Authors: Dave Holmes
Party of One (4 page)
But I was drawn mostly to music, and my brothers' peak record-buying years happened to produce the kind of music a younger brother would most want to borrow. Dan was into what at the time was called AORâKansas and Foghat and that “Iron Man” song by Black Sabbath that sent me screaming to my room to hide in the closet, because it was legitimately scary to a child, and also I was too young to recognize when I was actually living out a metaphor. Dan's albums had gatefold sleeves and intricate artwork: Queen's
News of the World
cover depicted a giant robot unwittingly wreaking havoc on a city, holding the dead, bloodied band in his cold, steel palm, thinking,
What have I done? Led Zeppelin IV
had mystical symbols and an old man carrying a massive bundle of sticks on his back, and only the teenagers seemed to know what it all meant. (St. Louis's radio tastes froze at right around this time in history; when I go back to visit, everyone still seems to listen to KSHE-95, the classic rock station. It used to bother me, but coming home and hearing Rush's “Tom Sawyer” within thirty minutes of my arrival brings order and stability to the world.)
Steve was into Magic 108, the soul music station. There are a few classic albums from this period in R&Bâ
Off the Wall, Songs in the Key of Life,
The Brothers Johnson's
Blam!
âbut it's mostly about the singles: Ray, Goodman & Brown's “Special Lady.” Cheryl Lynn's “Got to Be Real.” Shalamar's “Second Time Around.” Larry Graham's “One in a Million You.” Dan and Steve's stereos fought with each other every night until lights out at 10:00âdance beats and quiet storm ballads on one side, brainy lyrics and heavy guitars on the other. Right in the middle was the place to be.
The one thing they could agree on musically was Bruce Springsteen, who was revered by both as a god living among us. They each had their own copy of every one of his albums, from
Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
right up to
The River.
They also pooled their money on a tape player for the Buick Wildcat convertible they shared so that they could each buy all of his albums on 8-track. I begged to tag along on their errands, where we'd sing along to “She's the One,” and it would fade out in the middle, click, and fade back up. Errands are a major event for a kid with cool big brothers.
Each day, I became more aware that I was both different and
different,
and each day, I turned to music to ease the discomfort. I was insatiable. I took from my brothers, but I had to have more. Outside the family, my most reliable ally around these times was Casey Kasem. For Christmas 1980, I got roller skatesâred Nike numbers that looked like sneakers with big red wheels on them. And each Sunday morning, I woke up early, pulled my clock radio out of the socket, attached it to an extension cord, and lugged it out to the driveway just in time to hear #40. I roller-skated in a circle, working on jumps and spins, as he counted them down. It didn't matter whether I liked the songs, and frankly, there is a limit to the excitement a child can work up over Air Supply. But who cares; the star of the show was Casey. He pronounced each artist's name, crisply and respectfully. He gave each band equal weight, even Franke and the Knockouts. Even Get Wet. He told us that this thing, pop music, was a thing to be taken seriously, no matter what the rest of the world told us. Casey got it.
By the time he got to #15, I'd have to shower and get ready for Mass, but once a song made it that far up the charts, I'd heard it enough. Plus, if Father Shea did a short enough homily, we'd make it back to the car in time to hear what was #1. A thrilling moment, even during the grim, endless reign of “Bette Davis Eyes.”
My roller-skating got pretty good with all that practice every Sunday, so I took my act on the road. There was a roller rink a couple towns over, and it cost only a couple bucks to spend a weekend afternoon there. I couldn't get anyone to go with me, and I could not have cared less. Each week I wore the same thing: maroon rugby shirt with horizontal khaki and navy stripes, blue jeans held up by rainbow suspenders. I requested the same song: “I'm Alive” by ELO, from the
Xanadu
soundtrack, and I skated around and around on my own. Only when the DJ announced the snowballâwhere one couple skates, and then breaks up and finds new partners, and then two couples become four, and so on, until everyone who has experienced puberty has a skating partnerâwould I take a crucial break for Bugles and a Mr. PiBB.
