And It’s Always 1979
1979 is not simply a year, it’s a state of being, and I think anyone can understand and appreciate it even if they weren’t around to experience it. It has to do with flying colors and space invaders, rollercoasters and roller rinks, fireworks and crystal balls. Bright sunlight and scary masks. Time magazine and Mad magazine all jumbled up together. Steve Martin in a dirty bathrobe and Sigourney Weaver blowing the Alien away. 1979 is an essence, and you can bask in it anytime you wish.
Having said that, and at the slight risk of boomer-style “You guys really missed out” bullshit, I do feel just a little sad for those born after 1979 who were not able to experience ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” as nature intended: on commercial pop radio during the summer of 1979.
Don’t worry, though, you can listen to it right now, and the effect is basically the same. Besides, I was eight years old in 1979, so my ideas about it are almost certainly colored by the fuzzy glow of nostalgia and therefore probably shouldn’t be trusted. Case in point: In 1979 on the first day of school after summer vacation the very first thing my best friend Sam and I made sure to talk about, so enthusiastically it felt like we might burst, was that awesome new ELO song we’d been hearing all over the radio. It was as if some new hyper-charged entity had entered our orbit, colorful and exciting enough to rival Kiss or Star Wars. We stood apart from the class, looking out a window at the big wide world, and we exchanged our buzzy feelings about the song, and that’s the part I remember with the kind of glowing fondness that sometimes curdles when it’s explained out loud years later. Less readily remembered is how our teacher, no doubt, angrily (that teacher did everything angrily) demanded we get back to our desks and prepare for learning about multiplication tables and writing in cursive. I’m sure in the process that totally killed our whole day-glo eight-year old vibe, with the pointlessness of writing in cursive an added insult.
See, despite all our fond little memories, being eight years old actually sucks!
Nah, too harsh. Better simply say it’s overrated.
It might be. Nostalgia might be underrated, though. I sometimes suspect previous generations have been so damn smug about their own youthful experiences (not to pick on the Boomers, but yeah, sorta also to pick on them) that it ruined nostalgia for the rest of us and we’ve kind of taught ourselves to brush it off as an unproductive emotional illusion. Maybe it is, but maybe we just need to find a new word for a specific strain of nostalgia that might be truly useful in everyday life. Because if nostalgia’s an illusion it might also be something like a magic trick. Maybe we can actually pull 1979 out of a hat like a rabbit.
“Don’t Bring Me Down” is a good place to start; it’s probably the most 1979-ish of all 1979 songs. It is pure fun; relentlessly catchy and sleek, with a hint of sci-fi video game futurism that provokes a synesthetic sense of color and forward motion in whoever is listening to it. Maybe it could have been recorded or released a year or so on either side of 1979, simply judging by the sheer sound of the production. But it FEELS like 1979.
Mark that notion down as nostalgia if you like, I’m sure that factor is in play, but I also suspect the song sounds that way to the better portion of people who hear it. It’s such a bursting-at-the-seams cotton candy rush – no matter what year you were born or when you are listening the sound will be so keenly redolent of spinning carnival rides, glittering cartoon spaceships, Summer Nite trips to the mall. And when Jeff Lynne gets to the chorus (is there a chorus? The song is practically ALL chorus) and the “Bruce” part (Lynne has said he’s singing a made up word, “groos”, but we all know he’s actually singing “Bruce”, a near-hidden, hilarious nod to The Boss, right? Sure!) all of our inner eight-year-olds fall immediately into full-on laser show sugar-surge mode.
See, it can actually be 1979 right now! Adjust and attune your sensibilities a little. Simple.
So, fair warning, time is going to go a little off-kilter here, past and present tense are going to be difficult to distinguish. Everything is happening in the present tense, and that present is 1979, and it's also happening then, in 1979, it's also happening right now, decades later, in 1979. And it’ll be happening tomorrow, too, no doubt. You and I are eight years old, and graying adults, and everything in between. For now. Though truthfully that eight-year-old version of us seems to have things pretty centered, so maybe we should pay keen attention when that voice speaks. That voice is probably going to be a little overly credulous to some of our high-horse adult mindsets, but let’s roll with it. We’re already at sea in the timestream, we have nothing to lose.
So if that younger voice wants to go to the movies, go skating, go running in the park, go look at the stars at night, then let's do it. That voice is being carried along anyway by all those ceaselessly thumping beats and wash-of-color synth sounds, exemplified by “Don’t Bring Me Down” and so many other pop radio hits that collectively form such a vibrantly shining fantasy world within this supposedly real one that those two realms become hard to distinguish. Who wants to try, anyway?
The eight-year-old is very much in favor of other worlds and vivid dreamscapes and Rock and Roll Fantasies. It’s part of a natural tendency to make everything cinematic, widescreen, colorful, a tendency that’s in the air in 1979. It’s right there in the title of a hit Bad Company song, plain as day; “Rock and Roll Fantasy”. That song appears as a kind of fanfare under 1979’s opening credits, with singer Paul Rodgers adopting the voice of a herald letting the township know, Paul Revere style, that some unknown presence has appeared on the horizon: “1979 is coming! 1979 is coming!”
The first line is “Here come the jesters!” and the kid listener thinks Jesters? Where are they coming from? What are they gonna do when they get here? Jesters are kind of like clowns, right? Aren’t they usually part of a kingdom, where there’s a king and a queen and knights and stuff? Or are they like those playing-card guys in Alice’s Wonderland? I picture them rolling on the ground, somersaulting into the picture, jumping to their feet with lances drawn. Why they’re carrying weaponry I have no idea, but as a result of all this speculation the song seems like a vaguely surreal, potentially dark-hued thing. There’s nothing particularly psychedelic or flashy about the sound or the production, it’s pretty standard radio rock, yet my young brain nonetheless interprets it as a swirling cartoon fantasia, and once that mold is set it stays that way.
So “Rock and Roll Fantasy” will always sound like a call-to-arms, or a Grand Opening of the giant golden gates of summer. Other seasons will happen in 1979, but Summer would seem to be the operative one, the important one, the one that lights all the pathways.
Where to? Well, you know, we’ll go to the mall, where every store is playing “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth Wind and Fire. Maybe the ballpark, where some clever person in the sound booth will play Foreigner’s “Head Games” when the pitcher goes up and in. Maybe we’ll just drive down the strip, where every passing car is blaring Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ With Disaster”. And everywhere we go, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, we will hear Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”.
