I'll Hold My Head Up Like a King (and I Never, Never Will Look Back)
Billy Joe Royal — "Down in the Boondocks" (1965)
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 my paid subscribers as I kick them into shape. (Kick the chapters, that is — not my subscribers.)
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, as well as some of the absolute worst.
All the previous chapters I’ve written for the book — like the one about why a Jimmy Buffett 45 was one of the first singles I ever bought, or the one about how The Eagles inspired me to pick up a guitar, and the one about how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high — can be found in the Jagged Time Lapse archive, which also contains a ton of free reads on a wide variety of musical subjects.
If you’d like full access to the archive, It can be yours for just five bucks a month, or $50 a year… which I think is a pretty fair exchange for all the good stuff that’s already in the vaults, as well as all the tasty treats I have up my sleeve for ya this year. Plus, a paid subscription gets you full access to the monthly CROSSED CHANNELS podcast I’m doing with my friend and colleague
. You can listen to a preview below — and the second episode drops next week!
Anyway, here is the latest chapter I’ve been playing with — though unlike most of the others I’ve written so far, this one concerns a 45 that was released nearly 15 years before I discovered it. Please give it a read and l emme know whatcha think…
The last ten days of December ‘78 went by in one happy, sunshine-infused blur. I spent Christmas with my mom’s side of the family, and had many one-on-one hangs with my beloved Grandpa Fred, including him taking me — thanks to some sweet faculty tickets procured by my dad during his final weeks teaching at U of M —to see Michigan play USC in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. Sure, the Wolverines lost 17-10 that afternoon, but I was just stoked to be there watching legendary Michigan QB Rick Leach play his final game. It’s not like Bo Schembechler’s squads had ever won a bowl game anyway, so I wasn’t even particularly bummed out by the outcome.
(A running joke among my Ann Arbor friends in those days: Why doesn’t Mrs. Schembechler serve Bo’s oatmeal in a bowl? Because she’s afraid he’ll lose it.)
Music occupied even more of my time and attention that holiday than football did. I’d received my first “new” album (as opposed to a “greatest hits” collection) as a Christmas gift: The Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue. The album had already been out for over a year, but I was overjoyed to now have it in my own possession, and to be able to listen to any and all of its four lavish sides whenever I wanted. I played it over and over again on the new living room stereo system that my mom and aunt had bought for our apartment at University Stereo across from Tower Sunset. It was an entry-level Pioneer set-up — a floor demo sold to us at a nice price by a sleazy-smooth salesguy who spent a little too much time leering at my 34 year-old mom — but it totally did the job.