Why am I effusing about music created when Beyonce wasn’t even born, churned out by musicians with the faint ring of a dive-bar Throwback Thursday trivia contest? And just as Blue Oyster Cult sang about how nature continually revealed the foolishness of man, 1979 also sped the destruction of the glittery dance ball born from Barry Gibb falsettos, at least as evinced by the anarchy of the “Anti-Disco” night at Chicago’s Comiskey Stadium after a White Sox game. Classic albums, melodic punk, dangerous New Wave: if you needed pretext for an album party, there was always cellophane to unwrap.īlue-blood acts I adored - Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd - were proving they weren’t longhaired dinosaurs ducking comets named Deborah Harry, Joe Strummer, Robin Zander or David Byrne. The chrome housing of my pride-and-joy Sony stereo rarely grew cold, not as I gorged on a feast of eclectic, envelope-stretching music that painted my world the vivid colors seemingly bled out of the real one. So, blessed be for those unleashed Les Pauls, for thumping bass riffs, for singers going where the suited adults wouldn’t.
It was a kind of “Deer Hunter” state of mind. embassy workers hostage in Tehran.įor me, an ever-curious seventeen-year-old in the foothills of Pasadena, California, those flickering images, as well as other dismaying ones - the victims of crisscrossing serial killers, dying steel towns, Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan - seeded doubts about pretty much everything concerning the future. How a January than began hopefully with Terry Bradshaw’s aw-shucks glee after winning a Super Bowl in Miami metastasized in November into rage and disbelief at the righteous scowl of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed “Death to America” as his followers took U.S. To this day, the expressions remain amber in memory: the knotted foreheads of Pennsyl vanians near the meltdown at the Three-Mile Island nuclear-power plant Jimmy Carter’s clenched grin realizing circumstance would relegate him to a one-termer. It was the faces that slayed you that year, when the only reason for a belly-laugh was a Robin Williams standup act.
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