Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1978-79

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[Yes, I’m wrapping up this painful series by combining two years’ lists into one… I think it’s called “cutting one’s losses”!]

Many of life’s most difficult lessons can, in the retelling, be introduced with the sentence It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I’ve worked through this series of posts ostensibly about the pop music of the 1970s — at least as I experienced it in my firmly middle-of-the-road suburban South Jersey life — I’ve realized how much and how often I could have used that opening line.

First, there’s the “good idea” of building this playlist at all, at least the way I’ve done it: examining each year separately and including every single song which I still remember hearing, no matter how inconsequential to my life then or since. (And of course, no matter whether or not I actually thought a given song was very good.) The final list (on Spotify) grew to include almost 200 songs; it would take over twelve hours to listen to it all. I don’t know anyone (least of all, myself) with the curiosity and/or patience required to listen to it all.

Second, I decided to blog not just about the decade’s music or pop culture in general, but about events of my personal life back then, year by year. And you know what? I came to genuinely hate re-experiencing all those “good ideas” gone wrong. Hence my collapsing these two years into one: I’m just sick of thinking about it.

Herewith, a blitz through my life then, between mid-1977 and the end of 1979:

In August 1977, the sister with whom I’d been sharing an apartment got married and moved a good distance away. I moved back in with my parents. And my only income, right after I wrecked my teaching career (I’d had the “good idea” of “becoming a writer”), came from delivering furniture for a furniture store about 15-20 miles distant. Since that job didn’t pay very well at all, I decided it’d be a “good idea” not to blow money on insurance for my motorcycle or my car; indeed, that remained a good idea right up until I had a hypothetically minor traffic violation while on my motorcycle. In New Jersey, at least back then, operating an uninsured vehicle required judges to suspend one’s driving privileges completely for six months. So there went my furniture-delivery job.

[A not-inconsequential aside: I also decided to insist to family and friends that I did in fact have insurance, simply didn’t have my insurance card with me at the time. They were, of course, outraged by the miscarriage of justice — right up until I had to confess that, uh, well, no, I actually did not have insurance at all…]

I got a job, then, working in the shipping department of a major publishing company just 10-15 minutes away from my parents’ house. Even better, my other sister — who had not yet gotten married — also worked there, and also lived with my parents. So I had a pleasant ride to and from work, at least. I worked for the publisher all through the remainder of 1977, and then all the way to early 1979.

Somewhere in there, after my driving privileges were restored, I started seeing a young woman who also worked in the warehouse. This seemed like a “good idea” at the time because… well, it didn’t seem like a good idea at all, except on the most superficial level. (Interpret that as you will, and you’re probably not wrong.) Inevitably, I guess, I ended up simply walking away from that relationship when I got another job — a much better one — requiring me to move away from the area; I promised to keep in touch, though: a promise which was a “good idea” only from a cheap, heinously callous perspective.

But hey, I had a better job! And this one had staying power: I was a computer-programming trainee for The Phone Company — AT&T, which was then still one single unified enterprise, the only source of any telephone services in the country. I would stay with AT&T, moving on up the career path (technical, to management, and back to technical) until the 1990s…

…but on the way, in the first few months I was with them, I fell in love, hard, with a young woman in my training class. This, I still believe, was not merely a good idea but an excellent one — right up until the relationship ended six months later. (I never understood why it ended, but that it did apparently seemed a good idea to her.)

So there I was at the end of a decade’s worth of embarrassingly bad — and/or clumsily executed — ideas. When January 1980 rolled around, I didn’t know about the genuinely excellent (and well executed) ideas which lay ahead, and I didn’t know about the godawful missteps I’d take to undo the excellence of many of those ideas. Really, I didn’t know a lot of things.

But I do know that for my purposes now, it’s time to tie off off this series of posts here on RAMH.

About the playlist…

The same general rules apply here as in earlier years’ lists: songs appear in chronological order by release date; they’re not selected for their importance (to me or to the world), just because they sold enough copies to make the Billboard “Hot 100 Singles” lists for their respective years; and thanks to the way AM radio and the music business worked back then, the release dates run not from January 1 through December 31, but more like mid-year to mid-year.

