A Top Ten Memoir: 1978 - "Wonder how I ever got along without you..."
The end of 1978 marked the first time I actually created my own Top Ten of the year. Yes, I’d had my weekly radio and Billboard inspired WDNP lists so I’m not sure what made me compile that first list of favorite songs. Perhaps it was my own frustrations with the Billboard charts at the time or more likely I felt a need to categorize – it kept me safe and sane. Here’s my Top Ten of 1978:
1. If I Can’t Have You – Yvonne Elliman
2. Caravan – Melissa Manchester
3. You – Rita Coolidge
4. Whenever I Call You “Friend” – Kenny Loggins w/ Stevie Nicks
5. Back Down to Earth – Carly Simon
6. Big Shot – Billy Joel
7. Paradise by the Dashboard Light – Meat Loaf
8. Somewhere in the Night – Barry Manilow
9. Here You Come Again – Dolly Parton
10. You’re the One That I Want – Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta
The list that you see above varies from that initial list. In 2021 my friend Jim and I were re-viewing our Top Tens of each year from the 70s. Because I had done 1978 when I was so young I hadn’t ever considered if the songs I had chosen would be long lasting. As such, many of them including: Love Will Find a Way by Pablo Cruise, Sweet Life by Paul Davis, Always & Forever by Heat Wave, Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad by Meat Loaf, and We’ll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again by England Dan & John Ford Coley didn’t register for me over the next 40 years or so. I didn’t have much of this problem with any other future end-of-the-year lists but some of these songs just seemed off. So, I created a revised list with five different songs. Consider this 1978 list the transitional Top Ten into the regular revealing of such lists from the actual era in which they were created.
Saturday Night Fever was a very popular film but its accompanying soundtrack album was a monumental success. The Bee Gees sang most of the songs and hits from the album. However, my favorite was the gem sung by Yvonne Elliman. If I Can’t Have You was mostly featured in the film in association with the character played by Donna Pescow, who was in love with John Travolta’s character. As is the case with many of these number ones, I didn’t have a direct connection to the lyrics but there was definitely something in this song that spoke to me as a young teenager. I know I had feelings towards my classmates that I didn’t express. Perhaps I didn’t know what those feelings truly were. The emotion in the song was strong. Elliman sings “to dreams that never will come true, am I strong enough to see it through? If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody baby.”
Who did I wish I had? I don’t know. It could have been one of many in my freshman class. Those feelings were not specifically focused on anyone in particular. Rather it was that vague sense of longing that young people often have. Not knowing or understanding my sexuality only further contributed to that sense of confusion. I listened to this song over and over and was thrilled when it hit number one on Billboard (the only non-Bee Gees song from the album to do so.) Elliman never had another hit after this one but it always lived on for me as an emotional, disco favorite that somehow reflected my own inner life at the age of 15.
During the summer of ’78 my mother and Ray decided to rent an RV and travel throughout the country. They offered to bring Jeff and I along to see the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rushmore, and Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. The latter of these was prominently featured in my favorite film that year, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was fascinated by the solar system and the larger questions of the universe that religion didn’t seem to answer. A trip like this could have been a big spiritual journey for me as I ended my association with Catholicism in ’78 by, in part, no longer going to church with mom. (Ray was likely an atheist or agnostic although we never talked about it.) None of this was enough to get me to go on the whole trip though. Instead, I wanted my parents to drop me off in Gore, Oklahoma to see my old friends, Stevie and Guy. As mentioned earlier, their family had moved there to open a small restaurant and motel. I was devastated when they moved but thought this would be the chance to see and enjoy myself with them. So, Jeff got to bring his friend Mark for the whole journey, while my parents and the RV left me in Oklahoma.
It was strange at first. Both boys worked in the restaurant during the day so there was little for me to do but swim in their above ground pool. Most fun for me was nighttime. Stevie, in particular, I found to be an excellent buddy to chat with until all hours of the night. We’d talk about all kinds of things until his father would yell at us from his room telling us to go to sleep.
By the time we rolled out of bed around noon, half the day was over. Stevie took me for a ride on his motorcycle and showed me Tenkiller Lake, a Lock, and Dam. Not quite my style, but okay to visit.
Guy took us to see the new movie Grease while on a date in the big nearby town of Muskogee. The Olivia Newton-John/John Travolta song You’re the One That I Want was the film’s first smash single. The movie became the first I paid to see twice in a theater.
Seeing it in Oklahoma was a much-needed relief from an otherwise low-key vacation. After about two days of being there though, I was ready to go home. I had an open ticket to fly home at any time. When I told Stevie’s parents I wanted to leave so soon after arriving, they said I’d have to wait until the weekend to drive me to the airport. Finding this out on Monday was horrifying to me and I almost started bawling. However, I ended up making do with these little activities and purely enjoyed my late-night talks with Stevie. As mentioned earlier, I considered him my best friend at the time even if at this point I hadn’t seen him in two years. That summer Kenny Loggins’s duet with Stevie Nicks, Whenever I Call You “Friend” was a big hit single. Interestingly, the song was written by Loggins and Melissa Manchester but Nicks got the duet. “You and I were meant to be, forever and ever. I think about the times to come, knowing I will be the lucky one. Ever our love will last. I always want to call you “friend.’” It was played a lot while I was in Gore, Oklahoma.
