When I was 6, the 70s were ending, and so, I thought, was the world. The stories about the hostages in Iran were ever present, delivered elegantly by the polite, Canadian Peter Jennings in my house every evening. There were 52 Americans. I had learned to count that far. On my way to preschool at the Jewish Community Center in Dallas was a golf course once owned by my grandfather, now by Ross Perot—guess who got the short end of that stick?—and the days of the crisis were recounted in numbers outside the property, eventually up to 444, beyond my counting skills. Once, when I saw footage of the UN on the news, I thought those diplomats were hostages. They were wearing suits and sitting behind desks. What torture!
But there was one salient piece of information that reached my still forming brain, delivered by the songs pouring out of the radio. The Classic Rock format would be introduced in 1980, and it was in that decade that all the same songs would reach everyone I knew, whether they liked it or not, like totalitarian state propaganda. Meet someone who was young between 1980 and 1990, sentient and sitting in a car in America, and, more than likely, they knew the same songs. Bob Seger, John Cougar Mellencamp and The Eagles would become part of your life, and there was nothing you could do about it. Franz Kafka, in “Children on a Country Road,” was writing at the beginning of the 20th century and already knew the feeling.
One of us began to sing a popular catch, but we all felt like singing. We sang much faster than the train was going, we waved our arms because our voices were not enough, our voices rushed together in an avalanche of sound that did us good. When one joins in song with others it is like being drawn in by a fish hook.
Those kids on the train were around my age in 1979, right before the Classic Rock fish hook reeled us in, and it was my last year of preschool at the JCC; Kindergarten was sort of like senior year. When I was learning to count, I heard “Once, twice, three times… a lady,” and learned that there was a reward at the end. Pretty good. There was a book of rhymes by A.A. Milne in the house called Now We Are Six. And now we are. Now is when things are getting serious. And that’s when the signs started coming in. They first came on a record, owned by my older brother, called Rock 80, on K-Tel, which arrived in the mail as if delivered by Nostradamus. How can anyone know what 1980 will sound like in 1979? The album was filled with unsolvable mysteries. The numinous vibrato of Chrissie Hynde first entered my consciousness, singing of having “brass in pocket,” whatever that meant. I heard a couple of girls at a roller rink saying, “Mama said that’s a nasty song,” and I thought—What? How? Pretenders, indeed. “Pop Musik” by M, introduced me to early rap, or at least a default when a singer couldn’t sing, like Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. My dizzying love affair with Debbie Harry was in full bloom with two Blondie gems-- “Call Me” and “One Way or Another,” and the latter sounded like a hot blonde woman in her 30s tickling a besotted 6-year-old-boy. (“I’m gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha…”) I moved the needle on that one over and over and repeated the fantasy ad infinitum. Joe Jackson and Nick Lowe first entered my brain. “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” was about straight-up jealousy, and Lowe’s song, “Cruel to be Kind,” was about how hurting someone really helped them, a confusing concept, with or without the Prince of Denmark.
All of these splendors gave me the idea that the ‘80s could be eminently habitable, nothing to be scared of. But the song that really gave me what felt like a taste of adult paranoia—the actual thing would be much worse—was a song by The Ramones, “Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?” I was learning rock and roll radio. I didn’t know about CBGB or Phil Spector. I didn’t know they were Jewish. But I was haunted by this line, “It’s the end, the end of the 70s/ It’s the end, the end of the century.” The end of the century felt like the end of the line. It felt like this record coming from the next decade would tell me everything would soon be over. “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.” Thus spake Steve Miller, also from Dallas, also, apparently, trying to tell me something. I remember hearing it when I was old enough to grasp it, when the 70s seemed like they would never end. We were all slipping into a future we couldn’t stop, a chorus accompanying the final fish hook. We were all doomed. These fears were really the first, and certainly not the last, intimations of mortality.
