Come Live Your Secret Dream

The rise and fall of my KISS fandom in two Halloweens

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

I’d like to thank and welcome all the subscribers who have joined the party here in the wake of my recent Replacements piece. I really appreciate your interest in what I’m doing over here.

The JTL mission statement can be read in full here, but the short version for alla youse new folks is that this is a place where I explore my musical obsessions — new and otherwise — and examine and celebrate the many ways that music is interwoven with our lives, how it can transport us back and forth through time like no other art form, and how in some cases it can actually give us perspective on (and assistance with) the challenges we’re facing and going through.

Additionally, after 30 years of writing professionally about music (and over 35 years of playing it), I’ve accumulated a wealth of good and horrific music-related stories, interviews and experiences, which I’ve been sharing here with my paid subscribers. I’ve also been using this platform as a place to work on 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.) — and let my paid subscribers enjoy and offer input into the work in progress.

In other words, if you want to read massively entertaining interviews with the likes of Black Sabbath, Gene Simmons and Robbie Robertson that have never been previously published in their entirety… or you want to read memoir chapters about the first album I ever bought, why a Jimmy Buffett single was one of the first 45s in my collection, or why Grease and its blockbuster soundtrack still give me the goddamn willies… or you want to read deep dives into such pop cultural ephemera as that Rod Stewart rumor… or you just want to have access to the entire JTL archive, along with the various video and audio components I’ll be adding here in the coming months, you can get all that by upgrading to a paid subscription for a mere $5 a month, or an average of $4.17/mo if you opt for the annual plan. That’s cheaper than a beer or a coffee most places, and it’ll go directly to supporting my work and making Jagged Time Lapse happen.

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And now back to our regularly scheduled programming, with another chapter from that as-yet-untitled memoir…

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I was always confused by the name of the Power Center, the massive performing arts venue on the University of Michigan’s central Ann Arbor campus. I’d been there at least a dozen times since the place had opened five years earlier, to see everything from West Side Story to Marcel Marceau, so I obviously knew it was a theater. At the same time, its brutalist concrete-and-glass architecture made my aggressively literal young brain think of an actual power station — was it possible that the place pumped electricity to the entire campus while also hosting theatrical performances?

And then there was the political connotation of “power”. Having grown up in an Ann Arbor that was still a hotbed of Midwestern radicalism, I was used to seeing the word used in conjunction with “Black” and “People”. Was the Power Center also the headquarters of various local political action groups?

I was silently mulling over these questions for the umpteenth time on the evening of October 29, 1976, as we passed the Power Center in my dad’s Toyota Corolla wagon on the way to his new girlfriend’s apartment. This evening was kind of a big deal — we’d met her before, but this was the first time we were visiting her place, not to mention the first time she was going to make dinner for us.

My dad had stressed ahead of time that he wanted us to be on our best behavior, an edict which probably wasn’t too difficult for my eight year-old sister to comply with, but one which definitely required a little extra self-control on my part. Beef stroganoff was on the menu tonight, and it was all I could do to not share a joke that I’d recently heard during fifth grade recess at the dinner table:

Q: What do you call a masturbating bull?

A: Beef Strokin’ Off

But I more or less kept my mouth shout, at least until the clock began to approach 8 pm — whereupon I politely asked if my sister and I could watch TV. The Paul Lynde Halloween Special was coming up on ABC, and I didn’t want to miss it. I was a big fan of both Paul Lynde and anything Halloween-related… but the show also featured what was being billed as the premiere television performance by the band KISS, and I absolutely had to see that.

I didn’t know that KISS had already been on TV, appearing on The Mike Douglas Show and The Midnight Special, and this was actually just their first prime time television appearance. Then again, I didn’t know much at all about KISS — only that I’d come back to Ann Arbor, after spending the summer away in Tuscaloosa and Los Angeles, to find that the majority of my friends were completely obsessed with them. And now that my first season as a serious baseball fan was over, and since the Rick Leach-led Wolverines football team only played once a week, I was more than ready for a new distraction.