From my twelve-year-old point of view, this was the most obscenely profitable Halloween ever. Done up as Frankenstein's monster thanks to what must have been a rather expensive makeup and prosthetic set (complete with corpse-gray face paint, silvery bolts in the neck, a fake forehead, scars and nose), I set out with a group of friends around five thirty that evening and hit the streets of Southfield with a fiery determination to amass a king's ransom of sugary goodies. Without the indignity of having our parents following us around from house to house, not only did we greatly increase the speed of our progress but also opened up other streets aside from my own for pillaging for the first time. We were like the E Street Band of trick-or-treaters that night as we went door to door for nearly three hours, eventually leaving our subdivision and wandering across Evergreen Road, where there were bigger (and, let's face it, richer) houses to be plundered.
The rewards we reaped on that cool, dewy night were stupendous to our bite-sized Payday and Bazooka-accustomed sensibilities: full-sized Butterfinger and Nestle Crunch Bars, whole packs of Bubble Yum, the occasional dollar bill (rapidly squandered on videogames at Sandy's Stockade and/or trading cards at Sentry Drug), and boxes of Cracker Jacks, for god's sake. It was the Halloween haul to end them all.
Upon returning home, we were a bit less than pleased to find out that the adults had control of the big TV: Dad was watching a show he had taped the previous evening along with a couple of his friends. When we figured out that said show was not something sci-fi or adventure-related but instead some special episode of American Bandstand (of all things), we were even less thrilled, but not put off enough to keep us from sorting through all our Halloween booty on the floor in the same room. As the program went on, I found myself paying more and more attention to the TV, getting distracted by the presentation to the point that I actually wanted to see the portion we'd missed while we were out trick-or-treating. When the program had finished playing, I ejected the tape and set it aside to watch it again the next day.
Of course, I could never had known that night that I had just taken the first step under my own free will towards becoming my present day self. Until that evening, what very little of Bandstand I had seen over the years was generally just the opening bits showing a studio full of teenagers happily frugging to dance music while the eternally youthful Dick Clark held court at some little lectern in the back. Back then, the start of American Bandstand was nothing so much as a flashing neon sign that read "Saturday morning cartoons are over. Get your ass outside and find something to do."The episode Dad and his friends were watching that night, however, was Bandstand's thirtieth anniversary show and was not a teenybopper dancing marathon so much as one of those clip-filled self-congratulatory shows dear ol' Dick excelled at back then, heavily sweeteend with lip-synced performances from such current pop luminaries as Kenny Rogers, Earth, Wind & Fire, Kim Carnes, Stevie Wonder, Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart, The Beach Boys, The Righteous Brothers, The Oak Ridge Boys, and, uh, Frankie Laine.
In a very short time, this American Bandstand show became one of my most-watched videotapes, even earning a freezer-tape label on the side indicating it was not to be taped over without consent. Instead of a bunch of smartly-dressed California teens shaking their asses to the hits, this show was concentrated almost entirely on the music itself, and what I saw (and heard) absolutely captivated me: the special was like a fast-paced walk through a televised museum of pop music history, genre by genre, decade by decade, from the mid 1950s until the present day. I had never seen anything like it.
Of course, this was nowhere near a complete history course: there weren't any album rock titans like Led Zeppelin, Yes, Jethro Tull or Pink Floyd in sight, not one single psychedelic act outside of Jefferson Airplane, and (aside from a deranged-looking clip of Public Image Ltd.), no mention whatsoever of punk rock. Being completely oblivious to these shortcomings, I was astounded by the sheer wealth of clips by damned near every important pop singles act in history that just went on and on and on. Silly as it may sound (since this was American Bandstand, after all), this lingering glimpse of the vast history of pop music was breathtaking and mind-expanding in the same way as the first time I looked up into the real night sky during one of our annual family camping trips to the Upper Peninsula. And, much like that magical night on the south shore of Lake Superior, I couldn't get enough of it.
It wasn't just the old stuff that had me entranced, either: I was especially taken by the "live" performances of some of the contemporary material like Rod Stewart's smoothly danceable "Young Turks," Stevie Wonder's reggae-soul workout "Master Blaster," Earth, Wind & Fire's vocoder-laced funk anthem "Let's Groove" and Kim Carnes' slinky, pulsing cover of Jackie DeShannon's "Bette Davis Eyes." The latter two songs resonated especially strongly with me with their modern, synthesizer-heavy sound and slick, ultra-clean production. Not only did these songs become instant favorites of mine for weeks afterward, but also served as the first evidence that at least some of my dad's musical tastes had been passed down to the next generation.
Perhaps sensing that I had suddenly "tuned in," one of the gifts I got from my parents at Christmas a couple of months later was a little GE transistor radio. Silvery and sleek, this radio was so small that it ran on AAA batteries, only had 2 thumb-roller control knobs for tuning and volume and could easily fit into the pocket of my jeans, though this generally wasn't very conducive to great signal reception (using the little belt clip on the back worked better for that). The radio also had no power switch: that was actuated simply by plugging in the headphones (which were the same kind of "ear bud" deals you see on iPods these days, only they were colored black and attachable to an included headphones frame if desired).Until this time, my only real experience with listening to the radio on my own was getting my parents to tune in the NPR station on Dad's new receiver so that I could follow along with the Star Wars radio drama earlier that very year. So it was on Christmas night 1981 that I first started scanning around the FM dial on my own, seeing what was out there on the Detroit airwaves, looking for something that would electrify me in the same way those three or four songs on the Bandstand videotape had. I don't remember coming across anything that knocked me out of my chair, but I swept through the FM spectrum, noting what was out there: talk shows, soft rock, R&B, more soft rock, that faceless string-y background music that what was once called "muzak" or "elevator music," hard rock, country, and yet more soft rock (this was the end of 1981, after all).
For those first few weeks I flitted about the dial, testing the air rather than finding a place to hang my hat, if you will. Once in a while I would come across an older pop song I'd heard a clip from during the Bandstand special and listen to it in its entirety, but the rest of that time was an unfamiliar plunge into waters that had thus far offered very little of what I was really looking for. Also during those first few months of 1982, I had become an pretty faithful watcher of American Bandstand (a list of that season where I stepped in is linked here), Solid Gold, and even Soul Train. Sure, the performances were always lip-synced (a concept that I had a hell of a time coming to terms with: why bother showing up if you aren’t even going to sing? Don't they feel like idiots up there?), but "live" or not these acts were never less than interesting for someone who felt like had about a quarter-century's worth of catching up to do. I was slipping into that state again, where I was simply sponging up information like there was no tomorrow and storing it away like a harried squirrel ... the same kind of obsessive swan-dive into the deep end of the pool that consumed me during every other diversion of mine that had preceded this one.
As big as these three months at the end of 1981 and the beginning of 1982 were for my new interest, there was probably still some hope at that time for pulling me back from the brink: as much as I was interested, music was still just another engrossing detour for my brain to explore like dinosaurs, astronomy, Battlestar Galactica or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. However, there was a very powerful accelerant that had just arrived in Southfield homes around this very time that would ultimately seal my fate as a lifelong music dork. The only problem was that initially, seemingly everyone else had it but me ...
NP David Gilmour Kodak Theater, Hollywood CA, April 19, 2006
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