Black Friday with the Children of the Sun

Flashing back to a magical day after Thanksgiving

If you’re reading this, congrats on making it alive through Thanksgiving 2022. Hope you ate well, and were able to do so (if you so chose) in the company of people you love and who made you feel loved and appreciated in return. And most of all, I hope you were able to find some things to feel genuinely thankful for.

Gratitude has probably been one of the most important tools in my survival kit over the last few years. As lousy as things have been — in this world, in this country, and in my own life — I still find stuff to delight in, marvel at and feel intensely grateful for on a daily basis. Maybe it’s nothing more than a brain-splitting guitar riff, the rich reds of a late-afternoon sky, or a snuggling cat insistently head-butting my jaw, but the good bits are what continue to get me through the bad. And today, I’m especially grateful for the fact that I’ve reached *300* subscribers here at Jagged Time Lapse, not to mention that a significant portion of you are actually supporting this project with paid subscriptions. Thank you all very, very much!

So for alla youse paid subscriber types, here’s a little special Black Friday something to read while you’re stuck in the checkout line, waiting to get into the RSD Black Friday sale at your local record store, or maybe just chilling out at home because you’ve successfully managed to ignore the siren cry of DEALS DEALS DEALS…

As I mentioned back when I launched this thing, one of my intentions with Jagged Time Lapse is to to share some chapters from my musical-memoir-in-progress with paid subscribers as I kick them into shape. I don’t yet have a working title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence — a period of my life which coincided with some of the greatest music ever heard on AM (and FM) radio, and some of the absolute worst. Here is the latest chapter I’ve been playing with. Please let me know whatcha think…

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As far back as I could remember, the day after Thanksgiving had always meant either doing family stuff or returning from a trip involving family stuff. But on the morning of November 28, 1980, I woke up in my own bed giddy with the realization that I had no plans or obligations at all for this particular Black Friday — not that we called it “Black Friday” back then.

My mom and stepfather had some kind of social engagement that afternoon, and my sister was going to meet some of her friends and hang around the nearby Water Tower Place mall. Which left me completely on my own — and I decided over my breakfast bowl of Shredded Wheat that today was going to be the day that I finally ventured into downtown Chicago by myself…

Even though I’d lived in the Windy City for nearly a year, my solo movements had thus far been fairly limited. I’d worn out the pavement on the four-block stretch between our Lake Shore Drive apartment and Ogden Elementary during the first half of the year, I’d taken the 151 bus to and from my freshman year at Francis W. Parker High school during the second, and for several months I’d taken an animation class at the School of the Art Institute on Saturday mornings, which meant either walking or taking the bus a mile down Michigan Avenue to the museum and back. But literally everywhere else I’d been since moving Chicago had been in the company of either family or friends — back in those days, things had the potential to get fairly dicey even a block or two off the Gold Coast, and I hadn’t yet felt sufficiently knowledgeable or streetwise to go off exploring on my own.

Still, you can only spend so many days and nights looking out at a city from your ninth floor bedroom window before you’re completely consumed with the idea of actually becoming a part of it. It was time: The day after Thanksgiving 1980 was the day I would officially make the Windy City my city.

Wrapped up in my down jacket and scarf, I left our building and headed west on Walton. I took a left on Michigan Avenue at the Playboy Building, and plugged myself into the electric flow of pedestrians heading south on “The Magnificent Mile”. The weather was cold but not quite freezing, and the sun poked intermittently through the cloud cover, lending unexpected life to the limestone pallor of the venerable avenue. My general destination was Rose Records on South Wabash, but I was determined to take my sweet time getting there.

Having already styled myself at the tender age of 14 into something of an junior/amateur architectural and urban historian, I had long been both enchanted and frustrated by the wealth of architectural gems that downtown Chicago had to offer. Enchanted, because its skyline featured the most incredible collection of pre-WWII skyscrapers I’d seen outside of New York City; and frustrated, because it seemed like I was always seeing them from a bus or train window, or from the sidewalk while hurrying on foot to another destination.

But today, I could finally check out these buildings up close, and for as long as I wanted to. I spent about twenty minutes outside of Raymond Hood’s neo-gothic Chicago Tribune Tower, examining the chunks of other famous buildings from around the world — including the Great Pyramid, the Taj Mahal and Hagia Sophia — which had been cemented into the side of the newspaper's headquarters in an odd display of cultural/architectural imperialism. You didn’t have to go to China to touch a piece of The Great Wall!

