There was nothin' happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all
Then, one fine mornin', she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn't believe what she heard at all
She started shakin' to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock'n'roll
OK, so it's not 100% accurate, inasmuch as: (1) my name isn't Jenny; (2) I was 13 years old, not 5; and (3) we couldn't pick up New York AM stations before 6 P.M. or so where I grew up; but the gist of it's the same, and if I'm going to invoke anyone for my own personal mythology, then the Velvet Underground is an excellent place to start....that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)
I know it's a total cliche to bitch about the younger generation as one gets older, but I really don't think most kids today, even those growing up in my podunk hometown, have any idea just how isolated we truly were in northern New Hampshire during the 1960s and '70s--no internet, no MTV, no interstate, no malls, no Top 40 radio, no record stores, no fast food, no music magazines (except for the rare issue of Rolling Stone that found its way to the local drugstore and ice cream counter)..no, well, nothing, really. My hometown's population at that time was between 1000-1500; there were about 300 kids total at my highschool, and 45 or so in my actual graduating class--and that included kids from all over the school district (roughly a 30-mile radius); and for the most part, everything we knew about the world outside in general, and popular culture in particular, came to us through television, or at least such programming as we could pick up with huge rooftop antennas. Getting cable TV for the first time in 1973, which basically allowed us to get clear signals from the regional broadcast stations, was truly a godsend--before that, we were lucky if we got one station from each of the three major networks--ABC, NBC and CBS--(yes, kids, Fox, the WB and UPN didn't exist back then) and much of the time, NBC, coming as it did from Plattsburg, NY, was still terribly snowy and was a poor third choice, usually avoided unless it was Sunday night and time for the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and The Wonderful World of Disney double bill. After the Coming of Cable, we not only had PBS (Sesame Street! The Electric Company! Zoom! Masterpiece Theater!), but Canadian programming from the English-language CBC (complete with a riff from "Free Man in Paris" used as the signoff music for the weekend news) and a French-language channel from Sherbrooke, Quebec that frequently featured soft-core smut late at night (something my brother discovered long before I did, damn it...).
I'm always amused, and sometimes exasperated, to listen to people who've never lived in a very small town natter on about how quiet and peaceful it must be, how comforting to know all your neighbors and have a real place in one's community, how much simpler and purer life must be away from the corrupting influences of the Big Bad Cities, and so on and so forth (something Red Staters and Republicans are especially prone to)....yeah, riiiiiiight. Ever read a book called Peyton Place, folks? You know, came out in the mid-50s and scandalized everyone with describing just how many and what particular kinds of bugs would come crawling out from beneath when that metaphorical rock was flipped over? Well, Peyton Place the novel (and town) was most likely based on Gilmanton, New Hampshire (and considering the crap Grace Metalious put up with for the rest of her life, it must have been a pretty damn accurate portrait), but my hometown is namechecked in the book as a place known for its "loose women", and you could and doubtless can still find the same kinds of people there as in the fictitious town. (For the record, Grace was a tad bit late to the dance when she wrote about women of easy virtue in my hometown; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when there was still logging traffic on the Connecticut River and the town was a major railroad hub in the area, there was quite a thriving red-light district down near the river, and even into the 1920s and '30, decent women tended not to go too far downtown alone after dark lest they be accosted by drunken railroad men. By the time the novel was published in the mid-'50s, however, those days were long past, and my mother says that the gullible men who actually came crusing through after reading the novel were severely disappointed.) I'm telling you right now, people: small-town life is only picturesque and romantic and charming when you have the option to actually leave and make a life somewhere else; otherwise, you get all the petty, backbiting, gossipy aspects of life combined with utterly crushing social and cultural isolation, and it's NOT pretty.
Slight aside (get used to it, folks, 'cause I'll be doing it a lot): Since one of the main themes behind this blog is my life and times as a music fan/snarky pop-culture commentator, one of the people/bands I'll be talking about the most is Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails (and, as every good Ninnie knows after buying Pretty Hate Machine, Trent IS Nine Inch Nails ;-) ); and discovering that Trent and I shared similarly isolated childhoods is one factor that's drawn me especially close to the man and his music. When I read interviews where he describes growing up with a cornfield in his back yard and the McDonald's opening being the biggest thing to happen to Mercer, Pennsylvania in 20 years, I have to laugh, because he could be just as easily be talking about my hometown in New Hampshire. As if growing up in the boonies wasn't enough, my dad's been a frustrated farmer my entire life, and every summer we always had a good-sized garden behind the house, complete with small cornfield (you may laugh, but I've been spoiled for life by homegrown, freshly-picked corn on the cob), and another garden at a lot elsewhere in town; and yes, my town getting a Mickey D's--long after I grew up and moved away, mind you--really was one of the biggest things to happen in many, many years, especially after an elderly lady coming out of the supermarket parking lot across the street lost control and drove through the front window, injuring several people and causing one of the line cooks to have to leap onto the grill to get away, thus burning his hands fairly badly...but I digress. When he talks about how TV was his only real window on the outside world, and how everything interesting and exciting and real seemed to be happening in a whole different world, out there somewhere that he couldn't get to, far beyond the confines of Podunk, USA, and being the smart, geeky, non-jock who never fit in and wanted desperately to get away from the whole narrow-minded small town attitude and actually see the whole wide world for himself...well, I understand all too well, because I've been there and done that myself, and it's oddly comforting to know that I'm not the only member of my generation who's not only had many of the same experiences, but who had and has a similar attitude towards them. (One of us! One of us!)
