Songs of '78: "I Wanna Be Sedated"

Yep, one more, though I basically wrapped up this series back at the end of November. True, there were songs released in December of 1978, but none that really stick in my mind. I felt bad, though, as I thought about this journey, that with the debatable exception of one song by Patti Smith none of my (often reconstructed) memories of pop and rock radio from that year included any punk. Going through the back files of my brain, I realized that there was one more I could have stuck into this personal musical history: the furious punk anthem by the Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated." I have no idea when I first heard it; I've never listened to the album it was part of, and it wasn't even released as a single to get airplay on American radio until 1980. Still, there is this concert video of them playing the song at the historic Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on this date, 40 years ago. (It was the third-to-last concert ever hosted at that venue; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played there two nights later, and then the Grateful Dead--with the Blues Brothers!--brought the year, and the venue, to an end the night after that.) Anyway, this isn't a bad way to send off the Songs of '78, is it? Of course not. Enjoy, everybody!

Songs of '78: "Shattered"

The fifth and final song from Some Girls that my pop radio memories of 1978 present me with--following "Miss You," "Far Away Eyes," "Running Away with Me," and "Beast of Burden"--is the wonderfully punky "Shattered," released 40 years ago today. It's actually the final single released from Some Girls, the Rolling Stones album I love the most and think most highly of (and which I think I can critically defend as their best, or at least one of their very best, my own biases not withstanding--it's sleazy and misogynistic, but also filled with stripped-down power and creativity, as well as a defiant exuberance, something which, I think, they just couldn't generate any more as the 1980s progressed, thus heralding their gradual transformation, with the occasional exception, into the Oldest Established Permanent Floating Rolling Stones Tribute Band in the world). The only released single of theirs from Some Girls that didn't make my list of memories is "Respectable," which is a nice rocking tune but probably my least favorite cut on the whole album. As for "Shattered"--why? Well, why not?

Maybe my love for it goes back to the fact I grew up reading Marvel comics. While the maturity level of the tales of Spider-Man and other in the late 70s and through the 80s was nothing like what became standard in later years, the close reader--and I'd like to think that included me--couldn't help but pick up all sorts of rather adult clues about how tawdry and broken-down New York City was in the era of Ed Koch. Trying to decipher Jagger's slurred lyrics made me feel like I was unlocking a key to a cool, crazy, dirty, dangerous world that was a universe away from me. Plus, you can't but love that crunching bass line (played by Ron Wood, stepping into his new role with the Stones with great confidence), over which Richards is playing all sorts of cool, phased-out chords. It wasn't punk music, really, but it was close.



Of course, it can also be a sweet Julie Andrews song. Really.

Songs of '78: "Y.M.C.A."

40 years ago today, on November 13 (a Monday), the Village People released "Y.M.C.A.," and proceeded to conquer the world. Disco, and perhaps America too, immediately began its long, irreversible decline.

Yeah, I don't have anything more to say than that. Yes, I can do the dance. So can you. No, I didn't know it was using double entendres to play around with gay and drag urban tropes. Neither did you.

Anyway, enjoy.

Songs of '78: "Da' Ya' Think I'm Sexy?"

Nope, not done with the disco of 1978 yet. But "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?," despite--or maybe because of its cheesy title--is so much more than a fine, groovy disco tune; it is, in fact, a sly parody of the stereotypical suave disco-era lover ("He says I sorry / I'm out of milk and coffee / Never mind my sugar / we can watch the early movie")--a perhaps even honest expression by a man in his mid-30s who'd been playing rock and roll for over 15 years who is confronting the club and dance scene. Did I know any of this when I first heard the song? Not at all. But it did scandalize the youthful Mormon me? Not really--even as a kid, I think I realized that the song was, in a sense, one huge put on, revealing a Lothario who was, well, just trying a little too hard.

Anyway, I've never listened to Blondes Have More Fun, the album this single was released off of, 40 years ago today, all the way through (though its title song is also good). I'm fine with that. Rod Stewart was, and I suppose still is, more than anything else a working musician, and he worked with the tools that the moment called for. The result is a wonderfully sleazy tune (made up of not just one, but two plagiarized riffs!), a single that has stuck in my head for decades. I doubt it'll ever leave.

