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!

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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.”

This was a good deal, at least in theory, since it normally cost me 45 cents to take the 83 bus two miles down Wilshire and back to my neighborhood. But my brief glimpse of his transfer was sufficient to note that it was already several days old, and thus completely worthless. I could have simply refused the transaction on these grounds, letting him know that I knew he was trying to rip me off; but I was also pretty sure that doing so would result in a punch or three from a kid who was considerably bigger and taller than I was. So I played dumb instead.

“But I need to go down Wilshire,” I told him, trying to buy time as I continued to walk toward the line of buses.

“This will get you down Wilshire,” he assured me.

I acted like I didn’t understand.

“No, man — I need to go down Wilshire.”

“This will get you down Wilshire!” he said, clearly annoyed at my obtuseness.

“But I have to take the Wilshire bus,” I shook my head, still walking.

The field’s chainlink gates were getting closer. I knew that if I could keep this act up for another minute, I would be able to slip off the school grounds and onto the relative safety of the nearest waiting 83.

“THIS WILL GET YOU ON THE WILSHIRE BUS, YOU FUCKING RETARD!!!”

He yelled this loud enough that one of the school’s phys-ed instructors — who was doubling as an afterschool security guard to prevent any non-students from coming in through the school gates — overheard him.

“Leave him alone, Lopez,” the gym teacher called out wearily. The kid stomped off to find an easier (or at least less frustrating) mark, and I made it out through the gates with my bus fare still intact.

A typical RTD bus, 1970s.

The buses presented their own challenges, however. I never took the RTD to school in the mornings, when I was part of a neighborhood car pool with four other kids; but since my mom’s work schedule left her unable to commit to carpooling in the afternoons, it was always public transportation for me on the way home. Of the buses that lined up to accommodate the afterschool swarm, there were usually at least two for 83s; since none of my friends took that route, I would usually just hop on whichever bus was nearest or — if I wasn’t escaping from a bully — looked the emptiest, and therefore most likely to yield an empty seat for what was (depending on traffic) usually a twenty-to-thirty minute ride home.

As on the school field, I learned pretty quickly to avoid being noticed on the bus, a lesson hammered home by one particularly mortifying incident where I’d chivalrously offered my aisle seat near the rear exit to a cute eighth grade girl with perfectly feathered jet black hair — partly because I thought it was good manners to do so, and partly because she was a cute eighth grade girl with perfectly feathered jet black hair.

“Why thank you,” she smiled, taking me up on my offer. “That’s really sweet.”

“Sure thing,” I shrugged, trying my hardest to seem effortlessly cool. The rows behind me had already filled up, so just I got up and stood in the aisle, holding onto the pole behind the seat I’d just vacated.

“Excuse me,” came a voice from my left. “Did you just give up your seat to her because she’s a girl?”

I turned to see an older kid with freckles and center-parted brown feathered hair standing next to me. He wore a gleeful “I’m about to start some shit” grin on his face.

“Uhhh… yeah?” I answered, not sure what else to say.

“You know, you didn’t have to do that,” he lectured me in a teasing tone. “You’ve had a long day at school just like she did. If women truly want to be treated equally, then men shouldn’t feel like they have to give up their seats to them.”

“I… uhhh…” I stammered.

He kept on in this same condescending manner for another minute or so, mocking my actions while simultaneously feeding off my obvious discomfort at being put on the spot in front of this girl, who in turn was quickly getting fed up with the whole thing. “Okay, just forget it,” she finally snapped, before getting up and moving to the front of the bus. “Adam, you’re such a fucking asshole,” she added, flipping off the guy — though I also sensed she was annoyed with me for not standing my ground in a more articulate fashion. (I was certainly annoyed with myself for the same reason.) Adam just shrugged his shoulders, and with a smug expression plopped right down into the newly-vacated seat.

Though I generally refrained from engaging with other riders for months after this incident, I still naturally gravitated towards the back of the bus where the cool kids congregated. I wasn’t one of them, of course, but as a recent transplant from the Midwest I found it endlessly fascinating to watch these L.A. teens interact, flirt and talk shit with each other; like a junior anthropologist hoping to one day fit in with the tribe he was studying, I silently observed the way they dressed and carried themselves, and dutifully absorbed their slang. (I quickly learned that “Radical” meant something much, much different in Southern California than it had in the politically-charged hippie haven of Ann Arbor. “Bitchin’” meant something entirely different here, as well.) Plus, there was almost always a kid cranking some bitchin’ hard rock in the rear of the bus from a portable radio or tape player. There was also usually someone back there getting radical with a joint.

