Woodland Songs and Years Bewitched

I grew up surrounded by trees. We – me, my family, neighbors – referred to the lengthy stretches of trees around my childhood home as “the woods” even though the area probably didn’t stretch quite far enough to truly justify the term. That didn’t stop my childmind from imagining the whole place as a near-infinite expanse of mystery and adventure. Basically, I thought I lived in a damn enchanted forest.

Which doesn’t mean I grew up to be some kind of rugged outdoor adventurer. Far from it. I was a burgeoning space cadet, head already more-or-less irretrievably up in the clouds. My first priority was to whatever weird dreamscape my brain felt like concocting in the moment. Often as not that involved drawing paper, or some kind of media. The stuff of messy, air-conditioned living rooms. Being outside was just an extension of the same kind of Imaginationland that went on indoors, only with fresher air, and dirt, and bugs. I liked having the autonomy to choose my outdoor time carefully, which meant taking it in small, digestible increments. (My time in Boy Scouts didn’t last long; it required too much outside time, which meant too many mosquitos, too much sun, too much mud. And I had way too many movies to watch and comics to read. Sorry, Scoutmaster Greer, wherever you are now.)

That said, I did still spend a good deal of time out there exploring the woods, and I especially loved to do so in the fall when the air was brisk and leaves were everywhere. Those leaves became as much a comfort as summer reruns or radio songs. I created trails, found favorite spots to hang out. Sometimes I’d find a securely attached vine and mimic Indiana Jones swinging across an open pit. Sometimes I’d climb on top of a log and pretend to be a rock star playing a show, the sea of leaves in front of me serving as an audience. 

It was kind of perfect; since the woods were right there next to my house I could go out and mess around for an hour or so and still be back in time to watch The Dukes of Hazzard.

Years of quality time among trees turned out to be good preparation, because in summer 1984 (I was thirteen) my father moved into an old house way outside the city limits, a creaky, dust-covered place surrounded by acres of woods. In front of the house just a few yards down a tree-covered hill ran a pretty large and lengthy creek. It ran around the perimeter of the property, a length of a few miles, and if you followed the water’s path at certain points the width stretched to the extent that it may as well have been a river. The water could be heard rushing by at all hours, an effect that especially at night could be calming or eerie, depending on your mood. 

That place was an ideal setting for what we might now call a folk horror film. To get there you had to turn down a near-hidden gravel road, which before too long turned into a dirt road. Clusters of tree branches hung down in all directions, throwing shadows everywhere. Moss-covered rocks sat among alternating patches of weeds and mud. There was some heavy rural ambiance going on. If somebody was looking for a place to start a cult or summon some dark entity they couldn’t have done much better.

True to form, for a good portion of my time there I tended to stay inside, which in itself could be a risk to the nerves, because I’m pretty sure that place was haunted. The wood flooring created a natural creakiness that took some getting used to, given my otherwise carpet-covered suburban existence. Other strange sounds could be heard more-or-less daily. My dad told me that once, just after he had moved in, before the electricity had even been turned on, he had been sitting in the living room when he heard a strange, soft jingling sound, something like wind chimes or keys shaking in someone’s pocket. The sound was accompanied by cold air, and it moved just in front of him across the main room and into the next before slowly making its way up the stairs to the attic. 

I experienced my own sensory phenomena there; more than once at night I heard footsteps pacing up and down the hall outside the bedroom when I knew no one else was around. Another time I left a box of magazines in one corner of the attic and went up the next morning to find the box had been moved and tipped over, the magazines spilling out. In that same attic a piece of wood paneling mysteriously dislodged from the wall and somehow ended up lying several feet across the room. It was pretty freaky. I looked for ectoplasm everywhere, to no avail. (It was the summer of Ghostbusters.)

I did, however, find Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, squirreled away amid my father’s sprawling stacks of records. The cover of that album, with its mysterious photo of an elderly bearded man carrying a load of sticks on his back, seemed right at home in that old house. It suggested old ways and antiquity. I kept looking for a title and it was only later that I learned that people called it “Four,” since it was the band’s fourth LP, and also because in place of a traditional title the inner sleeve and label featured four arcane-looking symbols, runes that the band themselves designed. That ploy added to the mystery, and enhanced my eerie feelings about both the album and the place I was listening to it in.

So it was in this setting that I was officially introduced to the classic rock radio hits that I had certainly heard before but up until that point did not realize were performed by Led Zeppelin; “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll” and the Unkillable Classic Rock Beast that is “Stairway to Heaven,” which I played endlessly on repeat and then played some more until my soul’s shadow was tall enough to say “Hey, why don’t we play side two?”

