This Is Your Lucky Day
The Commodores — "Wonderland" (1979)
And it’s come to this: The last Jagged Time Lapse newsletter of 2024.
Rough as the year has been for our planet, it was a very good one for me personally, for which I’m incredibly grateful. And I’m lobbing a big glob of said gratitude in the direction of my subscribers, especially those of you who are literally keeping the lights on over here by generously shelling out for paid JTL subscriptions. I know there are a lot of talented folks on this platform and elsewhere vying for your subscription dollars, so it means a lot to me that you all dig what I’m doing enough to support it.
In your honor, and in honor of the final day of this year, I’m going to flash back on a favorite New Year’s Eve of mine — one from 45 years ago. This piece is another chapter in my still-in-progress musical memoir, which I’m sharing with my paid subscribers as it slowly comes together.
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 obsessions.
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 reading material that’s already residing in the JTL vaults, as well as all the tasty new treats I have up my sleeve for ya in the coming year. Plus, a paid subscription gets you full access to the monthly CROSSED CHANNELS podcast I’m doing with my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher. And it’ll only run you the cost of one fancy-pants coffee or not-so-fancy pint of beer per month…
And now, on to our featured program. Happy New Year — and please be safe out there tonight, people!
Christmas came early for me in December 1979 — about a week early, in fact.
This pre-Christmas Christmas was necessitated by the fact that my mom, sister and I were getting ready to move from Los Angeles, where we’d spent the past year living with my aunts, my uncle and my two young cousins in their airy Spanish Revival duplex in the Fairfax District, to our new home in Chicago with my mom’s future husband.
Our multi-pronged moving plan went something like this: My mom would fly to Chicago to meet her fiancée — who already lived there — while my sister and I would fly to New York City to spend Christmas (and a few days before and after) with my dad and stepmother at their new loft on Park Avenue South, after which we’d head to Chicago in time to start the new year (and new decade) in our new city. So on December 19th, our final evening in Los Angeles, my sister, mom and I exchanged presents with our family.
Among the more memorable gifts I received that night: a Strat-O-Matic College Football set, a paperback copy of The People's Almanac #2, and The Commodores' Midnight Magic LP. In retrospect, it seems a bit odd that the one record I received as a present that Christmas was far mellower than the music I'd recently gotten into via local FM radio station KMET and various clued-in friends — new wave-ish things like Cheap Trick, Blondie, The Knack, The Cars, The Records and Bram Tchaikovsky, older hard rock stuff like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Foghat and Jethro Tull, and of course the suddenly omnipresent Van Halen.
But I'd been a fan of The Commodores since the summer of '77, when “Easy” was oozing like cosmic honey out of every radio in earshot. Their promo-only Platinum Tour album had been the first thing I’d ever purchased at a used record store, and they were one of a handful of contemporary bands and artists that my mom and I shared an affection for (even if she'd aptly described them as "corny" on more than one occasion).
And frankly, I wasn't the kind of kid who got off on pissing off my mom with my record collection; I happily absorbed the harder stuff in my bedroom on my own time, but I also really enjoyed the times when my mom and I would listen to music together, finding common ground in the melodies that transported us. So when writing out my Christmas list that year, I reasoned that Midnight Magic would be a more sensible request to make than, say, Get The Knack, both because I knew my mom would dig a new Commodores record, and because with The Knack it’d only be a matter of time before my mom’s ears picked up the line “When she’s sitting on your face!” from “Good Girls Don't,” which would lead to an awkward conversation that I really didn’t want to have…