1977 - 1978: Growing Up

Well, first an apology to Bruce Springsteen for co-opting the title of one of his songs, but it does describe 1977 through 1978. Well sort of. It was my last year of grade school at St Pete’s and the last time I would see a lot of the people I spent the last 7 years growing up with. It was a time I would do some growing up, and make a few major bonehead mistakes. There were new influences and changing tides in music, in life, at home and through the country. Be forewarned:  The first half of the post is my normal musical reminiscing.  In the second half, I do get a little more personal than I have in the past - If you want to skip that. feel free.  I promise to do my best to keep future posts free of too much emotional baggage!

The major non-music event that happened in 1977 was the release of STAR WARS. And by that I mean STAR WARS, not “Episode blah d blah A New blah blah blah”. When it was released in May, 1977 there was no episode subtitle on the movie. That was added later after the Empire Strikes back was released. Oh, and Han Solo shot first. But even Star Wars ties into my musical heritage. I won the tickets for the show from a call in contest on WIBG. They sent the tickets and an original movie poster. The poster was folded and creased and stuffed into a 10x13 manila envelope, but I hung it up on my wall where it stayed until they day we moved from Pennsauken in 1986. I called my cousin Bret and we went to see it at the SamEric at the Pennsauken Mart. I saw it again with my dad as well (it may have been the other way around though!). I remember thinking that it was pretty good movie at the time and it was the first movie I saw twice in the theater. But what really turned me into a Star Wars nut was the merchandising! I had fan magazines and models and action figures and all that stuff, which is alas, long since gone. Eventually I remember my dad yelling at me, “Star Wars! STAR WARS! STAR WARS!!! Is that all you can think about?!? Why don’t you change your name to STAR WARS Walter!” But I would forever be a Star Wars Fan. Oh yeah – I had the soundtrack album, too.

But not only that, I think it also made me into a Movie Fan as well. There’s nothing like seeing a huge spectacle of a movie on the big screen with the sound blasting and the popcorn crunching. And by the end of 1977, I would be a life-long Science Fiction fan, too. Close Encounters was released in November of the same year and the original Star Trek series was still on in syndication. I enjoyed reading Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne and HG Wells, too.



K-Tel’s Last Gasp

While the last K-tel collection, Music Machine tried to latch on to the new Sci-Fi Wave and featured a campy picture of Robbie the Robot (from the movie Forbidden Planet) it was my least favorite. Disco reigned supreme on this collection, but this set is notable for at least one stunning exception: Debby Boone’s You Light up My Life. Released August 16, 1977, the thing just wouldn’t go away. It was a decent ballad but I’m not sure how it managed to top the charts for 10 consecutive weeks. Before that you had to go all the way back to the birth of Rock and Roll with Elvis’ Hound Dog to find a song that topped the charts as long. I mean c’mon!!! Freaking Hound Dog was beat out by Debby Boone?!?! Maybe it something to do with the fact that the song was released on the very day Elvis died. Or maybe not, but it would become the top selling song of the 1970’s. The song eventually became a victim of its own success and in the process served as the poster child for everything bland and vanilla about the decade. Even today, the oldies stations won’t touch the thing, but who knows, the time may be right for techno-sampled mash up of the tune. In case you’re wondering…yes I had the single.

Music Machine
Side 1
I Just Want To Be Your Everything / Andy Gibb
Keep It Comin' Love / Kc & The Sunshine Band
Don't Give Up On Us / David Soul
Do You Want To Make Love / Peter Mcann
Hot Line / Sylvers
Got To Give It Up (Pt.1) / Marvin Gaye
You Don't Have To Be A Star (To Be In My Show) / Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis
Play That Funky Music / Wild Cherry
Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky) / Bill Conti

Side 2
Dancing Queen / Abba
Beth / Kiss
Blinded By The Light / Manfred Mann's Earth Band
Car Wash / Rose Royce
Lucille / Kenny Rogers
I Like Dreamin' / Kenny Nolan
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road / Elton John
You And Me / Alice Cooper
Feels Like The First Time / Foreigner

     I don’t have a lot to add about the Music Machine, except to say that this was the last one I owned. There was Play that Funky Music, which became a bar band staple and Kiss’ Beth which would impress the Kiss Army into believing that the band could do anything it wanted. I remember my friend Larry saying, “Kiss is so great – they can rock out and turn it right round and mellow down”. I never really liked Kenny Rogers’ Lucille, but there was no denying it was a big hit. And I can’t figure out how a hit from 6 years ago ended up on this album but Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is there still the same. Two groups that would go on to have big careers made their debuts here. Dancing Queen was an irresistible hit from ABBA that would mark the start of a strong career from the Scandinavian quartet. And Foreigner proved that straight up rock singles could still crack the top 40. After this, I think K-tel had a few more collections, but they were exclusively Disco. Or should I say disco. Or maybe I should just say crap.

Blinded by the Light was a big hit for Manfred Mann, but I’m not sure how many people realize it was written by home state hero Bruce Springsteen? I didn’t at the time, but I was impressed that a song with the word “douche” in it could be a big hit. Of course that wasn’t really what he was saying – the real lyric is “deuce” – but that’s what it sounded like. Either way, the lyric has been a head scratcher for more than a few people. I think the original line:

Cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night

is meant to imply “cutting loose” something worthless, like a deuce playing card, to become a nameless wanderer in the night. But that’s just my take on it.