I don't need to be in a couple,
I figured.
I've had my
Xanadu
moment and I'm dressed like Mork. To ask for more would be selfish.
And then in a flash, my brothers were off to college. Dan went to Notre Dame, Steve two years later to Creighton. The timing could not have been better: Dan hit college just in time for the golden age of what we were then calling “college music.” He came back home from his freshman year with a Peaches Records & Tapes crate full of new treasures: the Clash, Squeeze, the Specials and the Pretenders and the English Beat. He caught the wave at the perfect time, and I got to reap the benefits. While he was gone at his summer job selling shirts at Brooks Brothers downtown, I rifled through and listened to messages from another planet: Split Enz's
True Colours,
XTC's
Black Sea,
U2's
Boy.
Fine bands whose best quality was that nobody else at school had ever heard of them.
Steve had hopped off the soul train by the time he got back from his freshman year; Magic 108 was starting to work some rap songs into their rotation.
Anyone
can rap,
we thought.
That's not music.
We agreed it was a fad that wouldn't even make it to 1983. The only thing keeping him in the fold was a young artist out of Minneapolis named Prince, and his protégés The Time. Filthy dirty funk music. Exactly what the country's Catholic white boys didn't know they needed.
When they moved out, cable TV moved in. We didn't get it for a few years, despite my beggingâ“Filth! Vulgar! N.O. spells
NO,
” Mom saidâbut my friend Pete down the street did, and we organized a barter system: he could come to my house and play the video games his parents denied him, and I would be able to spend an equal amount of time sitting in front of MTV at his. I remember the first time we flicked over to that channel together and were greeted with the sexily menacing pleather-and-neon jungle of Total Coelo's “I Eat Cannibals.” We sat back in slack-jawed satisfaction and didn't move for months.
What to the untrained eye looked like vegging out in front of the television was actually me silently plotting a way to crawl inside.
Looking back, I think my family raised me right. There were probably some lessons about decency and fairness and manners in there somewhereâwho can remember?âbut the main thing my parents and brothers taught me by example was how to appreciate pop culture and music. I want to thank them and also explain to them that I am their fault.
At the time of writing, both of my brothers listen to Toby Keith and my parents pretty much exclusively watch Fox News, at the volume level of a My Bloody Valentine concert. It's heartbreaking, but at least they left me something valuable before they checked out.
*1
My mom's a magnet for boldface names, in a way that might qualify as an actual medical condition. Recently, Steve and his wife, Betsy, went on a last-minute ski vacation, and with no time to shop for her own, Betsy borrowed my mother's ski vest. The first ski lift they got on, their seatmate was golfer Phil Mickelson. Steve and Betsy looked at each other and said the same thing: “It's a
pheromone.
”
*2
And I mean
bitter:
the show ended its four-decade-plus network run on a cliffhanger in which a drunk and rageful J.R. shot blindly into a party.
Who did J.R. shoot?
was the question they intended to leave us with, hoping we'd forget that at least a third of the guests at this party had already died on camera. Some had actually returned as ghosts for holiday episodes, or donated organs to other characters who were also at that party, but somehow they had been found in the basement of Dr. David Hayward, who had been keeping them alive this whole timeâeven the ones who had died when he would have been, like, eleven years old. Who cares who gets shot when there's a guy in town who can
cure death
? (You guys, I might still be holding on to some anger and frustration about the way
All My Children
ended.)
The pop culture of the mid- to late 1970s had no interest in entertaining children, which worked out beautifully because I had no particular interest in being a child. I was a sponge for all the music, TV, and movies I could get my eyes and ears on, and even the silly shit left a mark forever. Here are a few of the reasons I can't hold down a regular job.
The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
I begged for and received the soundtrack to
Grease
(a movie I had seen and not understood) in the summer of 1978 and swiftly went about the business of learning every single word, which required me to stop my father in the middle of his lawn mowing and ask, “What's a tit?”
