Re-listening to my LP collection from the 1980s... First up is Pretenders' debut, which entered the Billboard charts January 26, 1980, eventually peaking at #9, and spending 78 weeks on the chart. 

I had been fifteen for two months when I read a review in the January 19, 1980 issue of Billboard magazine of the debut album by Pretenders. I had been buying copies of Billboard for a while, tacking the over-sized Hot 100 and Top LP and Tapes charts on my wall each week. It was this review that inspired me to want this album.

The review read: "Led by American born Chrissie Hynde, English quartet plays raw and uncompromising new wave and avant-garde music. There are traces of Patti Smith and Velvet Underground in the songs with their bleak vistas and twisted images. "Precious," already popular in new wave circles, is not playable on the air because of language. The Lowe produced "Stop Your Sobbing" relieves the heavy atmosphere with its pop charm." (92)

I was attracted to the new wave sound, having fallen in love with Blondie's albums as well as The Cars, Nick Lowe, and Elvis Costello. I'm glad I gravitated to this album when I was fifteen: the songs felt authentic and like a New Wave to my teenage ears. The album's fitting, final track could be no other than the stunning "Mystery Achievement."

This was one of the first four albums I bought on cassette instead of vinyl, after Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, followed by the debut by The Romantics, and Gary Numan's The Pleasure Principle.

Today, the music still sounds as modern and satisfying as it did 45 years ago, when I was playing the tape on the Montgomery Ward cassette player my parents had gotten me for Christmas.

 Many country songs have been recorded about waitresses, including Ray Pillow’s “The Waitress” released on Mega Records in June 1971 (reaching #67 in Record World magazine). Opening with a pair of twanging, mournful guitars, and lean percussion, Ray’s narrator sadly describes the challenging life of a waitress who has to deal with the mundane and degrading aspects of waiting on male customers.

We soon learn that the narrator is describing his ex-wife, who “learned to be a waitress, from sittin’ home and waitin’ on me.” Waiting in this case is not just subservience, but waiting alone at home as he spent nights away, working, or perhaps carousing and cheating on her. There is a tinge of guilt in the narrator’s descriptions of his ex-wife, who works “in some lonely city” and has grown “tired of truckdrivers telling her she’s pretty.” The waitress is strong and patient, though, heartbroken but wise. 

A recurring character in country music of this era is the woman whose dreams are disrupted because of a man who can not settle down (or who tried but failed). Pillow’s narrator acknowledges a bitter truth about his ex: “She’s got much more to give, and less chances of getting what she’s after.” Although he seems empathetic, a truth that eludes him is that he took what made her most appealing to other men like him–her youth and her virtue. 

Pillow imbues the narrator with a shade of pride in his wandering and inability to stay with one woman, inferring perhaps that his emotional baggage may have strengthened his wife to go on with her life in such an independent, perservering manner. The “fleeing” men so common in classic country music must in some ways justify their own choices even as they regret them, and if their own escape from the women who sought from them a settled-down life can be viewed as a good thing, all the better: the idea can make their independent, aimless wandering more palatable, while they circle in on their next always-temporary home. 

Reminding us of 1967's “Branded Man” in which Merle Haggard’s ex-convict is forever running – from the law, from every woman who cared too much – the theme of being and staying on the run indeed runs rich through the veins of classic country music, the achievement of which makes these men both very satisfied, and very much alone.
 

A Journey with ABBA

When I was ten, I hid a small transistor radio underneath my pillow at night, listening to the Top 9 at 9:00. With the volume as close to zero as possible (sound was louder at night, especially if I heard parents coming up the stairs toward my bedroom), I’d wait and wait until “Waterloo” by ABBA came bounding onto the countdown: “Waterloo / Promise to love you forever more.”

As I grew, I’d await each new ABBA song to reach Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 program on Sunday, rooting on “The Name of the Game” or “Chiquitita” to reach the highest spots. At the checkout stand at K-Mart, I asked Mom if I could add the ABBA single “Take a Chance on Me” for $1.19 to our order. She always said yes. Promise to love you forever more.

When I didn’t have my license yet, I’d ask Dad to take me to Peaches or Record Bar. He always said yes, and I’d buy the newest ABBA 45 on the red and black Atlantic label, as intrigued by the flip side of the records as much as the a-side. Their 1979 b-side “Kisses of Fire” was as good as “Does Your Mother Know.” I slowly learned to look beyond the hits, beyond the surface of ABBA and myself. Promise to love you forever more.

As I got older I paid for records new and used with money I earned. I only ever bought one ABBA album, though, a used copy of their second LP Waterloo, which I found at a used store in Largo. I knew nearly every ABBA song, due to the 4 CD compilation Thank You for the Music, which I cherished somewhat privately, for it wasn’t always cool to admit. Despite this thorough set, I had never heard the albums as separate entities. I was still getting to know ABBA, still getting to know myself. Promise to love you forever more.

