{"id":26820,"date":"2023-12-05T11:26:03","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T16:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=26820"},"modified":"2023-12-05T11:26:10","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T16:26:10","slug":"my-1970s-am-radio-playlist-1978-79","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/my-1970s-am-radio-playlist-1978-79\/","title":{"rendered":"My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1978-79"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: John&amp;apos;s &amp;apos;70s Playlsit: 1978-79\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/playlist\/0WLBEEAnphggTE018f13hq?si=ff1efe0095194736&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>[Yes, I&#8217;m wrapping up this painful series by combining two years&#8217; lists into one&#8230; I think it&#8217;s called &#8220;cutting one&#8217;s losses&#8221;!]<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Many of life&#8217;s most difficult lessons can, in the retelling, be introduced with the sentence <em>It seemed like a good idea at the time.<\/em> As I&#8217;ve worked through this series of posts ostensibly about the pop music of the 1970s &#8212; at least as I experienced it in my firmly middle-of-the-road suburban South Jersey life &#8212; I&#8217;ve realized how much and how often I could have used that opening line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, there&#8217;s the &#8220;good idea&#8221; of building this playlist at all, at least the way I&#8217;ve done it: examining each year separately and including <em>every single song<\/em> 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 (<a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/playlist\/5hQmYDKQAA5AglmJT400v4?si=28994efce5ad4a79\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">on Spotify<\/a>) grew to include almost 200 songs; it would take over twelve hours to listen to it all. I don&#8217;t know anyone (least of all, myself) with the curiosity and\/or patience required to listen to it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second, I decided to blog not just about the decade&#8217;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 &#8220;good ideas&#8221; gone wrong. Hence my collapsing these two years into one: I&#8217;m just sick of thinking about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Herewith, a blitz through my life then, between mid-1977 and the end of 1979:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In August 1977, the sister with whom I&#8217;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&#8217;d had the &#8220;good idea&#8221; of &#8220;becoming a writer&#8221;), came from delivering furniture for a furniture store about 15-20 miles distant. Since that job didn&#8217;t pay very well at all, I decided it&#8217;d be a &#8220;good idea&#8221; 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&#8217;s driving privileges <em>completely<\/em> for six months. So there went my furniture-delivery job.<\/p>\n\n\n<p style=\"margin-left: 3em; margin-right: 3em; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.25em;\"><em>[A not-inconsequential aside: I also decided to insist to family and friends that I did in fact have insurance, simply didn&#8217;t have my insurance card with me at the time. They were, of course, outraged by the miscarriage of justice &#8212; right up until I had to confess that, uh, well, no, I actually did <\/em>not <em>have insurance at all&#8230;]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<p>I got a job, then, working in the shipping department of a major publishing company just 10-15 minutes away from my parents&#8217; house. Even better, my other sister &#8212; who had not yet gotten married &#8212; 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 &#8220;good idea&#8221; at the time because&#8230; well, it didn&#8217;t seem like a good idea at all, except on the most superficial level. (Interpret that as you will, and you&#8217;re probably not wrong.) Inevitably, I guess, I ended up simply walking away from that relationship when I got another job &#8212; a much better one &#8212; requiring me to move away from the area; I promised to keep in touch, though: a promise which was a &#8220;good idea&#8221; only from a cheap, heinously callous perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But hey, I had a better job! And this one had staying power: I was a computer-programming trainee for <em>The <\/em>Phone Company &#8212; AT&amp;T, which was then still one single unified enterprise, the only source of any telephone services in the country. I would stay with AT&amp;T, moving on up the career path (technical, to management, and back to technical) until the 1990s&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;but on the way, in the first few months I was with them, I fell in love, <em>hard<\/em>, with a young woman in my training class. This, I still believe, was not merely a good idea but an excellent one &#8212; 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So there I was at the end of a decade&#8217;s worth of embarrassingly bad &#8212; and\/or clumsily executed &#8212; ideas. When January 1980 rolled around, I didn&#8217;t know about the genuinely excellent (and well executed) ideas which lay ahead, and I didn&#8217;t know about the godawful missteps I&#8217;d take to undo the excellence of many of those ideas. Really, I didn&#8217;t know a lot of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I do know that for my purposes now, it&#8217;s time to tie off off this series of posts here on <em>RAMH<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">About the playlist&#8230;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The same general rules apply here as in earlier years&#8217; lists: songs appear in chronological order by release date; they&#8217;re not selected for their importance (to me or to the world), just because they sold enough copies to make the <em>Billboard <\/em>&#8220;Hot 100 Singles&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Specific notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Suddenly coming across 1979&#8217;s &#8220;Just When I Needed You Most&#8221; gave me (in October, <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/trying-out-a-new-series-1970s-am-radio-music\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">as I&#8217;ve already said<\/a>) the &#8220;good idea&#8221; 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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Disco was <em>such<\/em> a thing on AM radio in the late &#8217;70s, especially with the 1977 release of <em>Saturday Night Fever<\/em> and its soundtrack album. I&#8217;d be lying if I said The Beegees had only one Billboard &#8220;Top 100&#8221; song in 1978-79. But that doesn&#8217;t mean I felt compelled to include more than one (&#8220;Stayin&#8217; Alive&#8221;).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Not recently, but I <em>have<\/em> over the years blogged, at least in passing, about some of these songs (&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/a-direction-in-which-to-look\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Blue Bayou<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/whats-in-a-song-fever-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fire<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/midweek-music-break-rickie-lee-jones-chuck-es-in-love\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chuck E&#8217;s in Love<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/weekend-poetry-music-break-the-complications-of-my-sharona\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">My Sharona<\/a>&#8220;&#8230;) &#8212; maybe the music stuck with me more than I imagined.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I don&#8217;t feel at all guilty or hypocritical for including two Linda Ronstadt tunes &#8212; one for each year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of life&#8217;s most difficult lessons can, in the retelling, be introduced with the sentence It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I&#8217;ve worked through this series of posts ostensibly about the pop music of the 1970s &#8212; at least as I experienced it in my firmly middle-of-the-road suburban South Jersey life [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,15,247,5772,73,74,17],"tags":[663,735,1218,3844,5811,5820,5821,5822,5823],"class_list":{"0":"post-26820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-family","9":"category-ruminations","10":"category-1970s-am-radio-playlist","11":"category-radio","12":"category-music","13":"category-04_technology","14":"tag-motorcycle","15":"tag-personal-history","16":"tag-att","17":"tag-the-1970s","18":"tag-self-inflicted-wounds","19":"tag-5820","20":"tag-5821","21":"tag-broken-hearts","22":"tag-bad-ideas","23":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/19708-9.jpg?fit=1400%2C1400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-6YA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26820"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26827,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26820\/revisions\/26827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}