Specific notes:

  • Suddenly coming across 1979’s “Just When I Needed You Most” gave me (in October, as I’ve already said) the “good idea” to undertake this playlist series at all. Fittingly, I guess, my most maudlin self has always strongly associated the song with the collapse of the relationship at the end of that year.
  • Disco was such a thing on AM radio in the late ’70s, especially with the 1977 release of Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack album. I’d be lying if I said The Beegees had only one Billboard “Top 100” song in 1978-79. But that doesn’t mean I felt compelled to include more than one (“Stayin’ Alive”).
  • Not recently, but I have over the years blogged, at least in passing, about some of these songs (“Blue Bayou,” “Fire,” “Chuck E’s in Love,” “My Sharona“…) — maybe the music stuck with me more than I imagined.
  • I don’t feel at all guilty or hypocritical for including two Linda Ronstadt tunes — one for each year.
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1977

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[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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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1976

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[Only sixteen well-remembered songs from this tumultuous twelvemonth…! I think this reflects both what was going on in my life in ’76, and how little I was caring about AM-radio music by that point in history. More details below.]

I certainly didn’t know it on January 1, nor in any of the months from then to September, but 1976 was very much the year my life began to unravel (that is, to unravel for the first time). Events — self-inflicted wounds, really — which developed during the course of the year so profoundly affected me for the next several years that, in fact, I struggle to remember much of the earlier months…

Oh, yes, till teaching — I remember that much. I vaguely recall that as a no-longer-rookie in the English Department, I’d started to earn something like a measure of professional respect among my colleagues. On the other hand, the respect was tinted with a sort of chiaroscuro of confusion: What the heck is he DOING?, I could almost hear their whispers. The syllabus for my journalism classes was pretty much left to me, as there were no other syllabi to which it could be compared; my Junior-level English classes, though, seemed to confuse the kids as well as the people with whom I shared the teachers’ lounge (and the Junior English syllabus). Honestly, I doubt that if pressed, I could have cleared up the confusion much.

The problem-I-didn’t-know-about-in-January had its origin in the last few months of 1975; it began, as is true of similar problems in the lives of many people, with the phrase, “I met someone.”

Yes, I was still married. My wife and I were still together; in fact, we’d recently signed on with a program designed to strengthen our bonds, and keep us together. Which I guess maybe indicated, in retrospect, that we had some serious issues already percolating under our skins, between our ears…

Anyway, encountering The Other Woman — I’ll just call her “V” here — hit me like a bolt of lightning. She was cute, verbally sharp as a tack, a rapid-fire conversationalist with a bubbly laugh (its look and its sound) which I’m pretty sure I’ll never forget. And to top it off, she was teaching at the same school, in the same English department, so there were lots of opportunities to cross each other’s paths…

Long story short: by the end of 1975 I was living by myself, in a smallish one-room apartment on the third floor of what had at one time been a mansion in a nearby historic town, the first couple floors of which were now occupied by the offices of a successful real-estate company. I was so happy with V (I believed, and still kinda believe) — and so looked forward to what 1976 would bring. She was going away for Christmas break, to New Orleans, and when she got back we’d, well, we’d really dive into the relationship.

Then I got the phone call. Nothing so grandly tragic as a report of her death, nothing like that. No, she had just — yes indeed! what goes around, etc.! — “met someone.” On top of which, she would be marrying him, and very soon…

[Aside: V did not end up marrying him, after all. She learned that he was already married, which kind of scrambled the impact of her assertion during that phone call with me — that she couldn’t wait for me, given New Jersey’s separation-and-divorce requirements: it would take too long to formalize it all with marriage.]

Wow, did I go into a tailspin. (Turnabout, meet Fair Play.) Sometime in early spring, trying to assert myself in some positive way, I bought a motorcycle… and promptly totaled it in an accident (which caused no injuries or property damage except to the bike itself, of course, and to my self-esteem)…

I got a reprieve, mid-year, when one of my sisters got a job teaching at a different nearby school district: would I be interested in sharing an apartment with her? Why yes! Yes, I would!