Songs of '78: "Jet Airliner"

From the beginning of this series, I've been up front: these blog posts are about the pop, rock, funk, punk, and other songs of 1978 which wormed their way into my memory and have stuck with me--and that includes songs that weren't released in 1978, or that I have no specific 1978 radio-listening memories of, but which I just associate with 1978. I've already confessed that some creative cognitive reconstruction was going on with the way Cheap Trick or Sniff 'n' the Tears or Bruce Springsteen appear on this list, but "Jet Airliner," my absolute favorite Steve Miller song, probably takes the cake.

Why? Wasn't that song, and many others by the Steve Miller band, staples of the pop and rock and roll AM and (later) FM radio stations that I gained my earliest musical education from? Absolutely. But it was mostly just beloved background stuff for me until 1990 when, in a break from my tape-buying tradition, I actually started buying CDs (which didn't mean I stopped buying tapes, though). The Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974-1978 was one of the very first CDs I purchased, because the possibility of having all that great music from my youth available in one place ("Jungle Love"! "Take the Money and Run"!) was far too much to resist. Most of all though: "Jet Airliner," a soaring, rocking, yet also dreamy composition of moving along, moving away, and then moving back home. The song itself was released in 1977 on Book of Dreams, an album which I have never listened to all the way through, but no matter: the greatest hits collection was released as an album in 1978, so that's good enough for me. This was a song that I had playing in my head as I ran around, all alone, way back at the rear of the playground of Sunrise Elementary School, so it's a song of my 10-year-old, 4th-grade year, so far as I'm concerned. 1978 it is.

Songs from '78: "My Life"

Forty years ago yesterday, Billy Joel released "My Life," the first single off 52nd Street, one of his greatest albums. I have no memory of when I first listened to the album all the way through--in fact, it might not have been until I was in college (for years, my sole Billy Joel Bible was Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II; it was a long time before I listened to anything else by him). I love the album now, particularly "Zanzibar." But it was "My Life" off of that collection which has stayed with me longest, primarily because of how it always reminded me of a short-lived television show that, for some reason, I really, really enjoyed as a 12-year-old boy:



This is the actual video, and it has all sorts of stylized tough-guy New York notes to it. But I think I still kind of like the vision of a young Tom Hanks in drag better.

Songs of '78: "Radio Radio"

"Radio Radio" is one of those songs about our material and aural history--specifically, a song about the songs we listened to, and how we listened to them, and when we listened to them, and how they made us felt. I'm not sure any other technology ever has been so thoroughly entwined with one of its primary products--specifically, in this case, the pop songs that the radio brought into our lives. I'm thinking about Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" here, Rush's "Spirit of the Radio," and many more. But, in my opinion, "Radio Radio" beats them all. It's angry, excited, defiant, confused, and just overflowing with excitement over THE NEW SONG THAT JUST CAME ON!! It's my favorite track off This Years Model, which a lot of serious Elvis Costello fans will tell you is his very best album, and I'm not one to disagree (though my favorite is the experimental The Juliet Letters, for whatever it's worth).

Costello is a brilliant songwriter and an often-brilliant musician, and this song showcases both. It was just his second album, and he was really beginning to his stride with his backing band The Attractions. The song made it to America with This Years Model, but it wasn't released as a single until it came out separate from the UK version of the album on this day, 40 years ago. The video is classic early Costello: jerky, in-your-face, kind of weird, and ostentatiously playing with the images and references from the whole history of rock and roll.



And the song itself...well, let's just say it's history in America has been...interesting. This performance got him banned from Saturday Night Live.



But of course, wait long enough, and everything will come around again.

Songs of '78: "Fire"

Last time, talking about Chic's awesome disco tune "Le Freak," I confessed that as, a not-quite-10-year-old listening to rock music on my radio in Spokane, WA, I hardly received a thorough introduction to the world of pop music. Lots of bluesy, folky, proggy, and/or just plain hard pop-rock, yes, and lots of soulful white-boy soft rock too. But the African-American side of things--the R&B and funk roots of disco? Nope, not much. Hopefully I've repaired my less than perfect launch into the world of pop in the decades sense, though I don't repent of my love for Warren Zevon, The Cars, Al Stewart, Van Halen, The Who, Jackson Browne, or the Rolling Stones for anything. Still, looking back on it all, the skewing of my 1978-radio ear is really pronounced.