Just before “Stairway” on side one, track three in the sequence, is the song that has proven, in my little world, at least, to be more deep and durable than all the others, classics as they are. “Battle of Evermore” fits perfectly as a change-of-pace after track two, the full-throttle, thundering Little Richard tribute “Rock and Roll.” “Battle” emerges from that tumult, fading in slowly, lightly, mandolins plus acoustics plus voices providing a gentle warmer for “Stairway”’s white light ascension. It unfolds over six eventful minutes, moving like fog falling over a forest. Male and female voices sing in duet, trading off the lead, then harmonizing, weaving together a story based loosely (or firmly, depending on your point-of-view) on a Tolkien tale of war and mist and blood. lf the music is an ethereal respite from the harder rocking sounds of much of the rest of the album, the tone is firmly in keeping with the centuries-old mysteries implied by the album’s cover and title runes. It’s like something that might be sung around a small campfire, or around a witch’s cauldron. 

When we’re younger, I don’t think we consider how much the atmosphere and mood of a place can inform the way we hear music. I can remember sitting in the living room of that old house, looking out the window at the dusk settling outside, listening to the slow fade-in of the mandolins on “Battle of Evermore,” a faraway sound that might have resonated in my mind with the eerie story my father had told me about the strange chiming sound he had heard. I’m sure that the running water of the creek outside and the corresponding sense of isolation informed the way I heard the song in some indelible way that I may not have recognized at the time but is still there whenever I hear it now. 

This despite the fairy-fantasyland content of Plant’s lyrics, which I’ve always been able to hear as charming even when so many of my friends through the years have been put off by them. They’ve been subject to no little derision from music critics, as well. 

We get too hung up on lyrics sometimes, I think. The lyrics here include lords and queens and princes, dances in the dark night, and even a direct reference to Tolkien when near the end Ringwraiths appear. As we get older our reality-principled left brains tend to roll their figurative eyes when confronted with the stuff of magic on dark mountainsides, and it might have all seemed a little silly even to my thirteen-year-old sci-fi/fantasy sensibilities. I loved that stuff, so I guess on one hand I must’ve relied on that side of myself to accept the song’s lyrics. On the other hand it’s possible I misinterpreted or even misheard them – I’ve never really noticed that there’s a dragon in the song until I read the lyrics just now, while writing this. In that sense, maybe this song helped me develop a habit I’ve often used over the years of simply ignoring the lyrical content when the flow of the words or the mood the music invokes – the overall sound – is powerful enough to allow it. 

In that setting, in that creaky old house in the woods, the song felt very vivid. And I’ve come to believe in my perhaps all-too-credulous soul that “Battle of Evermore” is so much more than the sum of its lyrical subject matter and/or nicely-played mystic folk arrangement. I think it’s a kind of conjuring, a haunting. It’s the sound of a multitude of voices – ghosts, really – coming back, as they do again and again, century after bleak century, to experience some kind of absolution or deliverance. Calling out like they’re owed something. There’s a sense that we, the listeners, are implicated in the process, as if we’re supposed to help somehow. “Repay, do not forget,” says the singer, implying a kind of cycle, that all of those voices might be our own.

On the recording those voices belong to Robert Plant, toning his lustful Golden Rock God persona down for the occasion, seamlessly entwining his voice with that of the eternal Sandy Denny. I can say with some degree of wonder and thankfulness that hearing Sandy Denny’s voice at age thirteen had an impact that has resounded clearly and deeply through the decades of my life since then. Her voice sounded, and sounds, of another time and place. Golden, at once earthy and unearthly. 

I could’ve sworn I’d heard that voice before, which it’s extremely possible I had, after all my father owned this record, and he very well may have played it while I was around at any point in the previous thirteen years. I mean to say, though, that her voice sounded familiar in that sense of when in real life you meet someone that you feel you’ve known before, someone with whom you experience some innate and unnerving sense of connection. Often enough that person does eventually become a best friend or life partner. 

Not that I fully understood any of this while I was listening back in 1984, and definitely not that I  would have been too keen on sharing it with my peers, even if I did. Part of adolescence is forming a sense of self, and this includes the things that you choose to like and the things you choose not to like. That process can lead to some difficult choices, a wrong one can lead to a damaged social standing and/or a confused self-image, already a pretty natural state when you’re a teenager. Those concerns fade as we get older. (Don’t they?) Which is why I’m embarrassed about it now, but I gotta confess that when a friend at the time dismissed “Battle of Evermore” as the only song on Zeppelin’s fourth album that he didn’t like, complaining that all the folky airy-fairyness ruined an otherwise perfect sequence of hard rock music, I lied and said I agreed with him. 