Of 1978 provenance, and actually written and recorded years earlier, “Heart of Glass” reaches peak radio saturation in 1979. The track is all spinning mirror-ball groove, with Debbie Harry’s sultry matter-of-fact delivery a coolly irresistible attention-getter. That vocal seduces millions, including the eight-year-old who is otherwise simply thrilled to hear the word “ass” on the radio. It sets the stage for Blondie’s subsequent full-on world domination. The band (and it is a band, the label’s publicity department attempts to make clear, the slogan “BLONDIE IS A GROUP” appears on posters and buttons everywhere) had attempted to record the song numerous times, leaning over and over again into a reggae rhythm that non-started like a sputtering car engine, until finally they arrived at the slickly grooving disco beat that carried the song over the top.
Let’s call that sound not merely a beat, but The Beat. The Beat is non-stop, ever-present in 1979. So much so that Chic’s “Good Times” becomes the new National Anthem. There’s so much open space in the sound, anyone can find a place in it, and yet there’s so much going on; bassist Bernard Edwards locking in with drummer Tony Thompson on a groove that everlasts, Nile Rodgers’ chicken-scratching guitar riding that groove hard, an army of decorative synths, and singers chanting the title over and over again. And all of it happens on roller skates. The singers say so! They’re probably on skates as they’re singing it, which is pretty impressive if you think about it.
Chic had all that rhythm and nowhere to put it but everywhere. How could America resist?
Some voice from a place other than 1979 can’t keep its mouth shut, asking Are these times really the good times? The kid can’t really be bothered: I dunno, I guess so. But really, are they? This is where nostalgia can be troublesome – we only remember the good times and we leave out everything else. It's a dangerous thing. Nothing going on in the world at large in 1979 would really hint at any overall sense of socio-political prosperity, in fact things are pretty bleak on several levels.
But while the song is playing, who cares? That’s part of the reason why the song is such a big hit. If we can’t actually live in the good times, experience the high, free life, we can at least immerse in the fantasy for three-and-a-half minute bursts. “Good Times” works like an incantation, a magic spell, and everyone who hears it has suddenly adapted a new state of mind, is living the sporting life, cutting the rug, and did we mention the part about roller skates? (Roller skates!)
What constitutes good times? At age eight I used to see commercials for yuppie restaurants (they weren’t called that then, but they would be soon, and time is irrelevant here anyway), places that looked to me like some kind of more advanced, adult version of Burger King or Taco Bell – cleaner, sleeker, offering food that might be called “cuisine” rather than the usual (and far-preferred by me) burgers’n’fries. The clips always featured a bunch of good-looking young adults laughing and drinking together, and I imagined they were also probably involved in some kind of hi-jinks that were too adult for me to understand, and I was tentatively curious about whatever it was. Those good times in those commercials felt extremely good, so good they were almost sinister. I think I felt the same way about Chic’s “Good Times”, a feeling that seemed to be more or less contained within the little two-or three-note piano part that keeps repeating between each line of the song. It's so svelte, so casual and cool, like a nice dress shirt that’s open a little at the collar, just before the dance at the wedding.
So, again, the eight-year-old says roll with it. Because just as that beat is fading, pretty soon a new, not so dissimilar one emerges, then everything is suddenly bright lights, big city, a blur of activity in the street, and the sidewalk lights are both spotlight and life-giving force. Also it’s June and there’s no school tomorrow and maybe there’ll be fireworks soon. This beat is fading up, slowly, assuredly, it’s easy to hear – Chic have already primed the rhythmic well – but this one has a hard, slinking feel, it’s the sound of boots on pavement. Then there’s a flash of sequins to match the starlit sky and Donna Summer is in full feral heat. Line up for consideration or get out of the way.
Donna Summer ruled over not just her namesake season – though, yeah, she ruled that one with extreme dominance – but all of 1979, very much like the royalty invoked by the “Queen of Disco” tag the media gave her. That title is, of course, too reductive, and all a person has to do is listen to the 2-LP set Bad Girls to experience the full range of her powers.
It starts with twin hits - two singles, both with two-word titles and the same smoking beat. The guitar-driven “Hot Stuff” is hypercharged and heavy, Giorgio Moroder’s patented spiraling synth laying down the nightwalk path over which Summer prowls. It does not sound as if she is merely playing a role – she is decidedly a woman determined. It is difficult to imagine that the person singing this song doesn’t end up getting what she craves, and the listener feels a little of that lustful triumph second-hand, even if the listener is a kid who really has no idea what’s really going on and is just going with the groove.
The “Bad Girls” groove is a little looser, a little more open, taking time to look around and note the details; the sequined high-heel boots and feather boas, the disparate and desperate emotions on the faces of the girls in the street, background singers lurking like extras in the wings as they imitate the sound of passing cars. The transition between “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls” (and can’t you hear those songs just by reading the titles?) at the top of side one of the LP is subtly seductive – one relentless thump morphing into another relentless thump. Smooth like one nice dream into another.
There’s whole endlessly spinning worlds in there, and they play out across the rest of Bad Girls. Four sides of hard beats, smoking guitars, synth-gilded rhythms, twilight ballads, all of it wrapped in a shiny blue gatefold cover that hints at grand concept; the inside sleeve features Summer and entourage dressed as the title characters, along with cops and winos and producer Moroder himself decked out in pimp finery. Moving from the scene-setting “Hot Stuff” through to the goodbye wave to all the “Sunset People”, visualized like silhouettes as the camera pulls back to catch the full fading LA skyline, Bad Girls feels like a movie or a musical with characters and a plot and all kinds of emotional shifts – one night in a lifetime, several nights in a lifetime, dim all the lights ‘cos tonight it’s all the way. Yes it is, and “Dim All the Lights” is the personal favorite, for its knockabout groove but especially for its chorus, forever unwinding in a gorgeous descending arc, floating out into the ether and finding some other realm that looks a lot like ours, only with even more dancing and glitter and soft light and general abandonment.