Anyway, back to my musical epiphany:
It was Christmas vacation 1974, I was in 8th grade, and my mom had just gotten a large, fancy-schmancy multiband radio for Christmas, which meant that I could now freely claim her old ivory plastic AM radio for myself. I'm still not sure what led me to do this (serendipity or karma, perhaps?), but one evening I ended up alone in my room, turned on the radio, and started twiddling the dial until I landed on something that sounded interesting. It was WABC, 770 AM out of New York City, and the first song I remember hearing on it was the Three Degrees' "When Will I See You Again"--granted, it was just another R&B song of the time, but to me it was new and different from anything I'd heard on the AM station we always listened to at home (WDEV in Waterbury, Vermont, for what it's worth), and I kept on listening and listening and listening, late into the night, and the next night, and the one after that. Not long after, I flipped a little further back down the AM dial and discovered WRKO 680 AM out of Boston, which didn't mix quite as much R&B into their top 40 playlist as WABC did, but was still pretty damn good, and sometimes even had a stronger signal at night as well, and started dividing my listening time between the two stations. Eventually, as tends to happen, my mom's new radio eventually found its way into my room, and I was able to check out both the AM and FM bands, and find new stations with new music; and some of the bands on all of these radio stations would sometimes end up on American Bandstand, where I would be surprised and fascinated to see the real people behind the songs. (For some totally inexplicable reason, when "Mandy" first came out, I thought Barry Manilow was actually black, and was more than a little startled to see that he was just a blond white guy with a big old nose...yes, I really was that clueless as an adolescent.)
By the time February vacation rolled around, I was quite the Top 40 junkie, and when my friend Bonnie and her mom invited me along on one of their occasional shopping trips out of town, in the comparatively big "city" of Barre, Vermont, I jumped at the chance to add to my music collection. Mind you, I'd bought albums in the past--I was a huge John Denver fan in 7th grade for some odd reason (probably the glasses and the sense of humor), and thanks to another friend, Laurie, had already discovered Elton John and the Carpenters; I'm still not sure how I stumbled on Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, but I bought it some time in 1974, and it's not only the only album from that period in my life that I still listen to regularly, but has only gotten better over the last 30 years--but this time, in addition to an album or two, I wanted to get some actual 45-RPM singles, and I did: Elton John's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Ever Been Mellow", Neil Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain" (he'd been recently signed to Rocket Records, Elton John's vanity label) and Helen Reddy's "Angie Baby"--if you're familiar with that last one, then you'll realize that my liking it was more than a tad creepy (as is the song), but it wasn't the idea of trapping some random boy to use as a plaything via the power of the radio waves that caught my ear, but the sense that, in a weird way, I was that off-kilter girl, alone with the music. (I hadn't even thought of that latter song for years, until just after 9/11, when I saw Jim Infantino's band Jim's Big Ego playing at the late lamented 608 club, with Faith Soloway opening up...it was a very strange night anyway, complete with tea lights on the stage, and ended after the most cathartic version of Jim's "Porno Plot" I've ever heard him do; but Faith and her band actually covered "Angie Baby". I knew it was a creepy song anyway--talk about a weird one to have in the top 40--but it really hit just HOW fucking creepy it was that night. BTW, go check Jim out at
Admittedly, my musical taste at the time was horrifyingly middlebrow, but it took a number of years and various friends and roommates to really expand my musical horizons (special props to my college friend Angie, the only girl in Plymouth, NH to have bright fuschia hair in 1983 and the reason I ended up actually having a friendly civilized conversation with GG Allin--but that's a story for another day--and my roommate Ann, who got me into R.E.M. and the Violent Femmes, thus being indirectly responsible for my moving to Athens, GA 5 years later), and we all have to start somewhere, right?