I wonder how that friend would’ve felt about the band I latched onto next; Jethro Tull. Maybe he loved the hard-rocking FM radio hit “Aqualung” and the piledriving “Locomotive Breath”. Those are heavy enough to appeal to the average early-teen-boy sensibility. Not sure how he would’ve reacted to the folkier, near-twee sounds of so many of my other Tull favorites, as contained on the 1972 compilation Living in the Past, an LP that I would discover shortly after absorbing Led Zeppelin.

“Battle of Evermore” must have primed me. The lure of the ancient, of stories and feelings that recur throughout history, was a thing that surely must’ve planted a seed in my brain, because I pulled Living In the Past out of my Dad’s record stacks based purely on its cover design, which was put together to resemble some kind of centuries-old book of ancient wisdom. It had a wraparound gatefold with a thick spine, it was printed on heavy stock that was textured like a holy book or a wizard’s manual, dark maroon background with illustration and text embossed in ornate gold. That the photographs in the inner booklet featured photos of the band in ragged, multi-colored hippie garb that placed them somewhere between forest minstrels and court jesters was an added bonus. That so many of the photos were also so purposefully goofy - one featured a band member emerging from a trash can, which I thought was gross but hilarious - necessarily took the edge off and made the whole enterprise a little warmer. 

Finding an object like that in that musty old house was a little like discovering buried treasure. In turn, I used that notion as a guiding spirit while listening. Tull’s musical palette was always an eclectic one, and even though much of the music throughout the 2LP set explored relatively recent 20th century territory (mostly blues and hard rock, though one side is made up of a live excursion that melds jazz with classically-influenced progressive rock) my ears heard all of it as an echo of ancient impulses, particularly the folk and folk-rock stuff, which was plentiful, and particularly British. 

The Britisher the better, as far as I was concerned. English folk is naturally evocative of trees and greenery, rolling hills and grassy expanses. And woods where witches sometimes appear, often with the express intent of seducing young, fragile hearts. That’s the basic premise of “The Witch’s Promise”, a song that’s risen from the sprawl of Living In the Past as a battle-tested favorite. 

It’s a peculiar recording*, opening with a fanfare of Tull leader Ian Anderson’s multi-tracked flutes, giving way to a melody that’s gentle and pretty but nonetheless tinged with menace, with Anderson smarmily (Along with the ever-present flute, Anderson’s voice is a primary obstacle to those approaching Jethro Tull’s music for the first time – critics and naysayers would and will complain that he knew no other way to sing except smarmily, fans love it) warning the listener about those woods and the witch who lives there and the ill fortune that awaits whoever falls under her spell. (Reading over the lyrics now it is very possible that I’ve completely misinterpreted them for decades, seems like the witch actually ends up falling for the narrator, who rebukes her. Put it down to the willful interpretation games we all play with songs, and the way we tend to always hear them the way we want. Also put it down to the “leaves falling, red yellow brown, all look the same.”) It’s another fairy tale, sort of, but the dark melody is buoyed by flutes that beguile like the Pied Piper, with a more-felt-than-heard mellotron providing an air of unease. It’s a sound akin to threatening gray clouds, such that it can’t be simply dismissed as the extract from a children’s storybook that it might be reminiscent of. If it’s a fairy tale, it’s probably one of Grimm’s. 

*This is a bit of nitpicky music geek minutiae that you can feel free to ignore, but I gotta mention that if you feel compelled to listen to “The Witch’s Promise” please go to the version included on Living in the Past, which has recently, as I write, been reissued in expanded form via Parlophone/Warner. The song is on any number of other Tull compilations, but Past contains a unique mix that deftly blends the vocal and music in a way that the others do not. Maybe at age fourteen I would have heard any other version the same way, and I’d still be writing about it now in the same way, but who knows. Tiny subtleties sometimes make a big difference.

“Witch’s Promise” tended to blend into the flow of the album unobtrusively during my early listening. I think the song’s tone, that air of suggested menace, combined with the dark woodland sensibility I so readily brought to the listening experience in the first place, somehow infected all the other songs such that they all took on a little bit of eeriness. The hard rock of “Sweet Dream”, along with its lyrics that advocated getting away from your parents to experience the grit and gristle of city living, became a little more of an intense and scary thing. (This despite the fact that the track is fleshed out by a very non-scary horn section.) The jazzy take on a Bach melody in “Bouree” sounded like a jovial frivolity that might be played in a medieval king’s court before an execution. “Life’s a Long Song” is an essentially positive and very charming folk song that nonetheless sounds a little melancholy in all this darkly hued company. 

