An adjacent topic that’s not about Benjamin Orr!

All of the internet reading and researching I’ve been doing tracing the history of The Cars lately has got me thinking about the music landscape, concerts, and how much things have changed in the last- almost fifty- years since I really became cognizant of the power of music.  Reading about the clubs and the demo tapes and the gigs and the whole music scene in the mid to late 70s just takes me back to a completely different time.  Of course I was barely a teen-ager in the late seventies but I clearly remember the music scene here in this small college town when I was a kid. 

Music is the thing that fills my soul.  Experiencing it live makes me feel whole. It makes me feel light. I can only go so long without attending a live performance. It’s definitely medicine, a balm, a spiritual experience for me. I crave it. I crave that feeling of communing with others, experiencing the music together, yet also feeling it in deeply personal and individual ways.

My best memories involve musical experiences. There was something about being 19 years old, in a dank smelly bar, with hundreds of other people your age, dancing and singing at the top of your lungs, filled with the pure joy of being on the edge of life. Or wearing your gypsy outfit, dancing in the sunshine to a Dead cover band on a sprawling lawn at a fraternity Rites of Spring party or Folk Fest on a college quad.  Warm May sunshine, drinking bad beer in plastic cups, all your friends together.  Being young. Having fun. Not a care in the world.  I was lucky to have had such experiences. 

Folkfest on The Quad at HWS

Listening to music today is often done in isolation with AirPods, or on a laptop.  The connectedness to others is missing in the modern way we enjoy music.  Listening to music used to be tribal, primal.  You were one with the music, one with all the dancing bodies.  The music was in all of you and all of you were in the music.  Buying music was an experience.  Discovering new music, new bands, was revelatory. Talking about your favorite new group, or predicting what the song of the summer was going to be, buying your friend the hottest new album for their birthday party, were all integral experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s.

I miss the way things used to be.

I miss going to record stores and flipping through the bins, looking for particular albums or finding unexpected treasures. I can still see the giant posters of Rickie Lee Jones and the waitress from the cover of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America hanging in the front windows of Good Vibrations, a record store and head shop on Water Street. To a thirteen year old, that was the freaking coolest place on the planet. Record Giant at the D & F Plaza was another place frequented by teenagers. When my friends and I won a high school airband contest the prize was a gift certificate to Record Giant.  I am pretty sure I bought the Magical Mystery Tour album with my share of the winnings, along with some pins.  Remember wearing pins with band logos on them?  I know one of them was The Undertones.  Maybe The Clash was the other one.  

Twin Fair department store had a record department also.  I remember exchanging a Gordon Lightfoot record that my dad got me there for my 13th birthday. I really wanted the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack instead.  That particular album was destroyed when I was in an anti-disco phase a few years later. A boy I had a sort-of sort-of-not relationship with smashed it, with my permission and delight.  Damn I wish I had both of those albums now.

Murphy’s Five and Dime downtown was also a good source for buying vinyl.  I can picture the 45s and albums over against the wall close to the penny candy area.  How convenient was that? Grab a 45  of Nicollete Larson’s Gotta Lotta Love, Queen’s classic We Will  Rock You/We Are the Champions, or maybe Frampton Comes Alive or a Billy Joel album and an Astro Pop or Pop Rocks. Yum!

Album covers and jackets were treasure troves of reading material and artwork.  You’d read the lyrics and peruse the dedications, the names of the production engineers, the recording studios. They sounded exotic; Electric Lady, Cherokee, Muscle Shoals, and of course Abbey Road. You’d marvel at the pictures of the band members. It was an education. For a small town girl dreaming of bigger things, they conjured a sophisticated grown up world far, far away. We’d often take our records over to friends’ houses to share and compare them, pore over the album covers together, gossip, talk about boys and in general do teenage things. 

Who else foolishly got rid of all of their albums back in the early nineties when CDs became ubiquitous?  Wish I could have them all back again.  I’ve had to rebuy so many that were either sold at a yard sale or donated to the Salvation Army.  UGGHHH!!!

In the 70s and very early 80s, before MTV, there were regular broadcast television programs that showcased current and upcoming musicians and singers.  Shows such as Fridays, Don Kirschner’s Rock Concerts, The Midnight Special on weekend nights.  And on Saturday afternoons we watched Soul Train and American Bandstand.  And there was a time when local TV shows produced their own programs to promote local talent too. 

How about listening on the radio to the King Biscuit Flower Hour that would play entire albums or air whole live concerts?  We loved Block Party Weekends or Two-for Tuesdays on 97 Rock when Cindy Chan, the Bear Man, or Snortin’ Norton would play blocks of selected songs by a group. On Friday mornings the Fah King held court  and you could do a Primal Scream. You could call the station and request songs and make dedications. All of the really cool kids listened to Canadian radio stations like CFNY.  Anything Canadian back in the day was considered awesome, in the way awesome truly meant before it became over-used as a slang term for “cool’. Even AM radio was good when I was a kid.  I remember listening to CKLW from Detroit every New Year’s Eve when they had the countdown of the 100 best rock songs of all time.  Stairway to Heaven was in the #1 spot every year. It’s sad that radio is almost unlistenable these days. The impersonal pre-programming and sterility for lack of a better word, maybe corporatization is more accurate, has ruined it.  And satellite radio doesn’t even begin to take the place of the fun that listening to the radio used to be. Radio was king. And I miss it.