Then move on through to the similarly majestic, gospel-inflected “My Baby Understands”. Like the rest of the album it rocks hard, it ballads hard, it’s both icy and hot, and Summer sings it like she may never get another chance to express the feeling she so desperately needs to express. Both “Dim All the Lights” and “My Baby Understands” are credited solely to Summer, solo songwriting efforts sent out to meet a whole world that wanted to believe that Disco artists were mere pawns in the hands of producers and managers and media flackeys. That misconception was part of a bigger poison that infected even baseball - Comiskey Park famously held Disco Demolition night that summer, a disastrous event too sad and funny and fascinating to delve into right now, look it up - not to mention my own favorite TV show in 1979, WKRP in Cincinnati, where my favorite character, burnout disc jockey Dr. Johnny Fever, regularly made his antipathy towards disco apparent.
“Disco Sucks” is a rallying cry for those put off by The Beat. Luckily when that movement happened I was too young to take a side. I liked a little bit of everything. There were aspects of disco I loved, and some that I thought were kind of silly. I felt the same way about rock and country. All of it. Isn’t it easy enough to simply like the stuff you like and ignore the stuff you don’t?
One of my favorite things at age eight was Mad magazine, which provided some welcome perspective with regard to the vagaries of popularity and taste. Mad made fun of everything, punk and disco included. In the late seventies Mad printed a poster that I put on my wall, a Don Martin illustration in which music figures like John Denver and Elton John and Patti Smith, among others, coexisted in equally silly splendor. If Mad taught me anything, it's that culture can be great and stupid at the same time, distinctions between high and low all but meaningless. For instance if 1979 cinematic “high” culture is represented by Oscar movies like Kramer vs. Kramer or arthouse stuff like The Tin Drum or Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and “low” culture is The Jerk and Meatballs and The Muppet Movie (which admittedly maybe shouldn’t count in the high/low sweepstakes, given that it’s aimed at kids, and maybe exemplifies both ends of the spectrum anyway, in that it features both an uproariously ridiculous scene in which a raving, googly-eyed Animal grows Godzilla-size in order to frighten the bad guys away and a scene in which Dr. Teeth’s band makes the very meta move of figuring out their own heroic place in the story by reading ahead in the script, a highbrow approach if there ever was one) I think I’d probably still take Steve Martin and Kermit the Frog about 90% of the time.
But we can enjoy both extremes, right? We can also ignore both. It’s a false proposition, we don’t have to make a choice at all, even though the arbiters of culture and society itself always seem to at least imply as much, if not outright demand it. Screw ‘em. The Inner Voice of 1979 says you can enjoy what you like. But keep searching. You’ll find stuff to like either way.
And at eight years of age I assuredly and absolutely know that I like Kiss, no searching necessary. They are the dreamworld I’ve happily claimed residence in for the last couple of years and in 1979 they hit big with the rocking mirror-ball anthem “I Was Made For Loving You”. The band are making a semi-“comeback” after a break from touring and the disastrous simultaneous release of the four members’ solo albums. They’ve chosen to come back wearing the most garishly colored costumes they could find, with vividly-bright superhero-colored capes and robes decorating the usual silver-studded black stage gear.
And I absolutely LOVE it. Eat it up. Thrill to it. Ride it like a ride at the fair. Almost literally, actually.
The county fair has a ride called the Himalaya, basically a mini-rollercoaster that goes round and round in a circle, rising here and dipping there, speeding up and slowing down at intervals carefully calibrated for maximum thrills. The ride is surrounded by a painted backdrop with an Arctic Winter dogsled motif, a nicely wishful antidote to the cruelly-hot summer weather. A live DJ amps up the crowd both between and during rides, ominously bass-y voice egging on those who dare to brave the rapid waves of the HIM-UH-LAY-UHHH.
Tunes pump out of enormous speakers, underscoring the sense of breathless motion. The new Kiss single is a perfect fit there, matching the ride with its wide circular rhythms and peak-and-valley disco momentum, Paul Stanley quieting to a pronounced hush during the “tonight-I’m-gonna-give-it-all-to-you” verses before exploding into the resoundingly euphoric chorus, during which the ride invariably speeds up.
Upon arrival at the fairgrounds my friends and I head straight to the Himalaya first thing, feverishly hoping that we’ll hear “I Was Made For Loving You”, and we are never disappointed. The DJ seems to play that Kiss hit back-to-back on an alternating endless loop with The Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” another song me and my little friends eat up like fresh taco-flavored Doritos. Maybe every now and then the DJ will throw in a change-up; “Don’t Bring Me Down”, say, or maybe “Hot Stuff”.
Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll play Amii Stewart’s stomping hit version of Eddie Floyd’s 1966 hit “Knock on Wood”. That Stax soul classic is a whole new thing in its 1979 iteration - it sounds as if it’s been put through a Kaleidoscoping Machine, which is a thing that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist, but nevertheless might be the only way to explain the shiny, shifty, 3-D effect Stewart and producer Barry Leng got when they recorded it. It moves like a sly and sleekly powerful machine, Floyd’s lanky groove replaced by a thundering electrified disco gallop, with shards of prismatic light and color flying off in every direction in the form of blaring horns and percussive effects, over which Stewart belts the lyrics with something like abandon and seriously urgent purpose.
(Though in an amusing side note Stewart apparently didn’t much care for the song; rather than the blatantly rhythm-centric nature of her hit she preferred music with more of an emphasis on melody.) (In a less amusing side note, the hit version of this song is apparently not available to stream officially, so please don’t go looking for it there - inferior remakes are all you’ll find. Seek out a used record. If you do that you’ll also find an amazing cover on which Amii Stewart appears as a futuristic Warrior Dance Queen, decked out in fabulous golden space-age headdress and gown, ready to play a part in some unnamed sci-fi movie that eight-year-old me desperately wants to see.)
The nature of whatever urgency is going on in Amii Stewart’s “Knock On Woood” is of course beyond the comprehension of my young brain, I just know that when those background singers come in chanting the “bayyybeh betta KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK on wood!” chorus it seems tailor-made for playground swingset singalongs. Or for spinning around in circles at crazy speeds.
So does another big radio hit that the Himalaya DJ might very well run into the ground; Cheap Trick’s live version of “I Want You to Want Me”. Though it shares ubiquitous airtime with Stewart’s “Knock On Wood”, “I Want You to Want Me” is less an expression of urgency than pure dreamy adolescent neediness. Cheap Trick have always been good for that kind of thing. And as if to emphasize that point, the lead single and title track from their next album after the “I Want You To Want Me” breakthrough happens to be “Dream Police”, an ELO-ish ode to scary nocturnal visions and creeping paranoia that somehow manages to convey nothing but giddy excitement. “Dream Police” is a synthy heavy-pop candy-rock smash that appears as if right on cue in the middle of back-to-school doldrums, adding some much-needed vibrance and crazy color to those dull school days.
