A Big Warm Bun and a Huge Hunk of Meat
Jimmy Buffett — "Cheeseburger in Paradise" (1978)
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapse subscribers, and a hearty welcome to all you newcomers.
Back when I first launched this Substack, I wrote the following:
For about five or six years now, I’ve also been toying with the idea of a musical memoir of my adolescence — a turbulent and confusing period in which my life and sanity were truly, to paraphrase Lou Reed, saved by rock and roll (and AM radio pop, and disco, and new wave, and heavy metal, etc.). I’ve already penned a few chapters for the book, but I need a kick in the ass to get going again, and I think launching this Substack will definitely give me one.
Jagged Time Lapse has definitely succeeded on that score. So far, this Substack has inspired me to put down chapters about my first used record store experience, my first visit to a NYC record store, the first concert I ever paid my own money to see, among others. These pieces may take a slightly different shape whenever I’m finally ready and able to compile them into a book; but in the meantime, my paid subscribers get to witness (and hopefully enjoy it) as I wrestle with this work-in-progress. And in light of Jimmy Buffett’s recent passing (RIP), here’s another chapter for ya…
I’d spent a significant chunk of the summer of ‘77 sprawled on the living room carpet of the L.A. apartment my mom shared with her friend Julie, listening to the radio while endlessly replaying the 1976 World Series in Strat-o-Matic Baseball. (The only time the Yankees ever “won it all” against the Reds was when I cheated.)
I must have heard “Margaritaville” at least a hundred times over the course of that idyllic summer — idyllic at the time because it was filled with movies, baseball and also not really doing much at all, and in retrospect because the turbulent storms of puberty were still a few months away from making landfall — yet somehow failed to learn the name of the guy who sang it. There were songs on the radio at the time that I really liked (“Float On” by The Floaters, “Knowing Me, Knowing You” by ABBA), songs I absolutely loathed (Peter Frampton’s “I’m In You,” Rita Coolidge’s enervated version of Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher”) and songs that just seemed like pleasant-enough background music, like “Margaritaville”. But the names of the artists who sang them tended to go in one ear and out the other; I wasn’t buying records yet, so their identities didn’t really matter that much to me.
By the time the summer of ‘78 was heaving into view, everything had changed. I was still playing Strat-o-Matic Baseball, of course (even more obsessively, in fact); but thanks to puberty I was now feeling all kinds of urges and emotions — and asking all sorts of questions — that would have been largely alien to me even a year earlier. As a result, the second half of sixth grade had been exceedingly difficult, marked by clashes with my teachers, my dad, and even some of my best friends.
I had so much adolescent anger and adrenaline coursing through my veins at the time that I forgot to be scared of a thrown or batted baseball. I landed the starting shortstop position on my little league team that spring, not because I was particularly good, but because I was now totally willing to throw my 80-pound body into the path of any ball that came my way. One afternoon on the way to practice, I accidentally wiped out on my banana-seat Schwinn, resulting in a black eye, a badly split lip and blood splattered all over my prized L.A. Dodgers t-shirt. When I showed up at the field, the coaches took one look at me and told me I should go home to “put some ice on it,” but I flatly refused. Fuck it; baseball was one of the only things that made me feel good, and I wanted to play.