All of these songs bounced and flowed through my brain and spirit as I went through the usual rigors and ecstasies of being fourteen years old during summer 1985. Anderson’s flute and hard-rock rhythm section accompanied me, acting as a buffer and companion as I checked the baseball scores and read my comics and my music magazines and shyly longed for the attention of any number of female acquaintances. Music is good that way, it can work like friends or family, easing burdens or making them more tolerable. And it can be especially useful when the friends or family aren’t around, a thing I was in the process of learning.

By this time my father had moved out of the old house in the woods, and even though I had liked it there, I was kind of glad. That house had been a place of some turbulence in my early teenage life - in addition to the ghosts always knocking about it was often full of loud, inebriated people. My father’s door was always open, especially to people with outsize personalities and weed or beer to offer. I often found myself navigating varying degrees of raucous behaviour while attempting to do homework or sleep. This was a troublesome dilemma that would be a source of much adolescent strife. 

Every now and again, though, there would be moments of respite and weird wonder that couldn’t have happened under any other circumstance. On one memorable occasion while staying in that house I found myself awake and alone around two or three in the morning, sitting in the dim-lit living room trying to read so I could tire myself out enough to sleep. A man showed up at the door. He had a scraggly beard and wore beads around his neck that hung down over an earth-colored poncho, making him resemble a member of Jethro Tull. He was accompanied by two taciturn, enigmatically gorgeous women. They were looking for a party that had ceased raging an hour or so earlier. In my memory they’re all glowing, though I’m sure in real life they didn’t. Pretty sure.

My overactive imagination couldn’t help itself – it felt to me as though these people had emerged from some kind of portal from some other time or place. Maybe from some dark section of the woods outside. The man said his name was Lucius, and my immediate thought was something like huh, that’s pretty close to Lucifer. I didn’t know it at the time, and only found out when I looked it up just now, but there are also a couple good guys in the Bible named Lucius, so all’s even, I guess. I made an in-game decision to roll with it, and for the better part of the next hour I found myself simultaneously playing host to these three strangers – something I was relatively happy to do, it made me feel like an adult – and listening while Lucius held court. 

I don’t truthfully remember what was discussed that morning, only that it had a tone that was equal parts philosophy, theology and absurdity. Why Lucius chose to converse in this way with a thirteen-year-old he’d only just met is a thing I didn’t then and still don’t understand. I assume he was probably a natural talker, and a person not particularly given to small talk, which was a thing I could relate to even then. He gestured dramatically as he spoke, and the two women wore expressions somewhere between amused and bored, giving the impression they were used to his behavior. In retrospect, his persona might have seemed a little Manson-ish, I suppose. I probably should have been more wary. Somehow, though, I intuited a baseline of gentleness in him, warranted or not. He had a kind of congenial, weary spirit about him that I was a sucker for. Maybe he reminded me of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Also, crucially, he seemed perfectly sober. Sober and smart, both appealing attributes that I also mentally transferred to his two friends. I went with his flow, and tried to keep up. 

I had mixed feelings about the whole situation, really, I sort of just wanted them to leave so I could get to sleep, but I was also mildly entertained and particularly moved that he seemed to view me as an equal and spoke to me that way, rather than the way most adults were either befuddled or outright condescending. That’s an important thing at that age, and the combination of his effort at connection and his obvious charm cemented Lucius in my memory in such a way that I’m sure I would remember this occasion even if what happened next had not unfolded the way it did.

Two weeks after that experience, during my bi-weekly visit to my Dad’s place, my father told me that Lucius had died. At some point in the next several days after our interaction he had committed suicide. 

That news was a shock, of course. Facts and feelings flashed through the brain like movie scenes on fast forward: Wait, you mean that guy I talked to til four in the morning only two weeks ago? He died? And he chose to do it himself? But he seemed so…together. What about those two women? Are we supposed to do something about this?

More than anything, my memory retained and replayed the sound of his voice echoing through that old house, and the sound of the wood creaking beneath his feet as he paced around, the same sound as the disembodied footsteps that used to put a chill in me whenever I would hear them out in the hallway while in the bedroom trying to sleep.

