Mr. Steak, Acid Casualties and The Guns of Navarone
Silver Convention — "Fly, Robin, Fly" (1975)
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
As I mentioned back when I launched this thing, one of my intentions with Jagged Time Lapse is to share 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 to read these posts in full (and have full access to the JTL archive) you can do it for just five bucks a month, or $50 a year… which I think is a pretty fair exchange for all the good reads that are 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 of our fourth episode below — our fifth will be along shortly!
This next chapter doesn’t really fit within the scope of the book as I originally envisioned it, as it occurs a couple of years before my adolescence or my interest in music really began. But it’s definitely a precursor to all of that… and the whole thing came back to me so vividly the other day that I felt compelled to write it all down and share it. So come with me, if you will, back to the grey and chilly Ann Arbor, Michigan of December 1975…
The weird thing about being a kid in 1970s Ann Arbor was that it was, in some ways, quite idyllic — there were good elementary schools, plenty of nice parks to safely play in, and a seemingly endless array of wholesome organized extracurricular activities (including little league sports, cub scouts and girl scouts, chess clubs and classes at the “Y”) — but you also grew up way too fast.
Maybe it was just the tumultuous nature of the times, or our close proximity to the University of Michigan campus (or the fact that, for several years, the White Panther HQ was located just a few blocks from my school), but my friends and I all seemed to know about a lot of stuff that maybe we shouldn’t have, at least not before we’d reached double-digits. We knew enough about sex to make up playground songs using the sort of raunchy imagery that would have made even Rudy Ray Moore blush. We all knew at least one friend whose older brother had “got VD,” or whose older sister had “got knocked up”. We knew the names of all the fashionable drugs of the day, as well as (more or less) what their effects were. We all knew who Iggy Pop was.
We also instinctively understood that, as grade schoolers, we should give an extremely wide berth to any teenagers we encountered. At the very least, our small size made us easy targets for bigger bullies; but there was also a “wild card” factor to these older kids, since many of them seemed to be stoned on one thing or another, and you had no idea how being under the influence would impact their behavior towards you, should you be unlucky enough to attract their attention.
On one grey and chilly Friday afternoon in December 1975, I was walking with my friend and fellow fourth-grader Matt down Granger Avenue on our way to his house. We’d hung around at school for a while after Burns Park’s 3:10 bell — it’s entirely possible that I’d been forced to stay after school as punishment for some infraction, such as singing raunchy songs on the playground within earshot of one of the teachers, though I honestly don’t remember — so the usual after-school parade of kids had completely dissipated by this point. It was only us on the street… us, and a rather peculiar-looking figure shambling ominously towards us from about a half-block away. And the closer he got to us, the weirder he seemed.