Anyway, this is another song that breaks the pattern. Yes, it's a Bruce Springsteen song. And yes, by this point The Pointer Sisters had left their early years in jazz, gospel, and R&B behind, just going wherever their vocal muses carried them ("Fire" was the lead single off their album Energy, which also featured songs written by Loggins and Messina and Steely Dan). But none of that matters; the Sisters brought both torch-song heat and some wicked slow-burning fun to this tune--check out the video below, in which Ruth keeps playing the air guitar or the air keyboards while providing backing vocals--and, frankly, it's ten times more memorable of Springsteen's own rather desultory recording of the song, released nearly ten years after this gem. 40 years after the day of its release, The Pointer Sister's "Fire" still burns.

Songs of '78: "Le Freak"

Considering how dominant disco was in 1978--as I noted way back in February, it was unavoidable that year--not a lot of disco stands out in my memories, whether real or reconstructed, of what I was listening to on the radio that year. Some of that has to do with the stations I was listening to, of course, and probably some of it had to do with the thoroughly white, partly rural, partly suburban, and entirely nerdy person that my post-pubescent self was turning into. From loud pop-rock to introspective soft-rock, I drank it in--but dance music? The Bee Gees, of course, and I suppose Barry Manilow if you squint--and if you accept David Byrne's word for it, disco was always lurking around his post-punk Talking Heads stuff as well. But generally speaking, my appreciation of everything that disco was a part of then and what it has become since--soul, funk, R&B, and more--was still some years off back in 1978.

With one exception: Chic's "Le Freak." I never owned the album this came off--looking at the track listing, I've probably never listened to the whole thing through--and it wasn't until I was an adult and started paying closer attention to the producers and session musicians on the recordings I liked that I realized what a musical genius Niles Rodgers is. So how is it that this particular disco song, released forty years ago today, made it into my head? I think, in retrospect, it has to be Bernie Edwards's bass line. I mean, just listen. Isn't just the best you've ever heard? I kind of think so.

Songs of '78: "Beast of Burden"

Twice before I've showcased my love for Some Girls. There are songs that came out in 1978--whether I remember listening to them on the radio 40 years ago, or have built them retroactively into my memories of that year--while I love more than any of these Rolling Stones tunes, that's for certain. But the album as a whole holds, nonetheless, an untouchable mystique too it, I think. In fact, Some Girls embodies my Platonic vision of the Stones--Mick, Keith, Ron, Bill, and Charlie, having survived the 1970s (almost!), all of them still standing, still in possession of that bluesy energy, that sexual power, that rock and roll groove, that English naughtiness which launched them into the stratosphere with their great albums of the late 1960s. I will respectfully listen to and often really like just about any recordings by the Stones, from the mid-1960s up through the mid-1990s--but it is this album, which Jagger mainly conceived and orchestrated alone (Richards was dealing with the fall-out of his arrest for drug possession in Canada), reflecting influences of punk and funk and the times in general, that I think represents their peak. And "Beast of Burden," released as a single 40 years ago today, just might be its peak track.

It's interesting that "Beast" was mainly written by Richards, though Jagger played with the lyrics and the tempo, turning it into the slow, almost-but-never-quite punky jam which we know and love. It was certainly the first Rolling Stones song I memorized, and I make no apologies to singing it, shamelessly and at great volume along with the song as it came off my precious Some Girls tape as I drove Melissa somewhere on a date way back in 1993. She married me, so it must work at least a little bit. So Mick, Keith, and everyone else--thanks!

