Digging Pop/Rock 1975

When transitions reward us

To try to name all the unsettling experiences in one’s lifetime would trouble the nerves, the waves, and whatever atmospheric disturbances already exist. But when I think back to the major transition periods of my life, one screams—in that teen-thriller-flick-sort-of-way—for constant recognition.

Even though I have the diploma to prove it, when I graduated high school in 1974, it didn’t feel real. Not in that “we finally made it” utterance you hear forever and a day on that day, but in the “Am I supposed to be grown and in charge of myself now?” feeling.

Is this the seed of our imposter syndrome, the spring of our discontent?

Three months of a working summer break and then heading off to college might offer some degree of freedom, though it’s too much for some of us. I remember sitting in my freshman English class with Mrs. Fuller thinking for sure that someone was about to send me out in the hall for speaking to the girl across from me. Or more significantly, Mrs. Fuller might read my first composition and tell me that,

“You’re not ready for college yet.”

Double that fear for my intermediate Spanish class.

So I wonder if my freshman year in college was more of a fifth year in high school, since so many of my markers for growth and wisdom and love stayed the same? One of the major changes I can think of is meeting two guys at the organizational Entertainment Committee gathering and finding out that they were originally from Baltimore and LOVED David Bowie.

Though they were convinced that you should pronounce it BOUGH-IE, or if that doesn’t take, BOW (WOW WOW) IE, I thought it was either like knife-throwing Jim Bowie, or like the thing used to shoot arrows. That I didn’t know for sure was due to no one I knew back in high school favoring that androgynous alien. To say his name, you know, might infect you with his disease, or so it seemed to most people in Bessemer (not you, Jimbo!).

So, I found some Bowie comrades, but otherwise, the people I met in the dorm and in classes seemed pretty much like those I had graduated with/from. There was a girl named Teresa who loved Dylan, and that, even in 1974, marked her as one to watch. She had two other boyfriends, though, so…

Intimidated by most everything I saw, I went home on weekends, since home was only 25 miles away. My good friends often came home, too, and if nothing else, I was secure in a place where my immediate, non-adult needs were met regularly and with love, since my mother truly cried when she dropped me off at the dorm on that first weekend of college and asked every mid-week if I was coming home on Friday.

It’s hard to become an adult, and so when home, I’d run errands like I used to, sleep late, and meet up on those Friday/Saturday nights as I used to, at Pasquale’s Pizza Parlor, hoping that hanging out with high school friends could still be as adventurous as it was just weeks before.

Pasquale’s had a jukebox, three plays for a quarter, and depending on whose coin it was, the songs ranged from Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” to The Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again?”

So, as confessions go, here’s a start: I loved and still LOVE both of these songs, AM radio hits though they were.

But as I reflect on the confusion and strange way that a former girlfriend from high school was trying to tell me that she loved me, maybe, four other songs come to mind. These tunes put together show how eclectic AM Hit radio was, but they also perfectly portray that person I was, trying to be stronger than homesick while at college; out roaming the highways wondering what my best friends, or what that old/new girlfriend was doing tonight; or trying to determine whether college fit me, or I, it.

Often, because my parents’ cars still had only AM radios, I’d just listen along as I drove late to pick up my brother from his job as usher at the Midfield Theater—these were still his pre-driving days and he should write his own blog about all that happened in this lovely twin theater in a town just next to Bessemer.

Sometimes a friend would go with me to get my brother; at other times, a date I might have would end with our getting him. Or it might just be him and me, listening to…

This tune peaked at #6 in November of ‘74. Does a college freshman understand everlasting love? Oh sure.

And speaking of love, what about:

This was 1975’s #12 song, and was released in…November 1974.

That November was the month my former girlfriend called me to get us back together, so imagine how loudly, plaintively, I sang to that one in my mother’s Gran Torino (only alone and lonely).

Ranking only two slots behind “Best of My Love” at #14 for 1975 was this little ditty:

This one was released in September of 1974, and though it could be made fun of so easily, I never switched stations when I heard it on those back roads toward my tiny college in Montevallo. Sometimes at the Midfield Theater, I’d watch Bruce Lee movies while waiting on my brother to get off from work. Fists of Fury indeed.

And finally, a song that finished 1975 as the #15 song, though it, too, came out in November 1974 (what WAS in the air or swamp that fall, that November?):

This was never my favorite Doobie Brothers song, and yet, it reminds me of cruising with my friend Don B. down the Super Highway, and I’m sure I couldn’t appreciate how versatile the Doobies were then, which seems in keeping with how I struggled to appreciate a time in my life when I was truly 18, didn’t quite know who I was, what I wanted, but still loved hearing music that displayed the diversity that we should have all been seeing/hearing as our transitional key to maturity while we traveled down those precious highways of the heart and mind.