My attitude towards drug use — or at least smoking pot — had evolved somewhat in the past year. Having spent much of my childhood around hippies while also being bombarded with anti-drug TV ads (“Why do you think they call it dope?”), my views on the subject had largely see-sawed between disgust and fear. By halfway through sixth grade, I was so wound up by anti-drug propaganda that I was completely convinced life in junior high would involve dodging “pushers” lurking in the halls of my junior high school, who would force-feed me drugs and try to get me addicted. (One of the sweetest memories I have of my straight-arrow grandfather is of him comforting me when I tearfully expressed this fear to him during Christmas 1977. He gently calmed me down with a few soft-spoken words, as was his wont; but in retrospect I’m pretty sure even he thought I was being unnecessarily hysterical, and was probably having trouble keeping a straight face while talking to me about it.)

But by the fall of 1978, when I entered junior high, the drug humor so prevalent at the time (as popularly purveyed via Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, and Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke, among other vital sources) had made getting stoned seem pretty funny to me, if not any more personally appealing. And while life as a seventh grader at Tappan Junior High had largely sucked, nobody tried to shoot me up with skag in the locker room — in fact, even though some of my Ann Arbor friends would joke about going to the annual “Hash Bash” on the U of M campus and getting high on “whoopee weed,” I didn’t know anyone who actually smoked the stuff, or was even remotely in contact with the harder shit.

But the kids at John Burroughs didn’t just talk and joke about weed — a large percentage of them actually smoked it. (Harder shit was certainly within reach, as well; at least, I remember overhearing one girl in my home room talking to a friend about how her older boyfriend liked to smoke angel dust.) Though it was initially quite jarring to see joints being passed around on public transportation, watching the back-of-the-bus stoners getting high every afternoon on the way home did a lot to demystify marijuana for me. These kids weren’t doing anything crazier than laughing and grooving along to whatever Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith jams were emanating from somebody’s boom box; and with a few notable exceptions, they always seemed pretty together once school rolled around the next day.

I still had no real interest in smoking pot, but I could now at least kind of see its appeal. While visiting our dad in NYC in April 1979, he took time out of giving my sister and me an immersive tour of the Big Apple in order to sit us down for an encore broadcast of NBC Reports: Reading, Writing and Reefer, a documentary program about how the youth of America were in grave danger from “the killer weed”. Whereas such a documentary would have completely freaked me out just a year earlier, by this point I found it kind of amusing, not to mention informative — I mean, I’m pretty sure Reading, Writing and Reefer was where I first learned what a bong was.

“Why do you use a bong?” the show’s intrepid reporter asked one particularly heavy-lidded teen.

“To cop a bigger buzz, dude!” came the enthusiastic reply.

“Duly noted,” I thought to myself.

So when, a week later, someone actually passed me a joint in the back of the 83 bus, I was neither scared nor appalled; I was interested.

I’m still not sure why or how I ended up on the receiving end of that joint. Though I was a regular in the back seats, I always felt invisible — no one ever spoke to me, nor even gave me subtle “Hey, Dude” nod of acknowledgement. By now, I had gained enough social confidence to flirt with the girls and wisecrack with the guys in my seventh grade classes, but the back of the bus was a different story: The kids who sat there were all eight and ninth graders, most of whom were impeccably arrayed in their band t-shirts and ragged jeans or surfer/skater wear. I was still a few weeks away from the major hair and wardrobe makeover that would fully cement my transition into becoming a California kid; it’s unlikely that anything about me radiated “one of the gang,” and I was certainly way too intimidated by my fellow back-benchers to try and front as such.

And yet, here was a lit joint, held in front of my face by the very baked blonde kid who was sitting next to me. He wasn’t offering it in a mocking way, like “Ooh, let’s tease the seventh grader!” It was just a casual pass of some weed that just happened to be making its way around the back of the bus, and I just happened to be in its path. Without even really thinking, I reached out and took it.