I then crossed Michigan Avenue to take in the far more attractive (and far less problematic) white terra cotta ornamentation of the Wrigley Building. From its plaza along the river, I could also get a good look at the Stone Container Building, which stood on the former site of Fort Dearborn, and had once housed the legendary London House jazz club on its ground floor. The club was long gone, replaced by a Burger King, but far more interesting to me was the small classical temple perched on top of the building. A block to the west along East Wacker Drive stood the Jewelers Building, a fanciful pink terra cotta high-rise that had owned the title of "Chicago's tallest building” for about a year in the late 1920s. The Jewelers Building sported four ornamental temples of its own on the corners of its lower section; as with the Stone Container’s temple, these whimsical structures were designed and built for the unromantic purpose of disguising the building’s water tanks, but I smiled imagining that ancient gods and goddesses were actually lounging about them on a daily basis, invisible to mortal eyes like mine.

I spent much of the day indulging in similar reveries, drinking in one edifice after another from multiple angles and imagining what it must have been like to work inside of them forty or fifty years earlier, and what it would be like to ride their old elevators and use their antiquated mail drops today. I was occasionally bumped and jostled by the teeming crowds of shoppers outside department stores like Carson Pirie Scott and Marshall Field’s, but the vibe throughout the Loop was completely cheerful, even on its grittier corners. After all, it was Christmas time in the city, as Bing Crosby once sang. I blended anonymously into the festive throng, not feeling alone but rather like I finally belonged.

After several hours of zig-zag wandering, I finally reached Rose Records. Rose had long been touted to me as the best record store in the city — the equivalent of LA’s Tower Records — but my first visit to the chain’s South Wabash store was brief. I knew my mom wanted Bing Crosby’s Christmas album, so when I saw it on sale for a mere $3.39 in the store’s front rack, I simply snapped it up, paid for it, and headed back out to the chilly streets. I would kill numerous future lunch hours browsing at this very store, but today I was in and out in less than five minutes.

I spent much longer at Kroch’s & Brentano’s up the street, browsing the bookstore’s Ancient History section for at least 45 minutes before deciding on a paperback copy of C.W. Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars, a history of renowned archaeologists and their most celebrated digs. I’d already been reading anything about archaeology that I could get my hands on, preparing for what I was sure would be an exciting career filled with dusty discoveries on ancient sites, and this one looked right up my alley, or perhaps my excavation trench.

That evening, my nose still red from a day spent on the Windy City’s cold but welcoming streets, I cracked open Ceram's book and began flipping through its pages. As I always did in those days, I read with my clock radio tuned to WLUP — "Where Chicago Rocks!" — a station which, for a couple of years there, would prove at least as important to my musical education as Ceram's book would to my knowledge of archaeological history.

(I would learn much later that Ceram was a former Nazi propagandist, and come to the realization that his heroic portrayals of archeologists conveniently sidestepped the moral and cultural implications of digging up antiquities in one country and hauling them back to another. Still, his book provided a succinct, entertaining and fascinating look at the “golden age” of archaeology, which was exactly what I wanted at the time.)

Right as I came to a photo of an ancient Mayan pyramid, my radio started emitting all manner of strange whooshes and bangs, followed a minute or so later by a chugging guitar riff that seemed to draw inexorably nearer. Suddenly, an unfamiliar voice pierced the noise:

“‘People of the Earth, can you hear me?’ Came a voice from the sky on that magical night.”

Whoa!

I’d read Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, which claimed that ancient archaeological sites all over the world showed evidence of extraterrestrial presence or involvement — and now a song I’d never heard before about alien contact had popped up on the radio right as I was reading about the Mayans. I knew Von Daniken’s theories were considered borderline crackpot or worse, but the coincidence still sent a chill up my spine.

The song's "for headphones only" production values where completely nullified by the quarter-sized speaker of my clock radio, yet I was still completely swept up by the song, its vaguely Bee Gees-esque vocal harmonies, and its images of time- and gravity-defying beings sailing across the universe on their celestial ships. When the nearly seven-minute track finally faded out, the DJ back-announced it as being “Children of the Sun” by Billy Thorpe. I had no idea who Thorpe was, or that he’d been a rock n’ roll hero in Australia for well over a decade before somehow scoring a fluky FM radio hit with this Thai stick-tastic space-rock fantasy, or that he would never again achieve any kind of serious airplay in the US. But whoever he was, he’d left his mark on me that evening.

As I lay in bed later that night, my head still abuzz with images from my big day out, I thought about how there was a whole world of things out there that I needed to find out more about, and that I would now have to add Billy Thorpe to that list. There also seemed to be a whole list of things that I could be or become. Archaeologist? Architect? Historian? Rocker? I wanted it all, or at least I wanted to know about it all. The possibilities, at that moment, seemed absolutely endless.