Cheap Trick are famous enough that they appear on the cover of both Creem and Rolling Stone, but there’s assuredly something a little more Mad magazine about them, a sharp sense of the absurd that starts with the pointed contrast between the two sharply-dressed good-looking guys in the band and the loose-tie goofiness of the other two. That feeling for the comic and ridiculous aligns them also with the Muppets, whose show is a big syndicated hit, adored by millions, and on whose set the gloriously mustached drummer Bun E. Carlos could wander without any fuzz-faced creature so much as blinking.
Seriously, anyone can see how it would be pretty easy for a kid to make the transition from Muppet fandom to Cheap Trick Fandom. Just look at the cover of Dream Police, where the band appear in unrepentantly silly mode, acting out a sci-fi sitcom version of the title track, in space-age uniforms, armed with Mr. Sandman Zap Guns. The eight year-old brain, especially one already pretty fascinated with monsters and aliens and large furry creatures, could hardly be expected to resist.
Very subtly, though, that zany sci-fi impulse, along with all of the attendant paranoias and dark possibilities at work in any typical paperback sci-fi novel, will start to seep into the music. All of it. Which means it will also seep into everyday life, a surreal undercurrent that rises and recedes with oddly benign unpredictably and follows wherever we go, adding strange layers, a light dusting, of flash and flair and cautious excitability. It all seems to come together to form some new, previously unknown alchemical energy, one where nonstop fun and weird nervousness constitute a fresh, healthy way of experiencing life.
If you could contain that feeling, it might prove useful. In Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi novel Ubik, the title refers to an aerosol spray that can be used to reverse the deterioration that comes with aging. With that in mind, and given the idea that maybe 1979 never really ended, that maybe strains of it still linger in our atmosphere, always hanging in the air like mist, might it also be possible that it could be contained in a can and used like air freshener or spray paint?
Life turning colorless and cold? Try 1979!
We can get that effect fairly easily. So many of these songs have a built-in neon glow about them, consider the futuristic shimmer that underpins “Don’t Bring Me Down”, the flashing video game lights of “Dream Police”, the electric current synths running through all those Donna Summer songs. What is that quality, exactly?
Let’s call it The Gleam, a counterpart agent working in conjunction with The Beat to get the kind of 1979 essence that even works its mysterious magic into hard rock bands like Bad Company and Van Halen, whose “Dance the Night Away” is an emblematic illustration of the symbiosis – light and heavy, wild and smooth, in constant raucous motion but at no loss for joyous symmetry, the catch in David Lee Roth’s voice when he shouts “Come on!” just before the chorus acting as a fulcrum around which all of the stars in the night sky glimmer and whirl like dervishes.
So, yeah, that’s all that’s necessary in order to get that 1979 aerosol Ubik effect; just try playing any three or four of these songs in a row, maybe try “Dance the Night Away” into “Hot Stuff” into “Dream Police” into “Heart of Glass”, and see if the resulting combination of Beat and Gleam isn’t a little like spirit-reviving graffiti sprayed across the mind’s eye.
There is a lot to spray over in 1979, just check Time magazine, where all the heavy issues of the day are right there on the cover; Three Mile Island, Iranian Revolution, the Oil Crisis, along with all of the major players, including Jimmy Carter and Ayatollah Khomeini and Margaret Thatcher. Those pivotal decision-makers share common space with entertainers Robin Williams and Woody Allen and Diane Lane, all of whom also appear on Time’s cover as if in some kind of newsmedia display of karmic relief. It’s all so complicated, no wonder I turn to Mad magazine, with its satirizations and loving/mocking parodies of all of the above, and the Muppets, who appear in board games and on records and on notebook covers in addition to their TV show and big hit movie, all of it functional as a kind of repeat-use escape hatch from real-world troubles.
Peculiar thing that the Muppets and Mad Magazine have in common: they both make a big deal about how bad they are. Bad, as in not particularly smart or together. Part of the Muppets’ TV shtick is that their show-within-a-show regularly devolves into a chaotic and unprofessional shambles. Main characters include Statler and Waldorf, a couple of ornery, sarcastic coots whose sole purpose is to heckle the hapless onstage proceedings. Mad has a staff that it refers to as “the usual gang of idiots,” along with the gleefully mindless coverboy/mascot Alfred E. Neuman, whose 1979 exploits include doing a handstand in a burning building next to a fire extinguisher bearing a sign that reads “In case of fire turn upside down.”
(One wonders here if 1979 is priming a whole generation of children to grow up into a universe where “loser” is, if not a badge of honor, at least a sign of the shoulder-shrugging slackerdom times. Maybe we’ll call those times “The Nineties”.)
Pop music has a similar streak of hangdog self-deprecation going on. Little River Band’s current radio hit is a song called “Lonesome Loser”, a surprisingly spry, catchy little tune that my young psyche interprets as the Marching Anthem of one of those jesters from Bad Company’s Rock and Roll Fantasy, though it’s really just an Everyguy lament about being unlucky in love. That same theme is further explored in Robert John’s chart-topping piano ballad “Sad Eyes”, with John delivering a falsetto lead vocal that feels like a peculiar doo-wop novelty, though few can deny the raw emotion in the chorus when it goes sweeping upwards in a gospel-hued arc, John begging his lover to turn the other way so he doesn’t have to see the tears – it has such a sweet ache to it, like a hangover from cheap cherry wine. These songs constitute a detour, a long-way-home backroads option to The Beat and Gleam of 1979, cool changes of pace amid the summer heat.
That heat can be oppressive, and we’ll all look for ways to escape it, some extreme to escape the extremes. Like maybe an air-conditioned movie theater, where that shimmering sci-fi quality that permeates so much of 1979 has morphed into something genuinely terrifying in the form of a movie about a (literally) acid-tongued alien stowing away on a spaceship, killing off its passengers one by one in gruesome fashion. Everywhere people are talking about a scene where the monster, having surreptitiously implanted itself in the body of one crew member, comes bursting forth from said crew member’s chest in an explosion of gore and gristle. At school we’ve all heard about that scene and we all talk about it and giggle nervously, though truthfully we’re also pretty grossed out and horrified. And, of course, we’re also helplessly intrigued by the whole idea.