Songs of '78: "Time Passages"

"Time Passages," the first song released from--and the first song in the track listing of--Al Stewart's album of the same name, is probably responsible, more than any other single song, for this list's existence and my constant return to pop music and the radio for four decades of life (so far). It was the first piece of music I ever purchased (a tape cassette, the other songs on which I can barely remember, but which I destroyed from years of listening to this one song and then rewinding and listening to it again, probably hundreds of times over the years), and no other song from my early radio-listening years has stayed with me so constantly, being renewed in my memory in association with dozens of particular moments. I can remember thinking about "Time Passages" while watching clouds drop lower along the Wasatch Mountains just east of BYU's campus in Provo, UT, while I was there as an undergraduate. I can remember thinking about it while driving a moving truck along a mostly empty Ohio interstate, late in the afternoon, with my then-new wife and an old friend asleep in the front seat beside me. I can remember thinking about it while holding Melissa's and my first child--Megan, then about 10 days old and asleep in my arms--as I sat on the futon in our second apartment in Washington DC while I was in graduate school, and wondered: what the hell have we gotten ourselves into? I remember this song so damn much.

Why? What is it about this jazzy, lyrically folky, smooth piece of 70s soft rock that enabled it to send roots deeper into my musical consciousness than probably any other song I have ever heard? Hard to say. Maybe it was because, on some level, even as a 9 and 10-year-old, my consciousness was tuned to reflection and regret. Even as a little kid I was weirdly conscious of the passage of time--not in a morbid way, but one that left me thinking about how all was transitory; that there was always going to be another thing after this one. I suppose the mature Christian belief I hold to today, the faith that there is a God who is the Author of our existence--and that, as such, everything I say or do is secondary, an addendum, to the real business of my being here, which is by no means tied to any particular work I may do--was perhaps fated. Maybe I was bound to end up thinking this way, because I was the sort of person who, as a child, could hear a simple romantic lyric of longing like "The things you lean on are the things that don't last," and think to myself: oh yeah, that's the truth.

Oh well. Who knows? Forty years ago on this day, Al Stewart released a song, and it's a beautiful one, whether it makes your mind run deep or not. There was no video for it, but this live concert footage is wonderful. The fact that Stewart, at the conclusion of this passionate rendition of his humble little song, promises to be back in 20 minutes and then just causally walks off the stage fills me with a kind of bittersweet delight. Just about a perfect exit, says I. Would that we all could do the same.

Songs of '78: "Lights"

"Lights" was the final single released off of Journey's wonderful album Infinity, which had already produced two earlier--and, musically speaking, probably better--hit singles in 1978: "Wheel in the Sky" and "Feeling That Way." "Wheel," in particular, was a much bigger hit that "Lights"; I can't think of when I first heard this particular song, though it probably wasn't in 1978 (I didn't listen to the whole album through until years after it was released). But still, I've waited until August, when this single was released 40 years ago, to flag Journey and this album, because "Lights" has become, for me and for so many people, a simply iconic representation of Steve Perry's sound and overall sensibility. It's a song with a deep, driving longing to it, but also a kindness too (Perry astonishing natural alto--a pretty rare voice--was often heavy with emotion, but was never threatening, I think). Originally written about Los Angeles, he and the band realized that making it about their real home base, San Francisco, made the lyrics scan so much better. They were right.

Songs of '78: "The Load-Out/Stay"

If Joe Walsh's rock and roll song about the rock and roll life was bleary and crashing and awesome, this epic by Jackson Browne is earnest and reflective and equally awesome. (Between these two self-referential pop masterpieces, I'm not sure there's much left to explore about the rock and roll life--though Robyn Hitchcock's Soft Boys tune, "Mr. Kennedy," which has haunted me for years, might challenge that.) The fact that "The Load-Out" (a Jackson Browne original) and "Stay" (a doo-wop and R&B standard by Maurice Williams) merged so well to express an artist's ambiguous understanding of her own audience, to say nothing to finding such a solid place in my memory of 1978, is entirely due to Browne's wonderful alignment of them in the live concerts which he recorded for his 1977 album Running on Empty.

At a concert in Maryland in 1977, Browne ended with "The Load-Out," then used "Stay" to segue in the encores. Two musicians on that tour, Rosemary Butler and David Lindley, carried "Stay" to tremendous heights--and that's what ended up on the album. Those album versions of both "Stay" and "The Load-Out" were released as a single (with "The Load-Out" as the B-side; talk about getting things backwards!), but eventually, on August 5, 1978, 40 years ago today, the studio released them as they were heard by the crowds and by fans of the album, as a promotional single, and the radio stations--and listeners like me--at it up. And why wouldn't we? This is genius music, folks.