Grease
was a pretty filthy soundtrackâmuch filthier than the presence of a pre-“Physical” Olivia Newton-John would suggestâand while it may have worried my parents to hear me singing “she's a real pussy-wagon” and “get your filthy paws off my silky drawers,” what really should have had them concerned was such early, prolonged exposure to Stockard Channing.
If subtlety had been invented in the mid-1970s, it did not get through the doors of CBS Television City. Carol and the gang were turned all the way up all of the time, which for a child's first exposure to sketch comedy is actually perfect. They did show-length parodies of
Mildred Pierce
and
Gone With the Wind
âmovies I had not seenâand yet I ate it up. Could Harvey Korman have pulled it together once in a while? Sure. But it was the first time I saw grown-ups goofing off in an effective, efficient way, and I wanted in. (Honorable mention goes to Cher. In the early '70s, we said to Cher, “Listen: we know that you have a lovely, husky singing voice and a body for Bob Mackie gowns, but can you also do broad comedy?” And she said: “You know what? Let's find out together.”)
Children don't really get euphemismâsexual euphemism, particularly. So when this song came out, and Donna Summer was on the radio pleading for some hot stuff baby this evening, I assumed she was asking for a soothing bowl of clam chowder. I thought:
Donna Summer is enthusiastic about a hearty soup, and she doesn't care who knows it.
As with most truths you learn in adulthood, this one really disappointed.
What I loved about this one was the emotional bait and switch Eric plays with Sally. He spends most of the song begging her to stay the night, and then once he's convinced her, he's all: “Don't you ever
leave
?” Man, isn't that adulthood right there, I thought. Just when you think you know where you stand with someone, they toss you right out on your ass. And then an older kid in the neighborhood set me straight. It's more like: “Don't you
ever
leave,” like, “Keep staying here, the way I've been telling you to do,” which is pretty straightforward, as love messages go. Basic.
The first 45 I ever bought. It's about a guy who runs into his old lover in the frozen foods section, and they reminisce and lie about how happy they are over a six-pack of beer in the backseat of her car. I want to say it's Christmas Eve, but maybe that's just my memory adding more drama. Then he gets out and she drives off into the night and the snow turns into rain and nobody gets what they want and now Dan Fogelberg is dead. I was nine. This song posited adulthood as a series of disappointments I couldn't wait to grow up and face.
In which a dissolute woman bothers some lady on a bench and launches unbidden into the story of her life. She's seen it all: she's been to the Isle of Greece, she's sipped champagne on a yacht, she's done it with a priestâoutside on someone's lawn, even. Charlene has been there and back. And in the middle of the song, she stops singing entirely and just starts talking to the poor lady, who by now I imagine has driven off, with Charlene following on foot: “You know what love is?” she asks, and we know she's going to tell her: “Love is that husband you fought with this morning, the same one you're going to make love with tonight,” she says. Charlene is dropping some truth bombs, and, not knowing many Charlenesâor many grown-ups, for that matterâI assumed she was Charlene Tilton, famous at the time for her work as loose cannon Lucy Ewing on
Dallas
(and for being a room-temperature mess in the front rows of music awards shows with her then-husband Johnny Lee). And then she gets back to singing, this time about the unborn children who might have made her complete, and my mother would tsk and say “Oh, for God's sake,”â
O, fer Gad's seek
âand change the channel because we are Catholic, and abortion in pop music is not going to fly. But such drama! If the people in my subdivision seemed to have it all together, Charlene was coming the fuck apart, and I wanted to listen again and again.
This song has it all: passion, poetry, that synth break in the middle that makes you feel like you're on a spaceship. Plus it came out right in that 1970s moment when cults were at their peak, so I could imagine that it was about some mysterious figure in a white robe who came into the Wilson sisters' lives and hypnotized them, permanently transforming them into pure beings of rock and roll by sheer force of will and charisma. That guy could be around any corner. He could mesmerize you, too.
Now of course I realize it's probably just about getting finger-blasted.