You Know the Rhythm is Right
Foghat — "Slow Ride" (1975)
Happy Thanksgiving week, Jagged Time Lapsers!
As always, I have much to be thankful for, and among those things is the loyal support of my paid subscribers, who have kept this Substack afloat for over two years now. I love, appreciate and thank you all, from the bottom of my ink-stained heart.
As mentioned back when I first launched Jagged Time Lapse, one of my original intentions in starting this Substack was to motivate me to get cracking on the musical memoir I’d been wanting to write for years. Since then, I’ve been sharing bits of it with my paid subscribers whenever a chapter (like this one) feels ready for an audience.
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.
I’ve already completed a number of chapters for the book, including ones about why Nigel Olsson’s “Dancing Shoes” makes me think of Mormons and Chief Dan George, as well as how a Bee Gees B-side helped me nab a starting position on my Little League baseball team) and the time Luis Tiant teamed up with Crosby, Stills & Nash during my lone visit to the Oakland Coliseum. If you would like to read these chapters and all the others — as well as the various exclusive artist interviews in the Jagged Time Lapse archive — and/or listen to all the episodes of CROSSED CHANNELS, the monthly podcast I do with my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher, just five bucks a month (or $50) a year will get you the keys to the kingdom…
The following piece may be the only thing I post this week, but it’s a long one — a story about the first time I ever got high, and how I discovered Foghat Live in the process. Enjoy, and (those of you in the States, at least) have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
The athletic field at John Burroughs Junior High School couldn’t have been much longer than a hundred yards. But whenever the final bell of the school day rang, its concrete expanse seemed to telescope fearsomely.
Just a period or two earlier, the field was typically the sun-baked scene of gym class kickball or “capture the flag” showdowns; but as soon as school let out, the idea of getting across it and out to the line of RTD buses parked along Wilshire Boulevard suddenly became about as appealing as going “over the top” on the Western Front. Because that final school bell didn’t just signify the end of classes for the day — it also served as the bat signal for clusters of bullies to gather on the athletic field, where they would individually or collectively harass and pick on smaller kids like myself as they made their backpacked way to the buses.
Many decades later, I would run a similarly intense and claustrophobic gauntlet upon my arrival at the airport in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where reps from various local resorts made frantic, personal space-violating offers of free tequila, boat tours and hang-gliding excursions in exchange for attending their employers’ time share presentations. In the John Burroughs afterschool gauntlet, however, the in-your-face propositions were generally more along the lines of “Give me your bus money or I’ll kick your ass,” occasionally interspersed with somewhat more subtle attempts to part you from your coins.
As a 12 year-old lad fresh from the comfy college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, I wasn’t at all what you’d call “street smart”. But I quickly learned that the best way to sidestep such confrontations was to just keep walking and avoid eye contact; and if that failed, “keep walking and act stupid” was a far more effective tactic than outright resistance. I figured this trick out one afternoon in February 1979, when an older kid fell into step beside me as I was trying to leave the school.
“You taking the bus?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Here,” he said, holding up a grey paper RTD transfer. “Give me a quarter, and you can have my bus transfer.”