Songs of '78: "Don't Look Back"

Ah, Boston. The aspirations of progressive rock, the volume of heavy metal, with a huge guitar presence and huge hair. Similar to Kansas (which has already had its moment in this 1978 radio retrospective), for all their pomposity Boston was actually a serious, introspective bunch of studio geeks, who loved playing around with whatever counted as cutting-edge recording technology in the late 1970s, finding ways to layer their sound and then reproduce that on stage. Don't Look Back, their second album, was probably their greatest example of this--musically, the whole thing is a massive, driving, wall of melody--and the album's self-titled lead single, released 40 years ago today, was filled with that furious guitar buzz. I had a college roommate who thought Boston was one of the greatest, most talented and important rock and roll bands ever. (Our feminist friends at the time, on the other hand, made snarky--and probably accurate--comments about all those guitars strutting around on stage.) That wasn't my opinion, but who could deny that this sort of loud-but-never-angry, aggressive-but-never-dangerous, rock and roll was a huge part of 1978 radio, at least the non-punk and non-disco parts of it? I certainly can't. I never saw them live, but I wish I had; it would have been a trip.

Songs of '78: "Badlands"

I didn't situate what is one of Bruce Springsteen's greatest songs with my memories of 1978--in fact, I almost certainly didn't even know it was a Springsteen song--until nearly a decade after it was released. I'd heard "Badlands" occasionally on the radio, and thought it was a cool and strong rock and roll tune, but I didn't have the language or musical knowledge to appreciate it beyond that, certainly not enough to want to track down the musician behind it, especially when I heard it so rarely (it wasn't much of a hit). Once Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. album became a massive pop juggernaut six years later, we all became fans, of course--but still, it wasn't until a few years after that, when he released the moody, folky, brilliant Tunnel of Love (another one of those wonderful albums of 1987 which I still listen to today) that I became a real, dedicated listener to the Boss. And that meant going back and listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town, as well as much else he wrote, which was a fun, surprising journey of discovery all its own. (Wait, Bruce wrote the Manfred Mann song "Blinded By the Light"? And the Patti Smith song "Because the Night" (which I've already paid tribute to as part of the class 1978 here)? And the Pointer Sisters song "Fire"(which, don't worry, will get it's 1978 tribute soon)? Plus he wrote "Hungry Heart" for The Ramones but then stole it back? Etc., etc., etc.)

Anyway, point it, nearly a decade after the song entered my consciousness, "Badlands"--probably the closest Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band ever came to punk rock--found its home in my oft-reconstructed memories of that important radio year, 1978, and became a belated part of my appreciation of this wonderful pop and rock artist. It's not my favorite Springsteen tune by a long-shot, but this song, the lead single off Darkness, released 40 years ago this month, is pretty awesome all the same.

Songs of '78: "Take Me To the River"

There is some confusion on when, exactly, the Talking Heads's cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" was released. It was the only single released off their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and Wikipedia can't agree on when that album officially hit: either July 14, 1978, or July 21, 1978, forty years ago today. And was the single released before the album was, or along with it, or long after? Since the song didn't hit its peak on the pop charts until 1979, it might have been the latter. But lacking any better information, and given that me memories of 1978, dim as they are, claim this song for this year, I'm just going to go with the latter date and call it good.

It's such a wonderful recording of such a wonderful song--Talking Heads (and Brian Eno!) gave it their patented spare yet funky, post-punk, not-quite-techno treatment, without losing the elemental piety and sensuality of the Al Green original. That, actually, is the reason why I think "Take Me to the River" is the only song played during their famed concert film, Stop Making Sense, that isn't an improvement; the concert version is such a wild, art-house rave that the slow-burning, soulful element of the song is lost. See the movie, of course--but for this song, stick to what hit the airwaves, four decades ago.

Songs of '78: "Who Are You?"