And so it went, through another few months’ cabdriving, and the start of a new school year in September. Those last few weeks of “normalcy” lasted all the way up to the mid-autumn, and the beginning of a teachers’ strike in the school district where I taught. By then, the months-distant 1977 was already shaping up as a year more interesting than I would’ve imagined — let alone hoped for.

Postscript: V, as it happened, moved into a condo in a complex near the apartment I shared with my sister. This was coincidence; we had not been in touch, and she’d have had no way of knowing it — especially since she’d transferred in September to teach at a different high school. But she tracked down my phone number somehow, and invited me over. We split a bottle of wine, talked pleasantly but (as I remember) about nothing of substance, laughed from time to time, and then parted ways. I ran into her in a shopping mall one more time, in early 1979; again, we chatted without rancor or recrimination, and that was the last I saw of her.

About the playlist…

It’s shorter than the previous ones — which, as I mentioned, probably doesn’t surprise me. Aside from the preoccupations described (hinted at, more like) above, I think I was just, well, enjoying music less. I’d never been much of a dancer, but disco, via AM radio, was forcing the issue: Put up or shut up, it was saying to the audience; Take it or leave it. This is what I’m offering you now. I took that bet, and started listening less to AM radio, more to the edgier FM stations — and began buying music, in the form of LPs, more than I had for years. Which translated, largely, to buying music I already knew I’d enjoy. (“You tell me that it’s evolution/Well, you know/We all want to change the world…But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out”: still in my late 20s, and already verging on pop-culture fuddy-duddiness.)

Some specific notes:

  • Following my usual practice, I started building this playlist by referring to the year’s “Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles” list (per Wikipedia). And the only selection criterion was unchanged: if I remembered the song coming out of a car radio, onto the list it went; otherwise, nope. Now, seeing what I’d overlooked or ignored was an… instructive experience. Hall & Oates! David Bowie! Queen, for crying out loud! Indeed, the two Fleetwood Mac songs on my list are there only because they became important to me in later decades — not because I would’ve cited them, given the same criteria, by the end of 1976 itself.
  • “Convoy”: what a, well, bizarre hit song. It rode the coattails of the then-current fad for CB radio, and also directly referenced current events of the time — 1974’s National Maximum Speed Limit law, which had imposed a 55-miles-per-hour limit in response to a gasoline shortage. In retrospect, I wonder if this might not have been a precursor to later “The government is taking away our freedoms!” extremism.
  • The Beatles, jeez, yes: “Got to Get You in My Life” had first been released in 1966, on the Revolver album… but hit the Billboard list again ten years later thanks to an anthology of the band’s hits.
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1975

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By January, 1975, I fancied I might actually work out as a career teacher. After all, I started the previous September as a teacher of my own syllabus (within the constraints of the English Department’s generous reading list), rather than following the one laid down by my predecessor. I was getting into something of a groove as a teacher of journalism. I was making friends among the faculty, friends whom I’d occasionally see outside the four walls of the school. I was enjoying advising the award-winning school newspaper for a very talented, dedicated staff…

One interesting (?) thing about my English classes: in addition to teaching the reading of American literature (which was the core of the junior-level English curriculum), I was also emphasizing the writing of English. This was a nod, as I saw it, to my college major in Communications Education, vs. English Education. And the principal tool for getting kids comfortable with writing was requiring them to keep a journal. (I’d actually begun doing this in the foreshortened last few months of the 1974 school year.)

Here’s what I recall of the journaling activity:

  • The entries needn’t be daily, but they needed to be at least occasional…
  • …which meant that when I collected all the journals — on an every-three-weeks schedule, I think — I expected to find more than one or two entries.
  • Other teachers in the department also required that the kids keep journals. But three things distinguished my form of the exercise from my colleagues’:
    • I would not critique the entries’ spelling or grammar.
    • I actually read what they said…
    • …and I wrote back to the kids — not commenting on every single entry, but commenting at least every now and then to every single kid’s thoughts as written.