Years later, I purchased a box set of ABBA’s LPs reissued on 180g vinyl. Yesterday, while reading selected chapters from books on ABBA by Simon Sheridan and John Tobler, I listened from start to finish to all eight ABBA albums, from Ring Ring (1974) through The Visitors (1982). I could trace the development of the band, the songwriting, production values, and singing styles. I could notice themes like courage and self-empowerment emerge and relive the search for these qualities in myself. I could notice the undercurrent of melancholy in the upbeat songs I’d heard dozens of times, such as “When I Kissed the Teacher,” “Dancing Queen,” and “Super Trouper,” among others, and accept that with love there is pain and with agony there can be joy. I could understand the sublime ache of “The Winner Takes it All,” a song Sheridan describes as a “mesmerizing concoction of lush heartbroken harmonies and a beautiful claustrophobic melody,” their last big hit that expressed the mood of the band after their personal relationships had ended but they still worked together as a group. Promise to love you forever more.

I could sense now what I hadn’t been able to know in 1982: that the end of ABBA had arrived, with the two final, lovely, tracks on their last album The Visitors: “Slipping through My Fingers,” about Bjorn and Agnetha’s daughter growing up, and “Like an Angel Passing through My Room,” a haunting epilogue that begins and ends with a clock ticking. ABBA had ended and so had my childhood.

As I journeyed for 6 hours through the eight albums, I could hear the clock ticking for me as well, taking me from a boy who hid a transistor radio underneath my pillow, whose parents indulged him, to an adult who gained and lost family, friends, and loves, while through it all, even when I wasn’t listening intently to them, ABBA was always there beside me … forever more.

Kristy McNichol sings and smiles

Listening to vinyl LP:


Kristy & Jimmy McNichol, Self-titled

The 1978 debut (and only) album by the teen siblings isn't bad! There are three remakes of old pop classics that are pretty good. "He's So Fine" features The Chiffons on background vocals, with Kristy trying her best to sound like a pop singer. There's a nice acoustic guitar strumming through the whole endeavor, and an overall sound that makes you nostalgic for the year 1978 when Kristy was still starring in the TV show Family and was beginning to make movies (e.g., The End as Burt Reynolds' daughter). "My Boyfriend's Back" is a little better reading by Kristy, with effective percussion and a slightly wobbly, new wave guitar sound hidden behind the standard instrumentation that sounds like what you'd hear on any celebrity's TV special of the times (i.e., a facsimile of rock music). "Rock & Roll Is Here to Stay" is the best remake of the three. Jimmy takes the lead here and holds his own among other boy teen idols of the time, and Kristy infuses the song with playful charm by cooing her background vocals "Rock and roll will always be / It'll go down in history." The song really chugs along and the session musicians are having fun with the keyboards, chunky bass, and plucky guitars. I defy anyone to not tap their toes while listening to this one. (Besides, Kristy and Jimmy are so-o-o cute to look at on the album cover and poster inserts!)

Jimmy (Kristy's brother who also vied for teen stardom at the time) infuses his numbers with a gritty vocal delivery that surpasses most of the radio hits of Shaun Cassidy or Leif Garrett. "Box on Wheels" is a Beach Boys-flavored ode to his car, with its tape deck "pumping up some rock & roll," and the girl in the passenger seat beside him who rides with him, "Easy / rollin' along." She is his "favorite view" even as they pass by the coast, the desert, the beach, the "whole wide world / here within our reach;" the song exudes a playful sexual tension, particularly in the refrain "Love how it feels / In a box on wheels." ("Come ride with me / love the way it feels"). Jimmy's real crowd-pleaser, though, is on Side 1, "Girl You Really Got Me Going." Here, we've got a slight new wave sound, with power pop percussion, on a song that could have been done by The Rubinoos, it's that sincere. Interesting that Kristy's vocals are nowhere to be found on these two songs, and they are better because of it. As "come-on" songs, it would have been weird for his sister to appear in the vocals. It's also interesting that Kristy's primary lead vocals occur on "innocent" throwback songs that put her in the passive role ("My Boyfriend's Back" and "He's So Fine"), whereas Jimmy takes the lead on two songs that portray him as a sexual aggressor.

Kristy's ballad "Slow Dance" has a melancholy, Carpenters feel but of course her vocals are not in the same league as Karen's. I believe this may be a song that Cheryl Ladd later recorded but I'm not sure. (And I am not a fan of the saxophone on this whole album.) All in all, it's a song that gets better if you consider it is like much of the "easy listening" fare that was popular in 1978-79. And, at many points in my life, I would have given anything to have a slow dance with Kristy McNichol...

"Page by Page," the second single released from the album after "He's So Fine" was a minor hit, is arguably the best song on the album. It would have passed for country music at the time, and features a nice harmony from the siblings, a tenderness evocative of the singers' real feelings. (I'm still chasing down the promo 45 of the song, and its picture sleeve.)

Unfortunately, the two "funky" songs on Side 2, "Go For It" and "Hot Tunes," are listenable, but the inclusion of a fold-out poster of Kristy and Jimmy in silk athletic gear, plus a rare insert advertising several posters that the teenage consumer could purchase and hang on their walls and dream of kissing Kristy (and/or Jimmy) in their own bedrooms, makes up for these two songs' inclusion.

Over the years, I've been working on essays that examine how Kristy often seemed trapped in the TV and movie roles she played, always ready to pour out a shower of genuine tears that come from a pain that couldn't quite be healed. Kristy may have been "cute" to everyone at the time, with her face and fabricated stories plastered on the covers of many teen magazines, but her hidden pain only reinforces how real people and their feelings get consumed by the desires of those of us who gaze so rapturously and longingly at them.