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!

1971 wasn’t an especially monumental year for me, in terms of good or bad “incidents” as such. On the other hand, it probably ranks highly as a formative, becoming-John twelvemonth. In large part, I credit this to the mentors I mentioned in passing in the 1970 entry in this series…

I’d known Mr. H as an English teacher back in my high school — never actually took a class with him then, but he was the advisor to both the school newspaper and the yearbook. I’d taken photos for both publications, and during my senior year was on the editorial board of the yearbook, so got to attend many meetings with him in attendance. My staff title: “literary editor,” meaning more or less that I had ultimate responsibility for all the words. If you encountered a particularly lyrical passage in a photo caption, or for that matter a typo or a clanging metaphor, then I probably had a hand in it — an attentive or a distracted hand, as the case might be.

Anyhow, I don’t think I’d had contact at all with Mr. H during my freshman year at Wake Forest U. But somehow, he got wind of my “at loose ends” status during the summer of 1970, when I found out — belatedly — that I wouldn’t be returning to WF. As it happened, he himself had left high school teaching, and in September 1970 would be joining the faculty of a community college about a 45-minute drive from my hometown; also, he’d be advising the college’s yearbook — and would really appreciate having a “known quantity” on staff…

You can probably see where this is going: Mr. H went 100% to bat for me to make it not only possible, but easy for me to transfer to that college, despite the very late date of application. I was very, very lucky to have known him.

And yes, I came aboard as “literary editor” for that year’s junior-college yearbook. I took a creative-writing course taught by Mr H. (Somewhere around here, most likely in a cardboard box I haven’t unpacked, I’ve got a folder of my collected works from that course, and if you’re lucky — hell, forget lucky, maybe if you’re just present here at the wrong moment — I’ll share some highlights, such as they were.)

Very exceptionally, Mr. H helped me in one other respect: simply getting to and from school. My family had two cars, neither really reliable, and no public transportation would get me to that campus in rural South Jersey; Mr H lived a few miles away from my parents’ house, and offered to pick me up in the morning and drop me off at the end of the day when I had no other way to get back and forth. To this day, I remain amazed that he did — that any teacher would do — such a thing.

Actually, he went even further. Our daily schedules did not overlap, of course, and he was also working — mostly in the evenings — for a state college near the county one. So he actually gave me the keys to his car so I wouldn’t be confined to one campus or the other, until we were both ready to head back. To boot, the car was one of the coolest I’ve ever driven — a 1971 Mercury Capri (shown at the right, in a slightly different color than the gold/bronze I remember), with a “four on the floor” transmission. I simultaneously lived in terror of wrecking it and thrilled to the core with every gear change. I’m pretty sure I never again had so much fun at the wheel of a car.

That year, I also took a couple of journalism and American-lit courses with a teacher who advised the college newspaper and would become my other mentor: Mrs. R. She and Mr. H shared an office, so I ended up spending a good amount of time simply around her even before I knew her that well. It took me many years to appreciate not only that she’d taught me quite a bit about that course material, but also that I’d developed a genuinely profound crush on her — specifically, for the tempo and tenor of her conversation: rapid-fire, hilarious, at once kind, generous, and no-fooling. A couple years later, I lost touch with her (thanks to a stupid, stupid, stupid betrayal of a confidence, after which she understandably wanted almost nothing to do with me — certainly, nothing like confidences). I know she moved away a few years later, and remarried, and finished her career as a librarian. And I know that I have probably not gone more than a week since without suddenly hearing her voice or her laugh in my head. Ou sont les neiges…

The second half of 1971 brought more changes: I began classes at the college I’d eventually graduate from — the same state college which Mr. H had been attending/working at outside of his “day job.” I declared my major course of study to be not English, but something called “Communications.” (Journalism, PR, creative writing, filmmaking — the creation of texts and narratives, as opposed to their consumption, so to speak.) Not 100% coincidentally, the head of the Communications Department was Mr. R — yes, Mrs. R’s husband — a fact which introduced me to ever more subtle levels of the awkward human heart.

I wasn’t taking photos much, but I was writing — a little for the campus newspaper, but mostly for Venue, what they then called the “opinion magazine.” (Eventually, as I understand it, it became known as a “humor magazine” — but that came after the mid-’70s, when political and social tensions. i.e., hangover from the 1960s, had started to recede.) By the first half of 1972, I was Venue‘s managing editor, and would be editor-in-chief throughout my senior year. But that, like the music of 1972, still lay ahead…

About the playlist…

As with the previous one, this playlist’s songs are arranged roughly in chronological order by release date. And again, some came out months before January 1971 — they just took that long to gather steam, or simply hung around as (Philadelphia) AM-radio favorites. (“One Less Bell to Answer” dated back to April of 1970.) A few specific notes:

• I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know of Gordon Lightfoot until I heard “If You Could Read My Mind” (released December ’70). Ultimately, though, I doubt that I listened more to any other artist throughout the 1970s.
• The Beatles, again — as soloists (Harrison and McCartney), and as songwriters (those guys performing, and Richie Havens on the Harrison-written “Here Comes the Sun”).
• “Colour My World”: this song came out in June of 1971, but clung to the popular imagination for years after. Who knows? Maybe it’s still played all over at weddings and school dances. It was in fact “our song” when I married my first wife, in 1973, so it continues to hold a certain inescapable personal… well, resonance for me.
• I know what you may be thinking: Perry Como??? The singing barber of Pittsburgh??? He was still putting in a Billboard-list appearance in 1971??? I was surprised when I looked at the numbers, too, but oh yeah, now that I’ve been thinking about it: I do remember hearing “It’s Impossible” probably hundreds of times over the next year. Not so surprising, either: the WW2 generation was still actively listening to and buying pop music then, and Como himself was only 59 years old.