I think my colleagues thought I was a bit nuts about this (as do I, in retrospect). It was a hell of a lot of work, for one thing, no matter how much I believed in its usefulness; it pretty much killed every weekend involved — which meant, since I’d staggered the schedule among my three English sections, it pretty much killed every weekend, period.

On the other hand, it sorta blew the students’ minds (in a good way): I’d promised to read, think about, and respond to what they said (and, in some few rare cases of exceptional writing, how they said it). The first couple cycles were awkward, as expected: could they trust me? if they wrote about their families, the school authorities, their friends, would I rat them out? They could and I didn’t, of course, and by January most of them had genuinely started to loosen up. Most importantly, they were getting comfortable with writing — which had been my objective from the start.

But ye gods, was it a lot of work piled on top of all the usual job requirements: preparing lesson plans, preparing and grading exams, actually, y’know, doing teaching…

About the playlist…

The drive between the apartment where my wife and I lived to the high school where I taught, Google Maps insists today, would have taken me only 15-30 minutes in either direction. Maybe that was true then; I can’t even remember. So I probably was not spending a lot of time with AM radio — in the car, anyhow — during the school year. I more than made up for it over the summer, though: I was back driving a cab.

Given the vagaries of the AM-driven pop-music release-date-to-popularity cycle, then, it stands to reason that I’d probably best remember the songs on this playlist which were released in around March or later; this translates to the songs from “Philadelphia Freedom” (released February 24) on down.

Just a handful of specific notes:

  • I never owned even one physical album by the Eagles, but their music has always been pretty inescapable. (My kid sister, as I recall, was crazy about them. (Ditto about Captain & Tennille, possibly because she for awhile affected the Toni Tennille hairstyle look.)) “Best of My Love” has always been my favorite of their singles.
  • As the saying goes, Linda Ronstadt could have sung the Yellow Pages as far as I was concerned. Hearing her music from the 1970s always kinda melts me; maybe she didn’t write her own songs, but I’ve never cared about that. (I’ve blogged about her at least a half-dozen times over the years.)
  • Aside from Ronstadt’s songs, I notice that around now the cover versions of earlier popular songs were beginning to crop up almost as a genre in their own right…
  • On the other hand, jeez, “At Seventeen”: sui generis, and a song whose covers never touched Janis Ian’s original for anyone who heard hers first. (Gawd, don’t get me started on Celine Dion.)
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1974

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[Another one of those lists which really deserves at least one addition… impossible, though, because the artist in question (like Neil Young, previously) has apparently declined participation in the Spotify universe. Damn.]

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.
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1973

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[It’s becoming obvious how much these songs were pounded into my head during times I was spending in cars. But I’m looking forward to confirming this theory in the posts which follow…]

January, 1973: I’ve finished my college coursework, with one exception… Months, even a couple years earlier, I’d estimated the odds of finding work as an actual communicator (writer of fiction or journalism, editor, filmmaker, advertising copywriter, etc.) at close to 0%. (I didn’t doubt that I could do those things. But I had no clear options in terms of finding a corresponding paying position.) So by now I’ve changed course, subtly, to a major course of study called Communications Education: preparing me for a career as a teacher of communications-y subjects. The catch: finding a school with such an opening. And guess what? There are, well, no such (public) schools in 1973, at least in New Jersey, and for all I know there are none now 50 years later… Instead, back then, I’d have to find a school which offered, say, a course or two in journalism and/or creative writing — and an opening for such a teacher. In the meantime, that one course requirement remained: my so-called “practicum,” i.e., a semester at a school where I could practice teaching such things, under the guidance of a mentoring teacher of the paid staff.

In the event, I lucked out: the middle school in the town where I was then living had actually initiated a creative-writing course. My “cooperating teacher” there taught only a couple of classes specifically in that subject, the rest being good old English classes. But I was okay with that constraint…

In retrospect — even within a year or two later — I was not a very good “student teacher.” But I sailed on into the future, concerned mostly with personal matters… especially, getting married within a couple weeks after graduation from college.