These songs from Rock 80 were mostly in a genre called New Wave. A new harvest was arriving, the old crop was receding, and out with the old was my beloved disco. In Rock 80, the dance floor was closed. No more Donna Summer, who sang of “Bad Girls,” the ones, I thought, who were so bad, they had to miss recess. No more “You Can Ring my Bell.” Now I would never learn what that meant. (My brother claimed to know but wouldn’t tell.) No more Bee Gees! Unthinkable! No one would ever get too much heaven no more! And then I would hear Kenny Loggins intoning, “This is it!” This is it, I thought: no more 70s. I didn’t tell anyone, because I thought I just couldn’t. The 70s would be flushed, and if anyone ever wanted to consult an archive, I would be the one to make it. And so, like a kid who wants to dig to China, I consolidated the cassette tapes around the house and made as comprehensive a collection as possible. I took the cassette recorder, aimed it to the clock radio speaker, and pressed record. And my memories came flooding back! “Toot toot, beep beep,” “Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive,” “I will survive!” “Aaaaaah.. freak out!” and so on. Once, on my way to the JCC, a song by the Little River Band came on called “Reminiscing.” “What’s reminiscing?” I asked my father. “Remembering the past,” he said. Ah. I was 6, nostalgic for 5 and 4 and 3. I looked at my old classrooms at the JCC and wondered how I ever fit into those little desks. My teacher at 3, Mrs. Holtzman, so indulgent. My teacher at 4, Mrs. Brown, who forced me to write with my right hand (because, as we know, the left hand is the devil’s) and gave me a year of stammering and a life of terrible script. The past would never be recaptured. All you could do was remember the thing you could never get back.
The saddest goodbye would be Disco Blondie, the wish fulfillment incarnate, who taught me that the greatest desire could melt in the air. The groove was steady, but the words were ephemeral.
Once I had a love and it was a gas
Soon turned out had a heart of glass
Seemed like the real thing, only to find
Mucho mistrust, love's gone behind
This was, up to this point, the most amazing thing I ever heard, and, listening now, four decades on, it is still a shot of dopamine, a cool glass of water on a hot summer day. I was seduced by the vibe, the hypnotic beat, the haunting reverb, the bottle blonde seductress who sashayed with the Muppets, the desire for something I was way too young to understand. The heart of glass could never be filled. It had no feelings. It was bottomless. It was a mirrored ball, lovely distortion, a hustle, mucho mistrust. Pay no attention to the Blondie behind the curtain.
It would be a few months. I couldn’t save everything, but I would have something, a wild little bouquet, a sampler. The ‘80s would be entirely different. First Grade would come and then it would be Second and Third. I would grow, the world would change. I would see everything around me fall away. Time would keep on slipping into the future, and I could either keep up or be left behind; eventually, none of us would make it. My own private Studio 54 would be lost. The past would be gone, gone. The rest, as Nick Lowe might have said, is silence.
January 1, 1980, which happened to be my seventh birthday, came. I turned on the radio and, to my relief and, weirdly, to my disappointment, those ‘70s songs were still on the air, business as usual. The ‘80s would unfold on their own time. The world kept turning, the sun came up, I got to have chocolate chip pancakes at I-Hop. The hostages were still there. My mom explained they were not UN diplomats, but innocents bound, gagged, and blindfolded, and I realized that things could be even worse than I thought. No one was taking away the songs. Not ever. Not even in the face of the “Disco Sucks” movement. I remember seeing white guys in heavy metal t-shirts blowing up disco records at sports events. I didn’t realize that “Disco sucks” referred, not approvingly, to men sucking dicks, and that disco was a gay scene, and that these guys at the bonfires were staging a ritualized queer bashing. Those “Disco Sucks” guys would be back in many forms, in many rallies. Nobody gets too much heaven no more. These people weren’t going to stop the music. But did The Ramones have a point? By the end of 1980, they managed to take away John Lennon and give us Ronald Reagan. Some things could never be returned. I grew beyond my delusions at the appointed hour. Many adults would never get over theirs.
Blondie appeared on American Bandstand in 1979. The song was “Heart of Glass.” The kids in the audience were going wild. Debbie Harry picked up a bow and arrow like a goddess in a Renaissance painting. She played with it as she lip-synced. Finally, toward the end of the song, she shot it. The camera did not follow. Did anyone get hurt? We, who put ourselves in her hands, didn’t worry about such things. It was 1979. What could go wrong? Our hearts were not made of glass, but they felt translucent. I was 6, playing “The Entertainer” on the piano over and over again. The songs were leading me somewhere, and it could be risky. When her song was over, Debbie Harry had another arrow for her bow. Dick Clark picked it up and said, “That’s a dangerous implement you carry there, my dear.” “I had to reload,” she replied, testing her aim. Debbie Harry knew she was in possession of something dangerous, and she was not going to give it up.