Nothing on the radio can come close to that kind of extreme. Though Fleetwood Mac will do their daring best in early autumn when they release the bizarre, unnerving “Tusk” as the first single from their followup to the mega-selling Rumours. I don’t really know too much about Fleetwood Mac at age 8, but I understand that they are very popular and it is impossible to miss the bewildered reaction people seem to have to this single, as if it is some kind of affront or outright challenge to common decency. “Tusk” is an odd thing, for sure. The vocal is whispered, layered, fuzzy, ghost-world radio static. The beat is tribal and primitive, the sound of some dark ceremony or invocation. There’s weird laughter, found sounds, a marching band, and none of it sounds like anything else you’ve ever heard and yet somehow it sounds perfectly at home next to Blondie and Chic. We all get used to it, even come to admire it, though we don’t often end up humming it to ourselves involuntarily the same way we do “Lonesome Loser”.
It’s an anomaly, anyway. Mostly when 1979 offers up a change-of-pace to the beatgleam starlight dreams that otherwise dominate, it falls into a category many levels removed from fright or horror and lands somewhere in the realm of melancholy. Song after radio song evokes disillusionment, confusion, resigned sadness, a sense of “Is that all there is?”. Little River Band’s “Cool Change” and Robert John’s “Sad Eyes” and Styx’s “Babe” all fall in lockstep here but at a certain point the songs one after another begin to blend together, all piano hooks and high-pitched voices singing choruses about everyday malaise and parting’s sweet sorrow.
Within the haze of all this repetition, as one listens throughout the course of 1979, one might easily come to believe that all of these songs are in actuality composed and performed by Supertramp. They aren’t, but the feeling that they are can be traced to the ubiquity of a trio of hit singles from Supertramp’s ginormous hit album Breakfast In America: “The Logical Song”, “Goodbye Stranger”, and “Take the Long Way Home”, each released at intervals of three-four months, spaced out across 1979 in such a way that means Supertramp cover the year wall-to-wall.
Each of these songs, in keeping with the general 1979 vibe, is a sprightly, colorful thing, containing so many appealing melodies and irresistible musical hooks that it’s easy to miss the unease that percolates within. But the emotional hues at work in each of these radio hits is actually fairly complex stuff, sobering even, at least compared to our perception of pop radio as a place of superfluous escapism. These songs are about people who are caught in a world that they no longer understand, they’re looking in a mirror to see a face that they no longer recognize, and they are utterly confused by all of it.
“The Logical Song” has singer Roger Hodgson looking back on the freedoms and frivolities of childhood and wondering why everything in adult life makes him feel like he’s experiencing the existential equivalent of a cold shower. When all around the airwaves are good times and dream police and bad girls stomping in platforms down the avenue, Hodgson’s plea that someone “Please tell me who I am” is a disconcerting request, and the perky keyboard pattern only underlines the strangeness.
“Goodbye Stranger” is a fleeting-love-on-the-road “must be moving on” type of song, a tired subject that singer Rick Davies somehow manages to make engaging, going to great repetitive lengths as he declares gruffly – Hodgson joining on the chorus for a contrasting high part – how he feels no sorrow or shame as he says goodbye to Mary and Jane. But he protests too much, the sense of longing and loss is apparent; he’s a person at sea without an anchor. Like most of us at one point or another. When WKRP needs a song to reflect a moment of one character’s reckoning with the uninspiring results of their own choices, “Goodbye Stranger” fits the bill perfectly.
Melancholy comes right to the fore on “Take the Long Way Home”. Supertramp had taken cold hard reality into account on “Logical Song”, looking it right in the eye and saying, implicitly, “Fuck off.” By the time of “Take the Long Way Home” a kind of resigned weariness has set in, the latent sadness of all those goodbyes exchanged with strangers coming home to roost. The opening far-away harmonica fade-in signals the arrival of autumn, coming to morph 1979’s summer dreamz into a panoply of decidedly darker-hued fall colors. Leaves trailing your backstep on the long walk to a place that may not feel so much like home anymore.
Some voice – eight years old? Fiftysomething? The Spirit of 1979 itself? – comes along and whispers softly, a seductive voice in the ear decrying all of that downbeat nonsense as a mirage, an empty illusion and in any event a thing that even if it is real doesn’t have to be faced up to right this very minute. Does it?
Let’s put it off as long as we can.
That voice could belong to Rickie Lee Jones, who comes sauntering into the 1979 picture singing a song about the first flush of romantic enchantment, the kind that seems like it might last forever, a cure for anybody’s malaise. Taking the long way had been business as usual for Supertramp, they had years of releases and touring behind them, a long steady climb to their 1979 ascent to the top of the Billboard album charts. Rickie Lee Jones by way of contrast gives the impression of overnight sensation, though she had experienced years of hard times and hard traveling before the big music-biz break. Those years lend emotional weight to the after hours character studies and one-streetlight small-town sketches that constitute her self-titled debut album. That album, propelled by the top-ten success of the single “Chuck E’s in Love” is a big hit, and suddenly Rickie Lee Jones is everywhere. Just as suddenly 1979’s rock and roll fantasy transforms into a Broadway beat-jazz Coolsville.
“Chuck E’s in Love” has a loose, loping, acoustic-driven rhythm that lays the bedrock for Jones’ slurry, down-in-the-groove delivery. It’s a semi-story-song about a friend who has a mysterious new lover, and it deftly sweeps into its grooves both the elation of new-found love and the calm joy of standing around on the corner talking about it with your friends. The vibe is one of generosity and innocent playfulness. It’s a contagious feeling, the world picks up on it and Rickie Lee Jones, in beret and thrift store finery, can be found in 1979 slinking about like a West Side Story extra on a dimly-lit (by, appropriately, a single streetlamp) Saturday Night Live stage and appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone. Even the follow-up single goes top 40.