Billy Joel’s The Stranger was released in November 1977, but when Only the Good Die Young was released as a single it created quite the stir for us Catholic school kids. I think there was talk about the song being banned, but at St Pete’s all the guys were into it! Billy Joel totally nailed the Catholic imagery on this one, although he claims he never nailed the girl in the song.  It was the perfect song at the perfect time for me.



My Short-Lived Life as a Socialite (Or the blog where I, myself jump the shark!)

While my grade school days were winding down, my hormones were starting to get into gear. In 8th grade, the boys and girls started pairing off and everyone was talking about who was dating, or making out or was seen together at the roller skating rink over in Cherry Hill. I had eyes for one girl in particular, until she ended up in my basement closet with my musical “soulmate” and best bud Larry at my own party. I sure understood how Lesley Gore felt. Some time during eighth grade I was invited to what we called a “boy/girl” party by Ed Schmidt. Ed was an alright guy who sat next to me for most of 8th grade, but we didn’t really hang out. I was surprised to be invited but it was a pretty big deal for me. We had pizza, listened to a lot of cool records, some of the girls and guys danced and some of them hooked up and snuck off to make out. Ed’s mom would occasionally come down to keep everything on the up and up, but it was a lot of fun. I remember listening to Kansas and checking out the Point of Know Return album cover and I remember taking most of the night to ask a girl to dance and getting shot down anyway. Mostly I remember just having a great time.



I had such a good time that somehow I got the incredibly stupid idea that I should have a party myself. Well it seemed like a perfect idea at the time, my folks agreed and Larry helped with the planning, but if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t mind having another chance at doing it right. My mistake (bonehead mistake #1) was to try to recreate the same party I went to at Ed’s house, which really was a party of the more popular kids, with maybe me as the token dweeb. Of course, I wanted all the same kids at my party, to the point that I excluded some of the kids I had been friends with for that last seven years. My dad even tried to warn me that I was making a mistake, but I was too stupid to realize what I was doing. Even the nuns that were teaching 8th grade tried to make the same point. Sister Mary came over to our 8th-grade class to give us (and I mean me) a little lecture and said that all the parties always had the same people invited to them and that was a really a shame and maybe we (me) should try to do better. Another hint I was too dumb to take.


The party ended up being pretty good and Larry stole my girl, but I think I hurt a lot of my friends by not inviting them. A few years later, I would have another party right around the end of sophomore year when I was in high school and I would make it a point to stretch out the invite list as wide as I could. Maybe I learned something from that 8th-grade party, but I still feel bad about being a jerk to my friends.


My Short-Lived Life as a Stud-Muffin



Which brings us to bonehead mistakes number 2 and 3, my short lived romantic life. Before I completely incriminate myself, in my defense I just want to say that I really had no idea what the hell I was doing in 1978. First, there was the girl in my class who really went out of her way to show me she liked me. She invited me to her house, asked me to hang out – I more or less didn’t catch on and I think I ended up pissing her off when I shoved a handful of flowers in her face and triggered her allergies. Smooth move!


Then there was the 8th-grade dance and all that followed that. First, Larry and my old flame had broken up, so I saw it as my big chance to ask her to be my “date” to the 8th-grade dance. Even though everyone was invited to the dance, sponsored by St Pete’s, and we weren’t supposed to have “dates”, I still wanted to let Mary Jo know I still liked her. After all, she was the first real female friend I ever had. So I made a big deal out of setting up this whole “date” thing with her only to end up spending most of the dance with Fran, who I didn’t even know was in my class until she walked up to me and asked me to dance. I was sure glad she did. I can’t even remember what songs they played that night, but I remember her. Slow dancing and just being amazed that any girl would have wanted to dance with me, but there we were.

We talked to each other every night after the dance and we were together for a few weeks that summer – our first date was to see Grease with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. We had a great time and I think we even kissed good night that night. We hung out a lot, I remember being over her house and watching TV, I met her family, and she told me about the records she liked. I still think of her every time I hear Magnet and Steel by Walter Egan. Sometime in the middle of that, I went to stay with my brother Ted in Louisville for two weeks (most of which I spent playing Darkness on the Edge of Town on my brother' stereo) and we still managed to write letters back and forth. When I came back we went to see Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band This was a movie that featured the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, two of the biggest pop music stars of the day. The musical had some sort of convoluted plot wrung out of Beatles’ songs from Sgt Peppers’, Abbey Road and Let It Be.

Then it was over, before school started up again. That was bonehead mistake #3. One day I just didn’t call her and then I never called her or saw her again. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, because I did. I never meant to stop seeing her. I guess I just didn’t really know what to do with a girlfriend, or how to act mature. But it was a crappy thing to do. I mean, she went out of her way to dance with me, wrote to me when I was half way across the country, hung out with me for most of the summer and then I just blew her off. Another smooth move, Romeo. Geez. Well, I didn’t really intend for my blog to be some sort of tell-all way to exorcise my 30 year old emotional demons, but these things were really a big part of helping me become who I am. I learned the hard way, and (sadly) at other people’s expense, that there had to be better ways to treat people, and I would try, sometimes tipping the scales too far the other way. As the summer of 1978 waned, grade school was behind me and high school lay ahead like a sleeping dragon. And as I said at the start of this entry, it was all part of Growing Up.

I spent these month-long vacations in the stratosphere

And you know it’s really hard to hold your breath

I swear I lost everything I ever loved or feared

I was the cosmic kid…..

Next: 1970 - 1978: Odds and Ends