And you know what? I wasn’t a very good husband, either — at least, not as a first husband. More — and similarly superficial — details to follow, eventually. (Well, maybe.)

For now, just know that my wife quickly found work as a working newspaper reporter. I found no work at all; in desperation, I took a job driving a cab in the area of suburban New Jersey where we lived. Off and on, I continued doing that for several years (eventually, just in the summer). And of course this continued my indoctrination as a consumer of AM-radio music!

About the playlist…

Jeez, I spent a lot of time just sitting in and driving around in a car, obviously, when I worked at that cab company. But the cabs were nearly all old(ish) junkers — five-six-seven years of hard driving in stop-and-go traffic, very few long trips — and keeping their AM radios running was never a priority for the owner. If you were idle (which you often were, during your seven-days-a-week/twelve-hours-a-day shift), of course you had to keep the two-way radio to the base station turned on, in case the dispatcher needed to contact you. But AM radio came pretty much standard in all US cars by this time, even cabs, and the technology was pretty reliable, so I ended up listening to more AM-based music than I had since the end of the ’60s.

For a month or so, before I got the cab-driving job, I was able to watch the Watergate hearings live, on TV. I don’t remember listening to them on the radio later (although I remained riveted by the nightly television replays), so I’m guessing that’s how a lot of the music from the second half of ’73 stamped itself on my mind. For the first half, though, note that my tastes were nudged in one direction or another by the tastes of my middle-school students…

Just a couple specific notes:

  • It wasn’t until years later that I learned “Oh Babe, What Would You Say” was not sung by Carol Channing — or, indeed, by any woman performer at all. Duh.
  • “Superstition”: one of my looser-limbed college roommates impressed this song on my memory by demonstrating the robot dance as it played.
  • For years, I harbored a minor fantasy about writing a humor piece for The New Yorker. It would have something to do with art, and with museums, and that was about all I had — except for the title: “Your MOMA Don’t Dance, and Your Dada Don’t Rock’n’Roll.”
  • In general, boy howdy, this year’s music continues to ring fresh in my mind. John Denver! Carly Simon! Paul Simon! Roberta Flack, and Loggins & Messina, and… and… and…! Even the second-tier artists: just reading their names makes their music swell in my memory. (I know, I know: BOOMERS.)
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1972

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[I seem to be settling in at the “two dozen songs, plus or minus” length for the playlists (but see the “About the playlist” section below for info about a couple of songs I started to include here, but didn’t)… The list for 1971 is here, and you can see the introduction to the whole series here.]

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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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1971

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[This may be a sign of things to come: a playlist of twenty-five songs, vs. the previous post‘s fifteen. In general, I bet I spent more time in cars in 1971 than I did in 1970 — maybe that’s why I’ve got more music from the former? For an introduction to this series, see this post from a few days ago.]

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.
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1970

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[Fifteen songs? That sounds about right — what I expected. But note that I wasn’t really paying attention to pop music yet; it was just part of the “background sound” of life at this point. Songs in chronological order, from earliest to latest release dates. For an introduction to this series, see this post from a few days ago.]

If you wanted to characterize my 1970s with a single adjective, and polled for their opinions not just the me of 2023 but anyone else who knew me then, the consensus might cluster around the word “confused.” Hindsight, of course, is everything; but at the outset, in January 1970, here’s kinda where things stood:

I’d gotten midway through my freshman year at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, with every expectation of continuing there through graduation. That was really my only expectation of the future, though. While I enjoyed my course schedule (except — ugh — the physics class which met at 8:00 AM on Thursday and SATURDAY mornings), I saw nothing in their syllabi which tempted me to anything like long-term commitment. I was on friendly terms with, if not exactly close to, the seven other guys who shared my dormitory suite, and anticipated no trouble on the horizon in that respect. (I was right about that much, whew.)

My family were all healthy; the nearest blood relative who was no longer living was my paternal grandfather, who’d died when I was a year old.