Outside of that initial shock I can’t honestly say that the news hit me in a particularly emotional way – I’d only had the one encounter with him. But I was certainly confused, because in the days just after that encounter I had for one reason or another entertained the vague notion that he might end up being some kind of important figure in my life in some way, despite the fact that I didn’t really know him at all and even now have no clue what his real make-up might have been, whether he was on the side of the angels or possessed by demons or merely a harmless small-town eccentric. My adult brain suggests it's most likely the latter. But my romantic teenage brain had already given him the aura of some kind of otherworldly figure, and now that impression was and is frozen that way.

Up to that point I don’t think I’d known anyone who died. And since I hardly knew this person I was unsure how to measure the loss on an emotional level. I think after acknowledging the confusion and talking about it with my Dad for a bit, I simply went on with my normal teenage pursuits without letting it trouble me too much. At least on the surface. Maybe this is just how we learn to get on with our lives. I had plenty of things to distract me, and teens are pretty easily distracted. There were, again, all those comics to read and baseball games to follow, movies to see. Not to mention all the records I’d been “borrowing” from my father under the pretense that I would return them, though I think he knew they weren’t coming back. 

I was beginning to recognise music around this time as more than a simple distraction or hobby. It was becoming something like a lifeline, a place of refuge from life’s many dilemmas. I liked the sheer sound, for sure, and mostly that meant loud guitars, loud drums and singers singing with an urgency that seemed ultra-urgent. But I think I was also looking to these records for something else beyond all that. I was looking for some kind of understanding, and I needed the music to reflect back at me some of my own confusions. This was maybe another of the reasons I was so easily able to look past what might be perceived as the cloying, fairy-tale tone of some of the Zeppelin and Jethro Tull records I’d been listening to. There was something else in there, and it had something to do with death and spirituality and all of the other adult things I didn’t know so much about yet. (And still don’t, truthfully.) In this light Led Zeppelin’s Tolkein-inspired lyrical content took on a different, oddly spiritual resonance, and Tull’s flute went from mildly annoying to mildly haunting. I felt like the records might contain answers to questions I hadn’t yet thought to ask. 

Pretty sure the answers had something to do with trees.

“There’s something in those woods.” I’d heard lines like that in horror movies, and the truth is I did start to think that there was “something” in the woods surrounding that house where my father had lived, and I carried it around with me well after he had moved out. I’m not sure what that “something” was, or is, though it seems to have something to do with the cycle of life and death, maybe even divinity. Light and dark, eternity, and myth. You know, the usual. 

That’s all stuff that I heard in the music, too. When Robert Plant sings about bringing the balance back on “Battle of Evermore” I could just about understand what he meant. It helped that he sang those lines so emphatically, even convulsively; “Bring it back! Bring it bayyck! BRING it back!” Then on the record that outburst gives way to a strange chorus of voices, moaning as if they’re part of a séance.

Something like that feeling must have fed into the way I also heard Tull’s “Witch’s Promise” as a multi-layered mystery box, with a murky, oddly evocative quality running through it. I think I was hearing Lucius’ death in there, along with so many other things, including the inherent teenage desire to find a place, a way to fit in. Or to find a place and a sense of self via the act of not fitting in. Either would do. “Keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be,” Ian Anderson sings in the exquisitely modulated bridge, and I think I took that command to heart, in a way that I maybe didn’t recognize or think about at the time, but also in a way that sends weird chills echoing through me when I hear those lines now.

I found somewhere to be a couple years later in the form of my high school Speech and Drama team, as I drifted into becoming what some classmates (and even some people now!) would ungraciously (though not inaccurately) call a “theater nerd.” I was grateful to find that place and those people, and throughout my age fifteen and sixteen years I nurtured not only my first meaningful teenage friendships, but also found my first success as a public performer, as well as my first romantic relationship. That latter felt like the heaviest development at the time, as first love so often does. Which is not to say it doesn’t retain a certain heaviness even decades later. It does, but in retrospect the whole time period is colored with so much activity and upheaval that it’s hard to pin too much emotional weight on any one aspect of it all.  

Becoming part of a friend group is a formative thing that happens to most of us, hopefully, at some point in relative youth. Maybe it happens at summer camp or college or at our first job. For me it happened to happen in high school. The process can be especially meaningful for those of an inherently shy or naturally creative persuasion; we suddenly realize we are among a group of people with whom we identify and are finally able to share all of the enthusiasms and insecurities that up until that point we might have kept to ourselves. Vulnerability and the semi-realization of selfhood within a group of like-minded people can be pretty powerful bonding agents. As a result, we come to keenly value and rely on those relationships. 

