekeeper.

Yes, a housekeeper: on the staff responsible for preparing hospital rooms for new patients, and, uh, straightening up and sometimes sanitizing rooms recently vacated (for reasons voluntary and otherwise) by patients now gone.

I don’t remember a lot about that job, other than some of the other folks in the department.

One guy, named Jim, was actually a tattooed ex-con. I remember what he looked like, and I remember one other thing about him: when he prepped a cup of coffee during breaks and lunch, he opened packets of sugar two at a time by tearing them in half over the cup, as his biceps rippled. He looked like he was breaking eggs over a frying pan.

…but I quickly got out of the hospital-housekeeper frame of mind when lightning struck, in March: I found a teaching job at arguably one of the best public high schools in the state.

I came into that job to complete the school year begun, and nearly finished, by a teacher who’d been there for years — a teacher of English and journalism, and adviser to the school newspaper. The latter, as I understood it (and now remember it, in foggy detail), had been “the problem” for him: the paper had run a controversial report on a hot-button topic, like abortion maybe?, and he’d been insufficiently repentant in the face of public outrage. I wasn’t expected to resolve that specific dilemma, though — just to try keeping things on an even keel, to get the students, and the newspaper, through the rest of the year…

One of these days I may write in more detail, here, of the whole teaching experience. It will involve some subjects painful, even with 50 years’ hindsight, but also some subjects delightful — and probably so for the rest of my life. We’ll have to see about that.

For now, though, just a few things about my 1974:

• That summer, I stopped shaving and grew a beard and mustache. This is the closest I’ve ever come to a lifelong grooming/vanity project; they’re grayer now, gods know, but they’re basically they same I’ve had ever since.
• During the summer, I took up cabdriving again — same company, but with better weather and dispatchers than I’d had to deal with six months before. (My boss did not appreciate the bearded look, and kept referring to it as the dirt on my face, haha.)
• My wife continued to work full-time as a reporter for a daily local newspaper. Among the fringe experiences this introduced me to: socializing with folks who smoked pot as a matter of course. (She and I never indulged — I hadn’t taken so much as a single hit yet — although I think we smoked regular tobacco cigarettes then.)

About the playlist…

All the previous caveats and constraints apply: the sequence is roughly chronological, by release date; I’ve not discriminated against songs just because they had no (or little) lasting cultural impact; and, thanks to the nature of the music biz back then, the songs were not, strictly speaking, all released between 1/1/1974 and 12/31/1974. (Release dates span almost exactly a year, from August ’73 to August ’74.)

Some specific notes:

• The first signs of disco’s pressure on popular tastes were starting to appear, or at least becoming hard to ignore.
• The one song I wish I could’ve included: Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me,” from her Court and Spark album. That album meant a lot to me that year… Y’know what? The heck with it — here’s my old, non-Spotify audio player:
• When I hear tracks like “Love’s Theme” and “TSOP (The Sounds of Philadelphia),” deeply ingrained in my memory though they might be, my principal reaction nowadays is along the lines of, What were we thinking?!?
• My kid brother has often, to me, expressed his belief that my musical tastes in the early ’70s shaped his. (He was still in high school in 1974.) By this year, though, he’d begun to repay the favor: without hi influence, Todd Rundgren, Elton John’s mid-’70s work, and Steely Dan would likely have been outside my range — and possibly outside of my reach.
• Marvin Hamlisch’s version of “The Entertainer,” like Perry Como’s “It’s Impossible” a couple years earlier, is kind of an old-fashioned outlier on the “Billboard Hot 100” list for 1974. I think I remember it so strongly because of its strong presence in the soundtrack of The Sting: that’s pretty much the only movie I remember watching in a theater with Missus #1, post-college.