The single "Who Are You" was released 40 years ago today; it was the lead song off of The Who's album of the same title, which would get its full release in August. There are, to be sure, multiple other songs by The Who which might even better reflect their brash, undisciplined, whip-smart excellence: "Won't Get Fooled Again," "Behind Blue Eyes," and, of course, "My Generation." But this song has become, I think, simply iconic in its association with the band, far beyond any of the others (personally, I'd attribute a lot of this to CSI, but maybe that's because my wife and I were addicted to the original version of the show for several seasons, and thus had this song hammered into our skulls weekly.) But regardless of how the song gets into your head, you can't deny: it's their to stay. Keith Moon's drug addiction and alcoholism was killing him, but he could still smash those cymbals; Pete Townshend's guitar was echoing all over the room; Jon Entwistle's bass was steady and pulsing throughout; and, of course, Roger Daltrey was screeching and preaching (from a chair!) like nobody's business. Forty years on, it still rocks.

Songs of '78: "Fool (If You Think It's Over)"

Chris Rea, an English musician who has had a long and productive career in the United Kingdom and throughout western Europe, released his debut album, Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?, 40 years ago this month, and this sweet bit of heart-break poetry was its lead single. It was the only song of his to receive anything like significant radio-play in the United States, thus earning this talented, idiosyncratic, introspective artist the "one-hit wonder" label, which is really disrespectful to a guy who has had multiple hit albums in his home country. Still, that's what I thought of him for decades--he was the writer of that cool, sly, surprisingly deep little soft-rock number, the one that crept around the corners of my consciousness, catching me unawares and throwing me back to my childhood when I'd hear it on the radio. Rea himself apparently is ambivalent about the song--it's nothing like the sort of music he's mostly committed himself to over the years, but then, how can you distance yourself from the one song much of your English-speaking audience knows you best for? Of course, given the subject matter of the song, maybe such ambivalence is appropriate. The past is the past--except when it isn't, right?

Songs of '78: "Driver's Seat"

Pop radio and the music industry which enabled and profited from it was a mystery 40 years ago--at least from the excruciatingly well-documented, Instagram-everything-and-put-it-all-on-the-cloud standards of today. It's difficult to believe you could have a major radio hit in 2018 whose every specific detail regarding its origin isn't to be found on the web. But that's the case for "Driver's Seat," a jamming, propulsive, proto-New Wave rock tune that is pretty much the only thing anyone except their immediate friends and neighbors remembers about the one-hit-wonder English band, Sniff 'n' the Tears. I suppose that's unfair to Paul Roberts, the composer of "Driver's Seat" and a working musician who has assembled multiple iterations of Sniff 'n' The Tears over the years. But for someone like me, who only knows the one song, and has never so much as seen a copy of the album it came off, Fickle Heart, nor heard more than a couple of other songs off of it--well, I'll take what I can get. At some point in my youth I heard this song (probably after its much-delayed released in America in 1979, but maybe not until a Dutch advertising campaign brought it back until general circulation in 1991), and its smooth, slick, driving sound buried in deep enough in my head that I figured it must have been one of the first pop songs I'd ever heard. As it turns out, I was kind of right. Hashed out as an early demo sometime in 1973, finally properly recorded in 1977, it was the lead single off the band's first album, where it went nowhere. But nonetheless, it was out there, in the airwaves, at some point in 1978, though for the life of me I can't figure out exactly when. So today, halfway through the year, seems good enough. Enjoy everyone. The mysterious, partly lost, definitely partly forgotten of world of 40 years ago still beckons.

Songs of '78: "Hot Child in the City"

Forty years ago today "Hot Child in the City," the first and only single off Nick Gilder's album City Nights, was released. Three quick points: 1) Don't even pretend to deny it: it's a sultry, catchy, utterly stereotypical and therefore sleazily awesome 1970s-summertime rock song. (Diesel's "Sausalito Summernight" rivals it, but Gilder's is better.) 2) Besides being a great slice of 70s pop-rock, this song is about as perfect an example of One-Hit-Wonderism that you can imagine. True, Gilder had other hits in his native Canada, but you know, Canada. 3) Even after I learned the name of the singer, even after I saw him on television, I though he was a woman. Shut up; so did you.