Romance? Or rather “romance,” in quotation marks? Nearly nonexistent for me. I took note of a few girls (we were all still boys and girls then) around campus, but I was also separated from them by the thick shroud of social clumsiness I’d draped myself in. I couldn’t even start to imagine a setting in which I might actually talk to any of them. Almost certainly approachable, they were, but that didn’t mean I had, y’know, approaching on my mind.

On the other hand, there was this one girl, back in New Jersey… One of these days, I may write about her — I could probably do an entire post or three or four about her — and she certainly remained a fixture of my life (inwardly and emotionally, at least) until her death from cancer over 30 years later. For purposes of this playlist, though, just know that like all the rest of the above, she certainly played a part in the ways that some of these songs stuck in my head from the outset.

As 1970 rolled on, though, “things happened”: fate started to bump up against the scaffolding beneath my comfortable life:

Let’s start with Dad. He had been a maintenance mechanic for most of his working life; in mid-1970, the workers at his plant, including Dad himself, went out on a strike which lasted for most of the summer. (It was also a tough summer for Dad because his mother — Nan, to me — died that July. Not that Dad himself ever complained about any of it, at least to me; for him, I think, it was all just Stuff to Be Gotten Through.) Mom wasn’t working yet; when I asked her about it recently, she explained that she couldn’t work because my younger brother was still in elementary school. (The times, they change…) Between one thing and another, then, I wound up transferring for my sophomore year from Wake Forest to a small — and new — community college in South Jersey.

I did return to WF for a visit in the fall, and was astonished how much the guys had changed over the summer — beards! they had facial hair!

Among other things, my time at the community college gave me a real sense of how I might spend the rest of my days once I became an adult (whenever that’d be). I was writing, for one thing; taking pictures, for another. I had mentors, not just teachers, and got a sense of genuinely moving forward (vs. just scrambling to keep my feet)…

But 1971 and beyond, of course, still lay ahead. What did I know???

About the playlist…

Not all of these songs were actually released in ’70; but they were all hits that year, which is why I heard them so much on the radio — and which also says much about how the music industry functioned then: singles were “released” to radio program managers, who then offered them (via the DJs and the airwaves) to anyone tuned in. [*] The stations’ listeners would (a) call the stations to ask for repeats and (b) go out and buy the singles on vinyl, or — even better — buy the entire albums on which the singles appeared. It took time to get the momentum chugging along on individual songs.

(As an aside, it also means that some songs released in 1970 wouldn’t appear on the Billboard list until 1971, but that blog post still lies ahead…)

As far as specific songs on the list, I have no specific memories. In general, though, I remember:

  • A couple of them were favorites of that girl back in NJ, and maybe that’s why they imprinted on me, too.
  • At Wake Forest, I was a contributor to the campus literary magazine. The editor that year was a brilliant guy named Al — the next year, he went on to a Rhodes Scholarship — who possessed an incisive wit and shrewd editorial instincts. But he also had a bit of a mushy side to him: the managing editor on one occasion put the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” LP on the office phonograph, and Al yelled something, completely seriously, to the effect of Goddammit, Jonas, you KNOW that song makes me cry!
  • Ten years ago, one of my annual “Potpourri” posts included a brief discussion of “American Woman.” The song had actually come out during my senior year in high school, but it had staying power into 1970!

Stray observations:

  • Some monster hits of the time aren’t in this list, or in future ones of the series… because they were too long to be played by AM radio stations. The version of “American Woman” in this playlist, at five minutes’ duration, is the longest one here — but it wasn’t the version being played on AM then; they chopped off the intro passage and probably shortened (or accelerated) it otherwise, too.
  • The Beatles’ influential shadow remained long in rock/pop music of 1970 and beyond. Their own songs — like “Let It Be,” here — continued to be released, of course, both as a group and solo. But their Apple Records production company introduced a respectable number of other artists to the public… including Badfinger, above, which was sometimes referred to in the music press as especially Beatles-like. (The group changed their name from The Iveys to Badfinger as a subtle nod to the Fab Four: the original title of “With a Little Help from My Friends” was “Bad Finger Boogie.”)