It may not occur to us so readily that just as things can flourish they can also fade, and in turn we can easily become troubled when some force from within or without threatens to disrupt the established status quo of a friend group. Life has a way of providing that threat naturally, and it would come for me and my friends in the form of the looming, unknowable future. Good times always end. College, career, family, life, they’re all waiting in the wings, beckoning. The future and what to do with it not only twists us into emotional knots but it also tends to remove us physically from wherever we might be. As the last year or two of our high school days unfolded and we watched our little group splinter due to graduations and college and life pursuits my left-behind friends and I struggled to reconcile the very recent memories of bonding and good times with the knowledge that those times would soon be over, and that heavier, more complicated realities awaited.

In that same wary, disoriented sense, when the person that I wholeheartedly believed at the tender age of sixteen to be the love of my life moved away to go to college I knew deep down that our relationship as we had known it was over, but of course my heart in all its wholeness couldn’t accept it. So began the long process of subconscious acceptance, slowly and painfully working its way up the emotional ladder into conscious form.

Acceptance, of course, does not often come easily. Serendipitous, then, that around this time I discovered the music of Fairport Convention, whose most famous album Liege and Lief was born out of a need for acceptance.

Discovering new music (or old music that’s new to you) in the days prior to instant digital connectivity could often mean navigating a circuitous maze of byways and hints and mini-connections. The way I found Fairport was via reading about Jethro Tull, particularly Tull’s explorations in rustic British folk, which I wanted more of, in whatever form, if any existed. One of the music books I had in my ever-growing collection linked that sound, as Tull played it, to the precedent set by Fairport Convention. When I found an entry on Fairport in yet another music reference book I discovered to my wonder and delight that they had for a time employed as lead singer none other than Sandy Denny, owner of the same lustrous voice that had co-sung Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore” with Robert Plant. That simple shock of recognition was such a thrill that it still reverberates in me a little bit. Wait, I know that name! She was in a band? You mean there’s more of that voice somewhere? Take note and remember. And go looking.

My father’s records were now in a different house, hidden in the corner of a back room. Rifling through them one day in fall 1987 I found a trove of Fairport Convention records, and it felt like hitting the jackpot. I felt a little breathless, had to listen immediately. The record review volume in which I’d read about them recommended the third album, Unhalfbricking, which I listened to first and liked well enough (I would grow to love it) but I was really looking for something else. What I was looking for involved ghosts and dirt and ancient voices and tree bark.

Liege and Lief was the natural one to gravitate towards, featuring as it did a cover illustrated with vines and ornate Olde English lettering and an inner sleeve outlining centuries-old folk customs like morris dancing, wren hunting and something called the Burry Man. All of this stuff is somehow audibly infused into track one, a lively “calling-on” song called “Come All Ye”. If the use of the word “ye” (in this context roughly the British equivalent of the American south’s “y’all”) wasn’t enough to earn my endearment then the sound of Richard Thompson’s electric guitar in swirling, snakelike duet with Dave Swarbrick’s violin certainly was. Sandy Denny’s vocal is, as ever, magic.

Track two is where the feel of the album really emerges in full flower, in Fairport’s haunting reading of a century-plus years-old ballad called “Reynardine”. It’s taken at a slow, stately pace, the sound shimmering, the violin holding one raga-like note in the background and Denny’s voice moving through the music like a ghost floating through an old house. Wikipedia says the song is about a werefox who lures beautiful women to his castle, but Fairport’s version leaves the plot a little vague, enhancing the mystery. I’ve always heard it as a song full of drama, where lots of action happens despite the slow pace and empty spaces, but that isn’t really the case. The action is minimal, it boils down to a brief exchange between a maiden wandering out “among the leaves so green” where she meets up with a “sly, bold” stranger. He tells her he lives in a castle and she should come up and see him sometime. She spurns his advances, fearing he’s a rake, the use of which word - “rake,” British slang meaning “scoundrel” - is a nicely evocative detail. The finest detail: “His teeth did brightly shine."

The implicit violence of “Reynardine” breaks through forcefully in the song that would become Fairport’s signature live showstopper, the traditional “Matty Groves”. The story is simple; the wife of a nobleman seduces a farm boy, said nobleman finds out about the tryst and kills the farmboy using one of his prize swords, and when the wife admits she still prefers the dead guy to him he kills her too. Fairport play it up for maximum drama, building the track on a chugging two-guitar rhythm over which Swarbrick’s violin provides ominous color, with Denny’s vocal a masterclass in tension and release, all of it building towards a lightning storm climax of raging electric guitars and cymbal clashes. 