I thought about Stevie when I heard this song. However, I never did end up seeing or hearing from him again after that summer.
As a side note, in 2021, my friend Jim and I were “revealing” our Top Ten songs of 1978 via Facebook. The day I posted about this one just happened to be sandwiched within a trip in which I was finally visiting Devil’s Tower and Mt. Rushmore. I got to cross those sites off my bucket list 43 years after my brother Jeff, my mom, and Ray saw them! Oh well, better late than never!
Perhaps on some level Barry Manilow’s cover of Somewhere in the Night also reflected the emotions I was feeling about Stevie and some of my old friends that were now in the distant past. “We’ll just go on burning bright, somewhere in the night.” They were out there somewhere but since this was decades before Facebook, it wasn’t easy to stay in touch. The hormones were starting to perk up though and I really felt the emotion that Manilow inflected in this song. It’s a big, dramatic, power ballad that would become pretty common in this era.
While I had never been consciously in love with anyone by this point, I knew the love of friends. (Had I loved Stevie?) By the Fall of 1978 I had begun to move on from my Chicago losses. I had found some new friends as I entered sophomore year of high school. There was a boy who lived near me named Eric who I developed a bit of a kinship with. He was into model airplanes and often smelled like Doritos when I’d pick him up on the way to school but he was a friend. Then there was Willy who had grown up in the south and had a bit of a drawl. Willy would carry all of his many school books from class to class and tried extremely hard to excel.
He loved music and we would talk about the stars and solar system and wonder about “life out there.” On some level, these talks helped move me even further away from the belief system taught by my early Catholic school and church experiences. There was also John J. and John D.
The former I knew a bit from journalism class in junior high but didn’t really get to know until high school when some tough guy he knew threatened to beat me up after school. John was nothing like that and showed me some empathy. We warmed up to each other pretty quickly after that. He was attractive and kind of a goof at times but we began a bit of a spiritual connection: His birthday was a week before mine and we started having some good talks about life and love. John D. was an acquaintance of his. We became good friends pretty quickly. He shared a love of music and, like me, was probably not consciously aware of his own homosexuality.
Billy Joel’s follow-up to the previous year’s success of The Stranger was his album 52nd Street which would go on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. It is filled with many great, classic Joel cuts. Big Shot was always one of my favorites. I think my love for it grew over time as I loved its anger and references to New York, which, as I mentioned already, would become a big part of my life.
Back Down to Earth has always been one of my favorite Carly Simon songs. Though it was never released as a single it’s one of the standouts from her Boys in the Trees album. The song tells the story of a failed relationship (perhaps James Taylor.) In the end, she sings, with a lot of passion, about going back on the road alone after the breakup. The lyrics, vocal, and acoustic guitar all stood out to me making it quintessential 70s Simon revealing her soul to the world.
Caravan is truly still one of my favorite songs. Essentially Melissa Manchester sings about getting away from all of the people who were trying to tell her what to do and finally finding a group, her caravan, that will take her away to where she belongs. I was slowly finding myself with a small group of friends I could really relate to. Over time, I've felt that way about college, teaching film, and being gay. I’ve been lucky to be part of different communities that have been instrumental in helping me find my true voice. It's also a very optimistic song!
Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again was her first big foray into pop music. It was also a huge hit. Parton’s vocals are sweet and full of emotions and the production was strong and powerful. Of course, it’s the lyrics that got most of us: “All you gotta do is smile that smile and there go all my defenses. Just leave it up to you and in a little while, you’re messing up my mind and filling up my senses. Here you come again, looking better than a body has a right to….” Teenage hormones here I come!
John J. and I shared a love of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album. It was a huge hit, perhaps fueled mostly by its adolescent look at love and sex. John J. always talked a big talk. He knew things about sex that none of the rest of us seemed to know. Paradise by the Dashboard Light was a long, epic song filled with multiple segments and varying tempos. It was boy vs. girl trying to obtain and survive a sexual encounter. John J. and I would talk about girls but neither of us seemed to act much on those thoughts at the time. A few years later when I met my friend Michelle this became "our" song. We'd perform it for our immediate friends. When I graduated, we did the same at my graduation party. My mother videotaped it and, in a classic mishap, accidently taped over it! Still it remains a great memory!
Perhaps some of this positive energy with new friends and situations fueled my love of Rita Coolidge’s underrated Top 40 hit You. It’s a very upbeat song with more positive lyrics: “I can’t remember when I felt this high…. wonder how I ever got along, without you. Something very special about you.” I was definitely on a new road. The past was on its way out and I was beginning to move towards having people in my life again after years of feeling loss and loneliness.
Links to my Top Ten of 1978
What are your favorite songs of 1978?
Next Up: 1979 - “One way or another…”
Another great year!
I wanna go on an RV trip so bad lol
Did you know that Todd Rundgren produced and wrote much of bad out of hell? Meat never liked to give him credit.
Grease, Saturday night fever, the Billy Joel album--these things so much remind me of that summer.
The soundtrack of my youth!! Love the photos. We had a van and an 8-track player. And it was a bummer if I couldn’t bring a friend to the cottage on the label.