By now, I’d observed enough about local weed etiquette to know not to make a big deal out of it (“Whoa, dude! A joint? No way!!!”) or to take too big a toke. I still coughed, of course, but only enough to get an approving “Nice!” from my seatmate. Sticking to the circular path that it was being passed in, I quickly handed the joint to the big surfer kid sitting across the aisle from me, who looked like he’d already taken a few hits of “the good shit” between leaving class and boarding the bus.

The conventional wisdom of the time held that you wouldn’t actually get high the first time you smoked marijuana, and that it somehow only really “worked” once you had sufficient THC stored away in your system to trigger a reaction. But within minutes of my inaugural toke, I knew that this was bullshit; I was pleasantly woozy, and suddenly quite focused on the music coming from a row or two behind me. The song was something I’d never heard before, a bludgeoning riff carrying high-pitched, hyped-up vocals and the simplest of lyrics that were repeated over and over again.

Slow Ride

Take it easy

Slow Ride

Take it easy

And it was a slow ride; traffic on Wilshire was particularly brutal that day, and it seemed like the time between stops was getting longer and longer. Or maybe I was just high.

Slow Ride

Take it easy

Slow Ride

Take it easy

From the enthusiastic crowd sounds that accompanied the song, I could tell that it was recorded live, and that the audience was really digging what the band was laying down — even during the weirdly bouncy part that occasionally pre-empted the main chorus and riff.

I’m in the mood

The rhythm is right

Move to the music

We can roll all night

The big surfer dude across the aisle was definitely digging it, too. I watched him as he grooved hard to the song, slowly banging his head and stomping his Vans-clad feet and — every four bars or so — laughing while he flipped his center-parted, perfectly feathered hair out of his eyes with both hands. He was high. So was I. The rhythm was right.

I suddenly snapped out of my slow-ridin’ reverie with the realization that my stop was coming up in just two blocks, and that I was going to have to walk home stoned for the first time in my life — as well as possibly engage with my family. (Would they KNOW?!?) Thankfully, the former task proved quite simple, as long as I didn’t think too much about the mechanics of what I was trying to do, and no one else was home when I got back to our apartment.

Now that I was by myself and removed from the social stoner situation, I wasn’t sure I actually liked how I was feeling. I tried playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball, my usual afterschool pastime, but couldn’t concentrate well enough to write the team lineups down on the scorecard. I tried reading the latest copy of Sports Illustrated, but that wasn’t really working for me, either. Finally, I just laid down on my bed and turned on my clock radio, deciding to listening to whatever KMET had in store for me. I listened, and gazed for a while with some amusement at the Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem poster that hung on my bedroom wall. And then I must have fallen asleep, because all of a sudden it was three hours later and my mom was waking me for dinner.

It would have been poetic (or maybe evidence of some kind of stoner magic in action) if I’d come home, flicked on the radio, and heard that same “Slow Ride” song. But in reality, it would take another eight months or so — and a move to Chicago — before I heard it again, or even learned who sang it. Thanks to WLUP, a.k.a. “The Loop,” I would discover that “Slow Ride” was the work of Foghat, a band of British blues enthusiasts who had found a very receptive audience in America for their high-decibel, subtlety-free interpretations of American roots music.

I also learned that the song I’d heard on the 83 bus that day was the eight-minutes-plus live recording from the band’s imaginatively-titled 1977 album Foghat Live, which had sold over a million copies in the US within two months of its October ‘77 release. The original version, also over eight minutes long, had been featured on the band’s 1975 album Fool for the City; a 3:56 edit of that track — which chopped out over four minutes of the song’s sub-sub-Yardbirds rave-up while thankfully still retaining Rod Price’s wailing slide guitar lead and the immortal closing rhyme of “Slow ride/Easy/Slow ride/Sleazy” — gave the mighty ‘Hat their only US Top 20 single.

And as indefensibly dumb as Foghat’s music unquestionably was, I fucking loved it. Though it would be another five years before I tried pot again, I was all in on Foghat Live from the moment I learned of its existence. The album was loud, hard and fast enough to never get boring, and so unabashedly silly that you couldn’t help but laugh even as you rocked (or flipped your feathered hair) along with it.

As with many of the bands I got into in seventh and eighth grade, I would deny my love for Foghat through high school and the first year or two of college, thinking that I had to side with all that was punk, new wave and cool. It was only towards the end of college that I finally accepted the fact that Foghat Live was just as viscerally thrilling in its pure boneheaded simplicity as the first Ramones LP. Ah, the benefits of higher education.

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