Liege and Lief provided much-needed respite from the rigors of high school life during the fall semester of my junior year. I’d retire to my room around sundown and turn all the lights out and just listen, sometimes concentrating on the mood or the sheer musicality and sometimes drifting into dreamlands of my own, usually in which my erstwhile romantic interest would return to me and promise to stay forever and in turn she and all my friends and I would live happily ever after in a big sprawling mansion of our own, listening to records and watching movies and telling dumb dirty jokes into eternity. Maybe not an altogether healthy kind of fantasizing, I guess, but I still think it's better than geometry homework. 

Sometimes when I hear Liege and Lief now it is very easy to find myself back in that dark little room, staring out the window as I’d already done for years, looking at the trees against the sky. Speculating, imagining. Merging my own modern fantasies with ancient fantasies from the British Isles. Dreading the inevitable goodbyes, fearing the unknowns around the corner, listening to the gently winding and unwinding music-box melody of Fairport’s “Farewell, Farewell”.

It’s always goodbyes, isn’t it?

Fairport may have been helping me accept the farewells in my own life, but at the time I was listening I was completely unaware that they had recorded this music in an effort to deal with their own traumatic changes.

In spring 1969, Fairport were on the verge of releasing their third album, and hopes were high. One morning they were returning home to London from a gig in Birmingham when their van veered from the highway and crashed, killing Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn and Fairport’s brilliant young drummer Martin Lamble, and doing immeasurable psychological damage to the surviving band members. They were all in their early twenties at the time.

It’s hard to imagine the toll such an event takes on a young psyche. It would have been understandable if those within Fairport had chosen to each move in their own direction after the crash. But enduring a collective shock can also bring people together, and in that spirit Fairport made the decision to keep the band going. They decided to make a clean break from the band they had been before, cutting out the American singer-songwriter covers that had been prominent in their repertoire, focusing instead on the traditional music they had only dabbled in to that point. They recruited a couple of new members and retired to a rented house in Hampshire in order to rehearse and record a whole new set of material that fused ancient folk and balladry with modern rock rhythms and amplification. This material became Liege and Lief.

It had become something of a trend in the late sixties for bands to seek solitude and bucolic bliss far away from the city limits; The Band and Traffic had famously rented houses in the country in an effort to spur musical inspiration, with vibrant and enduring results. In Fairport’s case the rented house was called Farley House and it had a nicely divine history, existing since the 1700’s and having formerly been a rectory, where clergymen had lived, and, presumably, prepared sermons. (“All very Jane Austen,” notes Thompson wryly in his autobiography.) Located deep in the Hampshire countryside, it had a big front room in which the band could set up and play music and a big yard in which they could play football. It was surrounded, of course, by trees.

It's always goodbyes and it’s always the trees.

And it's always voices returning. Even after all the sad goodbyes of autumn and the deathcold of winter, the woods have a way of regenerating, of course; it’s called nature, and it works in cycles. In turn, that regenerative power can work its weird ways on human beings.

The whole enterprise of putting Liege and Lief together served as a kind of therapy for the members of Fairport Convention. The music bears that out, though there is plenty of lingering melancholy. “Farewell Farewell” consists of a valedictory lyric written by Richard Thompson set to the tune of the traditional ballad “Willy O’Winsbury.” It is almost unbearably light and pretty, and it is also, paradoxically, almost unbearably sad. (In a flashback to my too-cool-for-school younger self’s outward rejection of “Battle of Evermore”, I told myself that I didn’t like “Farewell Farewell” too much at the time – too light, overly pretty, nobody gets murdered. Now it's a favorite.)

On side two the traditional reworkings continue, culminating in the raging Halloween tumult of “Tam Lin” a tale of witchcraft that matches “Matty Groves” for dramatic verve and musical pyrotechnics. After that fiery excursion some kind of restive balancing is in order, and it comes in the form of the album’s final and perhaps finest track, the Thompson/Swarbrick original “Crazy Man Michael.” 

To call the song restive is misleading. “Crazy Man Michael” is a quiet song, but it is anything but calm. Listening to it one gets the feeling of waking up from a nightmare with a discomfiting mix of relief and dread, as if the dream had been spiked with a touch of reality. Dreams and reality can be difficult to separate sometimes, even in the best of times.

Thompson wrote the lyrics, and Swarbrick set them to his own sympathetically pastoral music. The sound is like wind through branches, smooth, light. It’s also full of profound disquiet; beneath its smooth surface shiver currents of longing and strange portent. The song is a lament, an elegy that sings in the same arcane language Thompson and Swarbrick had absorbed via the traditional music they’d been immersed in.