That followup is “Young Blood”, another upbeat nighttime streetlife scene, maybe a spirit-in-arms companion to Donna Summer’s similar street scenes of glowing Sunset People and bad girls out for kicks or cash. “Young Blood”, however, seems to disappear in the mist of subsequent pop history somehow, perhaps overshadowed by its better-remembered predecessor. It’s a victim of pop culture circumstance in much the same way that two radio hits by Sister Sledge, “Lost in Music” and “He's the Greatest Dancer”, awesome tracks both, and both Billboard chart hits, will be overshadowed in the zeitgeist equivalent of a solar eclipse by another far more famous Sister Sledge hit.
“He’s the Greatest Dancer” has the greatest hook; “Oh what wow - he’s the greatest dancer!” Only my eight year-old ears mishear the very emblematic-of-1979 non sequitur “Oh what wow” as “I wonder why” which makes it seem like the singer is wondering why the object of the accolade is so good at dancing. I dunno, I mean, maybe he practices a lot?
“Lost in Music” is an ode to merging with the divinity of sound, a notion that is altogether a natural one for Sister Sledge’s producers, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, who bring to Sister Sledge’s music the same elegantly skittering rhythm and suave polish that makes “Good Times” an anthem. “Lost in Music” is a Chic vibe that bleeds into religious fervor, Edwards’ bass thumping so gracefully and seductively it’s no wonder the singer leaves behind work and responsibility in favor of chasing the sound.
These songs are decidedly badass, but “We Are Family” strikes a different kind of chord in everyone who hears it. It is so instantly memorable, made up of nothing but hooks; the descending three-note piano bit that floats throughout, the chanted title chorus that leads off the song in the way a verse normally would. And it is so relatable, light as air, full of the joy of togetherness.
That latter trait is surely what made “We Are Family” the theme song for the World Series-winning Pittsburgh Pirates. Let’s dwell on those Pirates for a bit, because they are a team that is so emblematic of the kind of wild, optimistic color and cohesion that could only have happened in 1979. In the same way that “We Are Family” is made up of nothing but hooks, the ‘79 pirates are made up entirely of joyous personality. Offensive forces like rifle-armed right fielder Dave Parker, whose imposing physique and ability to destroy baseballs earn him the nickname “Cobra”, or the not-so-large, exquisitely mustached infielder Phil Garner, whose fiery demeanor and ability to play any position around the infield makes him the kind of player for whom the term “scrappy” seems invented. On the pitching side there is the rubber-armed lefty John Candelaria, whose name, wonderfully, seems to actually describe the way he pitches, a mixture of sweetly fine-tuned elegance and pure fun. The perpetually overlooked, exquisitely-bearded Bert Blyleven has maybe the best curveball of his generation, a pitch that swoops deceptively sideways and down in an impossible arc, something like a magic trick. But my absolute favorite is relief pitcher Kent Tekulve, whose lanky and thick glasses make him resemble some combination of Ichabod Crane and your Calculus professor, but whose nearly-underhand side-arm delivery is almost as unhittable as it is entertaining to watch. Is his hand going to scrape the ground?
On paper and in real life these Pirates might appear a motley bunch, a potentially wayward gathering of old and young, soft-spoken and brash, flashy and workmanlike. Holding it all together with a genial ease that belies his position as Atlas lifting a baseball-shaped globe is veteran first baseman Willie Stargell. They call him “Pops”, and all summer and into autumn he manages to brew an intoxicating chemical stew of cohesion and pure chemistry that the entire team willingly and thrillingly partakes of. One of his signature leadership moves is handing out gold stars for particularly inspired or impactful on-field performances. The Pirates, already decked out in a dazzling mixture of gold-toned yellow and contrasting none-more-black, now have some additional flair; players’ hats just above the brim all throughout the summer will spill over with multiple gold stars, a galaxy of good cheer so contagious that anyone who watches them ends up rooting for them. (Except maybe fans of their World Series opponent the Baltimore Orioles, who are a uniquely 1979 sight to behold in and of themselves – a vision in black and orange, egged on by a hirsute cowboy-hatted gent who leads the home crowd in coordinated motivational chants – the Orioles are just as colorful and talented as the Pirates, and they prove it by pushing the Series to a full seven games before finally giving in, a sixth-inning Stargell home run is the killing blow.)
Like so much of the music from that era, the 1979 Pirates are not just a phenomenon of 1979. They drift in and out of time like galactic baseball spirits. In my most delirious dreamstates I like to imagine that the whole team is still out there, perpetually playing baseball on some kind of Field-of-Dreams diamond, ignoring the laws of space and time, Willie Stargell perpetually giving out gold stars, Tekulve still wearing those glasses, The Cobra still showing off his arm from right field, Bert Blyleven still hurling impossible curveballs. And every night after they’ve defeated whatever ghost team they happen to be playing they blare “We Are Family” so loud that the spirit neighbors complain.
The 1979 Pirates should have been on the cover of Rolling Stone. (Baseball players on an RS cover was not an unprecedented phenomenon – lovably eccentric Tigers rookie pitcher Mark Fidrych smiled broadly from a 1976 cover.) Maybe they were spoiled for choice as far as a representative player. Or maybe the 1979 landscape was over-stuffed with too many musical contenders. In any case, not only Rolling Stone but much of the music press passed over so many of the most successful 1979 musicians that one begins to wonder about the fabulous and fickle magic aura that constitutes star power. Rickie Lee Jones and Donna Summer and The Cars made covers, but Sister Sledge and Little River Band? Forget it. Supertramp? Nah. Millions of records sold but scarce publicity from within the fame machine. Were they too goofy, too proggy, too poppy, too ordinary?
Billboard, however, loved them all. The music biz trade bible definitely loved the multi-million-selling Journey, who’s “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’” is released in June, just in time for bored teenagers to blare it from car radios as they drive aimlessly and uproariously down the small-town strip. The song is pure schmaltz, and it is utterly irresistible. Over an insinuatingly slick and sleazy hard rock striptease beat (expertly executed by a band too often written off as faceless corporate rock by surly know-it-all teenagers and adults who never shook off that teenage tendency, some of whom may or may not go on to write about music on their own personal blogs, some of which may or may not include this one) singer Steve Perry laments his lost love and all of its lost promises of physical sensation. No token hinting around at childish lovelorn heartbreak, it is all about the lust. Perry shoots straight for the top and then he goes deliriously over it. His vocals are so carefully timed, moving seamlessly and suddenly from winsome to urgent, and the music is equally calibrated, building from that lonely matter-of-fact piano-trill at the beginning up through the desperate Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah Hey Jude chorus; it is almost impossible not to get caught up in the schlocky desperation of it all. There is a fine and finicky line between schmaltz and raw emotion. Maybe we find that line wherever we want, but “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’” erases it altogether in favor of pure GleamBeat™ feeling.