______

[*] “Tuned in” then meant, among other things, within a few dozen miles’ radius of the broadcast antenna. No coast-to-coast monolithic AM networks existed — none which compelled local stations to follow the playlists established by corporate headquarters. Philadelphia radio stations, which I listened to, of course played quite a bit of the same music as their New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles counterparts. But they wouldn’t be marching in lockstep, and generally skewed toward the tastes of their nearby audiences. The Jacksonville Florida-raised Missus’s memories of music back then only partially overlap my own: I don’t think I heard a single Allman Brothers song — not often enough to remember — until I was in my 30s or older.

[back]

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Facing The Other, Pretending Not to See Oneself

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[Image: “Ukraine, Day 1,” by John E. Simpson.]

This week has certainly delivered to the world a big, heaping wallop of unease, hasn’t it? I’ve found it difficult to be really philosophical about “it all”; mostly, like many people it seems, I am baffled and rather irrationally angry that “it all” has come to pass… and I say irrationally, because after all, what do I know, and who am I to be having opinions about it?

A few days ago, before the invasion, the onscreen chyron beneath a couple of CNN talking heads said something like, How will a Russian invasion of Ukraine affect your pocketbook? I have no idea what the commentators were saying — the sound was off, and there were no closed captions displaying — but those big boldfaced words really hit me wrong. All I could think was, My pocketbook?!? Jeezus, think about what it would mean for the Ukrainians…!

Explicit references to politics and world affairs seldom bob to the surface over at whiskey river, where the current is always gentle. But the anonymous blogger there is human, after all, and in especially fraught times a given week’s selection may be hard to separate in one’s mind from the real-world context. Or maybe it’s just one’s own imagination that fits an interpretation around something like this (italicized portion):

At the risk of telling you
what you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There will always be people who think suffering
leads to enlightenment, who place themselves
on the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them
and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward that sure thing that awaits us,
which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs. Cavendish, every day is old news.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

I read of people who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, and think to myself: Yeah. Like Putin, that fool, that dupe of his own aspirations.

And then I cast around for more, not at whiskey river, and come across first this:

Malignant aggression does not reflect true human nature; it is connected with a domain of unconscious, perinatal dynamics that separates us from our deeper identity. Those who initiate war activities and violence in general are typically substituting external targets for elements in their own psyches, which should properly be faced in personal self-exploration.

(Stanislav Grof [source, but original text unconfirmed])

Yes, I exult, yes: that’s it, exactly!

But no, that’s not “it” after all… or rather, that’s not “it” unless I skip conveniently past that last clause: one’s own psyche, subject to self-exploration. And this, I think, is it — as expressed below, with my emphasis added to the original:

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

(Pema Chödrön [source])

When I was young, I knew a man just a few years older, man who suffered violent mood swings. Medication “helped,” after a fashion: as I recall, it rendered him impassive — functioning, as they say, but also strangely not-human. Yet when unmedicated, he tended to destroy the lives of people around him, principally his family. He seemed alternately obsessed and focused on the strangest ideas, and violently angry about injustices he imagined the world and those people had inflicted upon him. Eventually, with the help of improved medications and other therapies, he came to have something of a normal life — but the memories of those past episodes forever seared themselves in the minds of those (including me) who’d known him back then.

I think back to those young men now: him, going through the inner hell he went through and acted out; and me, watching in horror as he figuratively staggered from one violent encounter to another, lapsing only temporarily into dull-eyed “normalcy.” And I think of my helplessness then, and my helplessness now, and my hope that somehow — somehow — the right balance of remedies can be found, or forged. Maybe then madness can finally be laid to rest: an awful memory, but no more than that.

And then maybe we can return to life as it should be — never again “normal” (because it never was), but at least stabilized by fellow-feeling for strangers and an absence of national envies and judgments. (“National” the key word there: I doubt that we’ll ever, as a species, be free of personal envies and judgments.)

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