1977

My show this week is my birthday show (although my show this week happens six days before my birthday but what the hell am I supposed to do celebrate my birthday after my birthday that's just crazy) & every year since the start of my show on my birthday I've celebrated music from the year of my birth onward & now I've reached 1977.

I turned nine in 1977.  I was in third grade when I did, in Mrs. Carnes' class at Caldwell Elementary in Garland, Texas.  I wasn't much of a person.  I was noisy, obstreperous, prone to flights of fancy, & deeply selfish.  My mother raised her boys to be selfish.  Selfish but tied tight to her apron strings.

At some point in 1977, we moved away from the part of the world where I had lived for as long as I can remember.  In Garland, there's a road called Kingsley Avenue that "starts" in the east at the intersection of Centerville & Broadway.  It travels west until, for no apparent reason, it becomes Walnut Hill road somewhere in the first few blocks of Dallas.

Two roads that intersect Kingsley Avenue - Saturn Road & Garland Road - form the barrier of where I had lived up to that time.  My mother, recently separated & then, in 1974, divorced, lived in shabby apartments along Kingsley Avenue after her marriage fell apart.  In 1977, we lived on a road a block parallel from Kingsley, called Cranford Road, in apartments called Little Brook.  There were actually six of us - my mother, my little brother, my sister Karin, & two older brothers.  Oh, & me.  Possibly the least of them all.

After the school year, we moved "across town" - it was at best five miles, probably less - to an apartment complex on Fifth Street called Villa Cordoba.  (Interestingly, it still stands, some thirty-five years later, & it's called Garland Oaks now, which is slightly ironic, because at this point the people who live there are overwhelmingly Hispanic.  Not in 1977!  There were possibly fewer than six black families at the time - the rest were white.)  My mother's fear of the world kept us from riding our bikes to school every day - instead, she made our older brothers - who had either moved to the same complex or were already there - take us to school.  My fourth grade year, I remember, was full of absences, as my brothers were incredibly unreliable.  It didn't affect me much, as I was a good student & could catch up, but it was bad for my little brother, who was never terribly good at school.

One day I should talk about fourth grade.  Mrs. Harris was a horrible teacher.  It wasn't a good year.  But not here.  I wasn't in fourth grade then.

I wish I knew about my mother's financial situation & the really desperate straits we lived in, but of course at nine I had no real idea about anything.  I loved swimming in the apartment's pool, although I needed someone there for me & my siblings would hardly ever do something that nice for their annoying little brothers - my sister (& de facto babysitter) Karin was all of 15 & boy crazy, & my two older brothers were deep into drug culture.

One of the first friends I made at Villa Cordoba was a girl named Christi, with whom I played "dolls," that is, I used my GI Joes & she her Barbies to "play house."  It was quite thrilling for me & I imagine she was the first girl for whom I ever "felt anything," whatever that might mean.  The boys who lived in the apartment complex, my little brother included, were generally very crude to her, though I didn't really understand what any of it meant.  She was a pretty blonde girl - I can't for the life of me remember what she looked like, although I can remember exactly what the front of her apartment looked like - & her mother, who seemed more a grandmother - was very protective.

As anyone who's lived in apartments knows, tenancy there is transient.  She was gone within the year.  We, on the other hand, stayed at the Villa Cordoba until I finished the eighth grade.

None of the music I will play on my show this week is anything I was listening to at age nine.  I liked listening to the radio, to what would later be called "classic rock."  Sometimes I taped it on a random cassette, but it wasn't important to me.  I hadn't discovered the Beatles yet.  I hadn't yet been so alienated from the world that I needed to find far-away voices who sounded like me to speak to me.

But holy shit if I were self-aware there was some awesome music in 1977.  The fact that none of my older siblings noticed or brought it home is a fundamental reason why we were never friends, & don't really communicate with each other in our adult lives.