Given an understanding of the story behind the creation of this music, it is difficult not to hear Thompson’s lyrics as an attempt to come to terms with the recent tragedy in his life. The song is in ballad form, telling a tale in which the title character wanders by the seaside where he meets a raven that offers to tell his fortune. The prophecy, it turns out, is that Michael will end up murdering his own lover, a prediction that causes Michael to go mad and kill the bird. Only then, when Michael observes the dead beast at his feet, he realizes that the body is actually that of his lover, thus fulfilling the prophecy. It is folk horror, through and through, right down to the description of the cold earth and the spinning sky. “You speak for the devil who taunts me,” Michael tells the raven, revealing that his mind had been haunted by evil and madness long before he met the soothsaying creature, which like Poe’s raven may itself be a figment of his fraught imagination.

What I made of this story at age sixteen, or whether I bothered to parse the lyrics at all, I don’t really remember. I only remember listening in my dark bedroom and feeling comforted, somehow. (And right in the middle of autumn, perfectly.) It’s a horror story, that’s obvious enough, but why do we tell horror stories except as a way to deal more bravely with the horrors of the everyday? I was very conscious at the time that this listening experience was a kind of therapy, a way to deal with the unknown. Listening to “Crazy Man Michael” eased the intense longing and dread that was otherwise so prevalent in my psyche at the time, and I think it genuinely helped me reconcile with possibilities I otherwise wouldn’t have been too keen on facing up to.

Putting the pieces together, trying to solve the puzzle of both this song and this life, would become in itself a meaningful occasion, with its own kind of psychic and emotional weight that would end up outlasting the moment. The simple act of listening had become a kind of signal event, a paradigmatic one in my little world, as though I knew that this music, including but not limited to this specific music by Fairport Convention, might be able to help me navigate through the coming years in any number of ways. I’ve ever since, in a sense, been sitting in a dark room listening to this music, contemplating the past and considering next moves just like I did each night during those weeks in 1987. All while looking out the window at the trees, and in 1987 that would have been the same run of trees in which only a few years earlier I’d cavorted around pretending to be Indiana Jones. Who can I pretend to be now?

The last lines of “Crazy Man Michael” continue to resonate with quiet power. Michael is still wandering, maybe he’ll be wandering forever, and he’s whistling and he’s quite calm and collected, thank you, despite the ordeal he’s endured. But he also longs to be somewhere else, somewhere far away, and when he encounters wild wolves he practically apologizes for his weary demeanor, begging their pardon, “for his true love is flown / into every flower grown / and he must be keeper of the garden.” A few final strains of violin and guitar underscore that regenerative sentiment, a soft caress that fades slowly, enigmatically. 

All of our precious phases and stages work like apparitions. They come and go, right? Mostly they go, or at least that’s the way it feels sometimes. But as we get older they sometimes drop back by to say hello. Maybe it’s best to acknowledge them. Say hello back. When my father told me the story about the weird experience he had in the old house with the strange floating chime sound he confessed that while he had been somewhat alarmed by it, he also felt like the experience had been sort of nice. Like it was maybe a kind of welcoming, an acknowledgement that if we gotta share this space, let’s try to get on with it by using a little lightness of touch on both our parts.

Maybe life is an accumulation of ghosts, real and imagined. Maybe we’re always dying in some way and coming back in some other way. The dream of the perfect relationship, say, realized in small, invigorating bursts, then gone. Faded, gradually or abruptly. Maybe it will come back, we think, hopefully, and sometimes it does. Friendships wither, then they’re renewed. Green leaves fade into brown, then a sea of dead leaves morphs into a crowd of people. A house haunted by footsteps and strange sounds and talkative early morning visitors is subsumed into a group of songs, a few hazy memories and a lot of trees.

The inexplicable is a given. How we deal with it is, maybe, our primary dilemma. We can’t force an answer, we can only hope to finesse it. The woods might be a good place to look for advice, with all those leaves dying and coming back every twelve months, and all those birds singing their weird little songs. They pass those songs on, brood after brood.

I mean, if and when we do come back, imagine how much fun that might be! Hey, we’re unmoored from our physical bodies! And we get to hang out in these trees! Though I guess it’s possible it might actually not be fun at all - maybe we’ll be only one sad voice in some haunted, low-moaning chorus. That doesn’t sound particularly exciting. But, you know, keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be.

Whatever the form or circumstance, let’s try to err on the side of ghostly prudence. Repay, do not forget. I think that means let’s try to be helpful, and do our best to be unobtrusive. All these other people have to live.

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, 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 represented by 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 a 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 the 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 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 frame 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!