A Top Ten Memoir: 1976 - "I must be fantasy's best friend..."
During much of ’76 I continued experiencing what I felt the previous year: I was lonely in Palatine and desperately missed Chicago. Stevie and Guy moved with their parents to Gore, Oklahoma to open a restaurant and motel. (Why? I never knew…) This loss was a major blow. When I turned 13 in February though I managed to have a small birthday party with two of my Chicago Perkins School friends, Dave and Vince, along with two new friends, John and David.
It was an odd pairing of people but it made me feel a little special for a short time. I still felt uneasy in school and shy to the point of cancelling out of attending David’s own birthday party. Whatever lack of early childhood inhibitions I had dancing in front of my mom’s movie camera were now long buried under the self-consciousness and anxiety of adolescence.
I spent increasing amounts of time alone enjoying my privately created worlds and watching TV. With the lights out in my room at night, I began watching reruns of Dark Shadows on our local channel 32 at 11 PM until it was abruptly yanked off the air. I was heartbroken but highly inspired.
This brief return exposure to my favorite daytime gothic soap opera allowed me to create my own Kid Channel version called Dark Nights in which I was a child vampire named Aaron Cooper and all of my former Chicago friends played various other bewitching roles similar to the ghouls that appeared on Dark Shadows. Every day after school I’d write the synopsis for a new episode.
Plots would thicken. Characters would be killed off. Suspense would increase. It was intense stuff for a 13-year old! I wrote all of this for about a year and came up with this great idea of having my character killed with a stake on the very last episode by a young female character “played” by my Chicago neighbor Dolly. As she ran off into the woods after the deed was done, the music of Elton John’s great medley Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding would play. To this day when I hear that song I think about the fictitiously created images in my head from this Dark Nights finale. I thought the whole concept of Dark Nights was so cool that my mother agreed to type it up as I began to “novelize” the story. I didn’t get very far though. Somehow the excitement of creating the original synopses didn’t match up when I attempted writing a longer form story.
Starting eighth grade that Fall began what would become one of my darkest years ever. The way it worked at Palatine Hills Junior High is each student was part of a “section.” Each section went to the same classes together all day – kind of like homeroom, although we didn’t have one. I had made friends in my seventh-grade section but none of them were in my new one. The only person I knew was a kid named Jay who had entered the school during seventh grade and often sat out during gym class. I was never quite sure why he didn’t have to play football or softball but he seemed like an appropriate person for me to hang around with in eighth grade. He had two friends in our eighth-grade class, Mike and Dan. I was interested in some sort of friendship with them but they never really included me in their clique. Instead I was poked fun at not only by them but also by other guys in the class. At one point, I thought I’d get back at Dan and call him a “bitch.” Immediately he, Jay, and Mike made it clear that a guy couldn’t be called “bitch.” This was news to me as Elton John had already declared “the bitch is back” (my #2 of 1974) a couple years earlier. HE was referring to himself – a bitch. Perhaps they didn’t know the song. It didn’t matter though: I was the outcast.
I became increasingly depressed and grew to hate my fellow classmates. Another Dave, who I was forced to sit with when I first arrived at Virginia Lake School would pound on my back while sitting in gym class every day. My way of dealing with it was by saying, “that feels good.” Then it hit me one day: I’d return to my third-grade trick and play hooky! I discovered that one could be absent for at least two days before the office would phone parents. So, I once again decided to take days off here and there – particularly if there’d be some unpleasant gym activity or group project. One particular week, I decided Monday and Tuesday weren’t enough. I’d go for three days and stay home on a Wednesday too! I didn’t do much at home. My sister Judy was away at college so I got to have her room. My brother Mike was around but he seemed to be home at odd hours. His bedroom was next to mine so I would literally STAY IN THE CLOSET! As if my gay card wasn’t already met, I read the biography of Judy Garland while in that closet! (Very true!)