If Journey woo the masses with slickly-produced radio anthems, The Cars approach the mainstream middle from the opposite (if equally opportunistic) side. Coming together out of the Boston-based punk milieu, The Cars are clearly not punk; their songs are too poppy, their image too stylish. Punk is meant to be kind of scary, and The Cars are not even close to scary, they’re actually kind of lovably goofy. Their music, however, has a primitive cool catchiness and an almost glib, spiky undercurrent that aligns them in some vaguely spiritual way with punk, even though their songs are just as ready for the airwaves as anything by Journey or Little River Band or Chic. The Great Wise Men of the Music Biz come up with a term for artists who fit this particular not-quite-punk profile; they call it New Wave, a term designed and applied for the sole purpose of not frightening anyone away.
My older sister has both Cars records and I associate their sound with a burgeoning excitement about the opportunities that teenage life presents, all of which seem just beyond my comprehension. This feeling is magnified by the uneasy but beguiling feeling I get from Candy-O’s cover drawing of a red-headed woman sprawled across a car hood. As an eight-year-old lover of comic art and drawing in general I genuinely appreciate the artistic touch of the person who drew it – it’s signed “Vargas” in the corner, I’ll have to look for his other work – but I am not sure why I feel like my staring at it for too long might get me in trouble.
“Let’s Go” is the hit and it takes its place alongside “Don’t Bring Me Down” and “We Are Family” and “Dance the Night Away” and all the others as another irresistible and otherworldly slice of pop euphoria. Every sound is a hook and each one seems to emanate from any one of a whole slew of synthesizers. Ben Orr sings with the same offhand matter-of-factness that Debbie Harry wielded so convincingly on “Heart of Glass” and beneath him the band pounds and surges with just the right measure of loose tension. Steely and cool, sardonic and exuberant, “Let’s Go” is a Classic Rock song with space-age overtones - all of those crazy synth sounds collectively come to feel as though someone has thrown a bucketful of future all over you. “I like the nightlife baby!” Of course you do. Doesn’t everybody?
Well, most people do. Some people like to stay in and read. Some people like to study music in grotesque up-close detail, looking for reasons to praise, or, more likely, dismiss it altogether. Some people come to think of the New Wave sound as a contrived, facile marketing ploy, tantamount in its own way to the supposedly “empty” disco music that’s been dominating airwaves for years.
The differences between Punk and New Wave can be a blurry, nebulous thing. Some might be able to perceive and explain the minute details that separate them, though it’s an inherently subjective process. Many regardless will spend an inordinate amount of time and precious brain cells parsing the lines between all of the different factions and sub-factions of pop and hard rock and soul and punk and funk and disco.
But let it be said, loudly; 1979 doesn’t care about your dumb cultural divides. Go do your precious categorizing somewhere else. 1979 says GENRE IS OVER. At the very least it’s beside the point. This is a world where a Journey song is followed up by a Sister Sledge song is followed up by a Kiss song is followed up by a Cars song and nobody bats an eye, everybody just sings along.
Think of the 1979 pop music landscape as a kind of aural 31 Flavors, only it actually offers hundreds of flavors, and you want to taste them all, but you can only do one at a time. Time is weird that way, it forces us to do things in a particular order, when all we really wanna do is dance to every rhythm at once, or feel every emotion at once, or experience it all in some random order that only makes sense in retrospect, if we bother to look back and remember.
But what we will remember is not the specific order in which we felt the emotions, we don’t even remember each specific emotion in and of itself – what we remember is a smear of feeling, a whole new aura that didn’t exist before and doesn’t have a name. So we call it 1979.
If we are looking back at the exact chronological order of 1979 we’ll see that The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” entered the Billboard Hot 100 during the week of January 20, 1979, a fitting beginning that we only realize is a beginning when we look it up, because in the mind’s ear “What a Fool Believes” saturates the whole year and doesn’t seem to have had any beginning or ending. Similarly, the number one song on the chart during the final week of the year is “Please Don’t Go” by KC and the Sunshine Band, the very title of which indicates an ending, but the song itself lingers. It also turns back and talks to the songs that came before.
What might it say to “What a Fool Believes”? Maybe something like, wow, yeah, I totally get it, heartbreak is the worst. “What a Fool Believes” is another sprightly, upbeat piano-led tune in which a singer – in this case Michael McDonald, whose exquisitely gruff/smooth combo voice proves ideal for this hard-truth tune – laments the gap between the ideal and the reality that so often exists in our romantic lives. The song is in conversation with “Lonesome Loser” and all those hit Supertramp songs that will technically come later in the year. They’re like a group of confused souls at some 1979 cocktail party, huddled around together, forlornly discussing what went wrong.
The Doobies tune also nods in the direction of another 1979 benchmark of hilarious holy foolishness; Steve Martin’s hit movie The Jerk. One scene, a personal favorite among many, then and now, has Martin’s title character splashing around in a bathtub, gleefully singing a song called “I’m Picking Out a Thermos For You” to his lover, Bernadette Peters, oblivious to the fact that she is in the process of walking out on him. It’s the stuff these songs are made of. Hapless, blinded by love’s pitiless glare, playing the fool and perfectly fine with it.
The Doobie Brothers made their name singing upbeat, catchy songs whose tone usually steered towards celebratory or jubilant. Who knew it would take a tiny injection of melancholy to produce their biggest hit? Similarly, KC and the Sunshine Band were known for disco hits – doing dances, makin’ a little love, gettin’ down tonight. 1979 is full of that kind of thing, so what should KC and Band do but cloud up the Sunshine by releasing a ballad about utter heartbreak?
“Please Don’t Go” is a small masterpiece, summing up the devastation of expired romance with a synth line so poignant and catchy that it could repeat throughout the song and never become boring, which is exactly what happens, only with the twist that each verse accelerates in intensity, gaining an emotional momentum that leads to an almost ecstatic, magisterial fade. The singer is explaining his plight, measured at first, then building to a point where all he can do is repeat the title phrase over and over. It’s a soulful blend of drama and down-to-earth. I mean, there's some self-pity here, the singer is on his knees begging, but the fact that through the fog of sadness he can offer gratitude for simply having known and loved this person – “At least in my lifetime / I’ve had one dream come true” – produces, surely, at least, a miniature lump in the throat. It’s gorgeous.
The world thinks so, and it buys the song in droves. Everybody can relate. Right? In 1979 it seems the common ground is more common than it’s ever been or ever might be again, but that might be the optimistic view of a person who’s only existed in the world for eight years. Can everyone also relate to Mad Magazine and Muppets and mirror balls and neon lights and the confusion that comes with being so caught up in some lovelorn feeling that we have to ask the owner of the sad eyes to turn the other way? Maybe. Most people can, I guess. But let’s just say everyone, for the heck of it. It’s everyone! Everybody is singing these songs and these songs are singing through everybody. It’s a fun contagion.
Also, the reverse is true: These songs are singing you, they’re singing in your voice.
We don’t have a whole lot of control, we just live with things as they are, as best we can. We experience our joyous beginnings and our bittersweet endings, whether we notice them in real time or in retrospect. Nature is cyclical – day into night, wakefulness to sleep, noise into silence. So if “Please Don’t Go” is both a final song of 1979 and a song about saying goodbye, it’s appropriate. Everything fades. Doesn’t it?
Abrupt time shift here to near-modern day. (Don’t worry, we’ll go back again. We always do.)
It’s around, let’s say, 2016, and I’m sitting in a BBQ place eating lunch, listening to the piped-in music, which is a scattershot selection of songs from any and every era and genre. I’m feeling at a loss; a close friend has announced via social media that the cancer is terminal and the end is imminent. This person and I had known one another for decades, an enduring and invaluable relationship of impossible-to-measure depth and trust. The emotions stirred up by this dire news are, predictably, difficult to process.
All of this is swirling in my psyche when suddenly over the speaker system comes KC and the Sunshine Band singing “Please Don’t Go”. It is altogether inappropriate - “Please Don’t Go” is a pure break-up song, and break-ups, however arduous, are pretty small stakes compared to mortality. And it is almost comically on-the-nose; “Don’t go away, I’m begging you to stay.” Cancer tends not to listen to that kind of plea.
The songs, those 1979 songs, they are speaking in your voice, of course, and they’re also speaking in everyone else’s voice, and all of those voices are trying hard not to say goodbye. Like they just can’t bear it. Goodbye stranger, please don’t go. It is as if we are holding on to a reality that we know deep down does not, cannot, exist. No matter how hard we want to wish it into being. What a fool believes.
I remember it, though. 1979. Sure there were some weird sadnesses and confusions going on, but mostly what’s remembered is giddiness, euphoria. Maybe it’s the old story of the brain’s memory blender whipping all these eight-year-old impressions into frothy nostalgia. But damn if it isn’t the kind of sweet candy-colored nostalgia that anyone might be able to access and translate into a right-now modern day feeling that’s just as real and powerful as my maybe-made-up memory-feelings. Seriously, again, just play some of these songs all in a row and see if it doesn’t feel like a ride at the fair, full of neon and motion and the electric scent of cotton candy and corn dogs and horseshit. Even horseshit evokes joy when it’s attached to a fond memory.
It is very easy to gorge and overdose on that kind of thing, no doubt. It might all be a mirage. Roller rinks and laser shows, crystal balls and fairground rides. Sad romances, elusive dreams. All of it can wither, fade, go dreary in the blink of an eye.
But I can tell you with fierce certainty that all of that stuff – the euphoria, the vivid color, the wild dreaminess – or more accurately some small but powerful measure of it, a whiff, like smoke, came flowing delicately into my senses that day that I found out my friend was dying. Hearing “Please Don’t Go” out of nowhere in that little BBQ place worked for me on that day like a rescue mission.
Maybe it could have been one of any number of other songs. Maybe it could have been “Lost in Music” or “Long Way Home”. Hell, maybe even freaking “Dream Police” could’ve triggered it. Regardless, there was some kind of small comfort in the feeling, and that is no small thing.
When I was a kid my family and I would sometimes go out for walks around our neighborhood at night. We lived just outside the city limits, and I’d look at the massive expanse of stars and the way they reflected eerie blue light on the streets and fields surrounding us. It felt fairly wondrous. During 1979 all of these songs would have been reverberating around in my 8-year-old psyche while we were out there, so a part of me still associates them with the road and the expanse and the trees and the strange isolation of small town life. Blue light, meet “Dim All the Lights”. Sometimes when I’ve thought about those walks in the years since then they seem like a far away, distant thing, like maybe I imagined them, like it would be impossible to experience the same kind of thing now.
That isn’t true, though. The body is different and the mindset is different but those same stars that were up there then, in 1979, they’re still out there right now. Most of ‘em, anyway. Likewise, all those songs are still there to be listened to. Obviously.
So take all your haughty, dismissive ideas about nostalgia, its meaning and utility (or lack of) and shove it. Music and memory and associations are a complicated web, just like everything else that goes on in our fragile and labyrinthine psyches. Nostalgia has its limitations for sure, but it can have its beneficial effects, too.
So if 1979 is a state of mind, a way of looking at things, it might also be a state of being, a temperament, a layer of emotional make-up that we can draw on if we need to. We go through all of our little joys and tribulations, our strange convulsions and transformations. It happens in alternating intervals of disconcertingly slow and fast motion, but it all happens in a way that produces some collective smear of feeling that we can draw on later. It happens at every stage, every age, even age eight, when everywhere there are roller coasters and fireworks and beaches and scary-but-fun masks. Aliens and Steve Martin. We lived in that place once, and we still get to live there, sometimes.
Hopefully.
It’s that damn voice again, the one that won’t shut up, the one from somewhere outside the 1979 realm. It asks this: Can the way an eight-year old perceives the world, primarily through the prism of commercial Top 40 radio in 1979, really provide some kind of ground to stand on, some kind of medicine or balm? Really?
I think so, but, you know, just for backup I’m gonna go ask Donna Summer. Her spirit. Hopefully I’ll get an approving nod.
If not, I’ll ask Jeff Lynne.
Debbie Harry?
Kent Tekulve?
Anyone?
David Lee Roth answers, in typically flamboyant style. Affirmatively, emphatically.
Dance the night away!