I remember not knowing if my brother Mike was home. I would stress myself out about opening my bedroom door around the time I’d usually come home from school. I knew he might be in his room but I didn’t know if the door was open. Eventually I snuck to the door, took a chance, and found his door closed! I was saved! I wasn’t saved that Wednesday though. By the middle of the day, the phone started ringing. I knew it was my mother. When I picked it up and heard her say, “Danny, what are you doing home?!” all I could do was cry. The next day mom, Ray, and I had a meeting with the Assistant Principal. I cried and told him about being bullied in class. He offered switching me to another section but for some reason I decided to stay put. As a “punishment” of sorts for playing hooky, he asked me what I liked to do. When I said, “watch TV,” he had me join the school’s TV club. The group met in the library with the head librarian serving as the faculty adviser. We didn’t really talk about TV but instead spent time creating videos of school productions. The other kids were fun enough to spend an extra hour with once a week and the librarian would drive me home. I never became particularly close to any of them but it did give me some kind of outlet. (Plus, occasionally the dark-haired teacher I mentioned from ’75 would often show up doing who knows what in the library.)
As such, most of my time was still at home in my private worlds, listening to music, and watching TV. Here are my Top Ten songs of 1976:
1. Happy Endings – Melissa Manchester
2. This One’s for You – Barry Manilow
3. Let Your Love Flow – Bellamy Brothers
4. Say You Love Me – Fleetwood Mac
5. Grow Some Funk of Your Own – Elton John
6. Only Love is Real – Carole King
7. Daybreak – Barry Manilow
8. Talkin’ to Myself – Melissa Manchester
9. Fairweather Father – Carly Simon
10. Crazy on You – Heart
My fictitious Kid Channel was still going strong. The Recorders TV series was replaced by The P’s & K’s. The former included all of the Oak Park Avenue gang along with Stevie and Guy. But by ’76, Irene had moved away from that neighborhood and Stevie and Guy were gone from the State. So, the P’s stood for Jeff and I, the Pals, while the K’s stood for Lois and Paula Kirsch.
This new show was similar in my mind to The Recorders but it only featured the four us performing songs such as Elton John’s Grow Some Funk of Your Own which told a tale of a guy being stuck in a cantina when a senorita showed up causing all sorts of problems for him. I thought this one would make a great performance and I, of course, played the character Elton John was singing about.
Truthfully, all of this was painfully lonely. I remember at least once screaming to my mother, “I HATE THIS HOUSE!!” Melissa Manchester released two albums that year. Both featured songs that spoke loudly and clearly to me. Talkin’ to Myself from the album Help is on the Way features the line: “And it’s just me again perfecting the art of talking to myself and feeling better.” I certainly spent a LOT of time talking to myself and to the “characters” in my life. Happy Endings is filled with more relatable lines: “Oh no, I feel it coming on again. I must be fantasy’s best friend.” In the song Manchester sings about a hopeful happy ending to a relationship: “Don’t cry now. Nothing’s gonna come between us as long as the music goes on and on. ‘Cause when it stops, I’ll be gone.” She was my friend and if I kept listening to her, I’d be okay. That certainly was the effect her music had on me.
As a side note, years later, I met Manchester after one of her concerts in the Chicago area. I told her how important she had been to me and how her music helped me when I was such a lonely adolescent. She gave me a very compassionate look and smile. I may have made her day as much as she did mine for many days in a row back in the late 70s.
If you look at some of these lyrics there was some hope building too. As much as I hated eighth grade, I found comfort in my activities. I think I got some of that sense of hope and escape from my mother. Even though by this point she had buried two husbands, she always seemed to bounce back. In ’76 we had been in our new house for a year when mom found out that Ray was pretty broke. He had a great job with Kemper Insurance as a computer analyst but somehow remained forever in debt. (After he died many years later, my mother found over a dozen credit cards he kept locked away in a briefcase. He was thousands of dollars in debt and likely gambled much of his money away.) All of this made mom very angry and she threatened to divorce him several times, even requiring my sister to transfer from Northern Illinois University to the more affordable University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
Mom occasionally listened to pop music and really enjoyed Barry Manilow’s Daybreak. It’s a very positive song: “We’ve been closing our eyes, day after day, covered in clouds, losing our way. But it’s daybreak. If you wanna believe it can be daybreak, ain’t no time to grieve. Said it’s daybreak. If you’ll only believe and let it shine, shine, shine all around the world!” She saw light in the darkest of times and Manilow often represented that to her and I.
From the same album came This One’s for You. Manilow seemed to be expressing so much of what I was feeling at the time, especially in relation to my then long gone friends: “I sing of things I miss, and things that used to be and I wonder every night, if you might just miss me too, cause this one’s for you. This one’s for you. This one’s for you, wherever you are, to say that nothing’s been the same since we’ve been apart.” Paula and I continued to write to each other regularly. On occasions, which would prove to be highlights, Paula and Lois’s mother June would bring them to see us in Palatine. We are literally in a silent movie here (we even did our own stunts…)
June and my mother were great friends. They loved to drink and bitch about men. (June was divorced twice by this time.) June loved the song Let Your Love Flow and I still remember her dancing around our Palatine family room as I played it for her.
Both Carly Simon and Carole King released albums in 1976. Neither was a major hit but the songs Fairweather Father and Only Love is Real from the respective artists proved to be ageless, introspective songs by these two great singer/songwriters of the era Simon sang about a father that wants different things than his wife. (Hmm…mom and Ray?) The melody and harmonies are again stellar from Simon. King recorded one of her best songs since It’s Too Late with Only Love is Real. It features the haunting and moody guitar playing that made the earlier song such a work of art. This one comes close in sound and style.
My taste in music was definitely evolving. Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Love Me and Heart’s Crazy On You are now classic rock staples. The former comes from the Fleetwood Mac album that introduced most people to Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. I became big fans of the whole band very quickly as their songs were everywhere on the radio. Say You Love Me is one of Christine McVie’s most positive, uplifting songs. Great keyboards and guitar work along with a powerful melody makes this among many from that album to stand out.
Crazy on You was the first single from Heart’s Dreamboat Annie album. Also being exquisitely produced, with soaring vocals and an adventurous arrangement, it was one of the group’s standouts. Both of these songs today harken call back to that era but are timeless both in sound and message. They’re from albums when albums truly were albums, full of twists and turns, ballads and rockers but a strong unifying sound all the way through. I truly appreciated these full-length records and their polished productions. I spent a lot of time with them alone in my room.
Links to my Top Ten of 1976:
What would be in your Top Ten of 1976?
Next Up…1977…”I wanna be where you are…”
I was 7 in 1976. In 1975, my uncle hitchhiked across the country to visit and gave my sister and I presents when he arrived. My gift was a copy of Kiss Alive! That kickstarted my love for rock and roll and records (not to mention, all things Kiss!). I remember in 1976 I had saved money from either chores or birthday and I purchased my first two records with my very own cash - Kiss 'Rock & Roll Over' and Aerosmith 'Rocks.' Kiss appealed to my little boy imagination, Aerosmith seemed very rock and roll and quite dangerous (I was fascinated by the photos on the inside sleeve).
Another bangah, Dan! Your '76/8th grade "year of angst" is slamming right into my year 21, when I was doing 7-midnight at my second commercial station, WFMF-FM 102 in Baton Rouge, LA. That comes into play, musically, in a sec, but we coulda been such buds had I been 13 when you were!
I was feeling many of the insecurities and self-doubts (in 8th grade...1968-'69) you're describing....and, if either of us had mustered up the courage to talk to the other, I think we could've helped each other, enjoyed music together, etc! It never occurred to me, though, to skip school. I just did my thing, tried to disappear, came home, locked the door, and lost myself in my promo records from Dad! "Play with friends?" What's that? Putting the needle down on the new Tull, etc was "playing with friends" to me at that point!
LOVED "Daybreak"....all of Manilow, really....I've written quite extensively about him, mainly focusing on the hits he had that were written by other singer/songwriters (based on mix tapes like that I made in the '80s)! You know where to find them!
I also love Carole's "Only Love is Real." Loved that "Thoroughbred" album, too. Back to my radio gig in '76: It was a 'progressive rock' station, so King was not exactly at the top of the format list! Nevertheless, I think I "got away with" playing "Only Love.." a couple times! One song I know I got listener flack from was Wendy Waldman's "Living Is Good"....every time I played it, my phones would light up (I didn't have to answer....after 5, the switchboard closed.....but, I loved punishment!)....."Play 'Free Bird,' man!" They were, at least, kind enough to NOT say, "Get that crap off!"
Wendy was always a favorite....her early-'70s career had a cool connection with Andrew Gold (I bet his "Lonely Boy" pops up on your '77 list.....it did mine!! At 22, then, and I know 13-year-old Brad would've felt some reassurance from it)! I call Wendy "the West Coast Melissa"! Same alliterative names, same mane of brown curls'n'waves, and the same ability to speak to the listener's psyche and emotions with an endless supply of melodies and harmonies.
In case you haven't heard it (and even if you have), my gift to 13-year-old Dan.....Wendy's "Living Is Good" (from her 1976 "The Main Refrain" album)....the harmonies alone!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiSCCxe1QnU