How to Mend a Broken Heart
Lifted up by the radio and the talent show, I glimpsed a cooler world
When I became a music fan in the 70s, Rolling Stone and Creem and other rock magazines I was too young for seemed to say that girls needed to shut up. And in the world of my neighborhood and school it also felt like as a girl, I wasn’t allowed to tell my music-fandom stories or blab on and on about my favorite bands the way boys did. As I remember it, almost no women wrote music reviews, few female artists received reviews (let alone good ones), and the music I liked was looked down on by rock critics and by guys in general.
I don’t know why I found this so stifling, considering I had two best friends (girls) and we raved on and on about our favorite albums as much as we wanted. But it did seem like I better keep my enthusiasms under a lid outside the house.
I was lucky to have a cool musician neighbor next door who didn’t put down my favorite music, which when I was fourteen was the Bee Gees. He gave me guitar lessons, talked a little bit about music theory, and sometimes let me play records on his stereo for twenty or thirty minutes while he and his wife made their dinner. (Then I went home.)
There were a lot of firsts at the home of those neighbors. It was where I heard for the first time a really good stereo, the first time I saw an electric guitar in real life—a Goldtop Les Paul—heavy! They had the first personal computer I ever saw (a Macintosh), and a Moog synthesizer, probably the only one I’ve ever seen in someone’s home. Oh and their house was where I first listened to compact discs instead of vinyl, and it was where I first tried Szechuan food, and pesto, and… marijuana, when I was right on the cusp of eighteen. It made me lose my grasp on reality, and I hated it, and as if that wasn’t punishment enough both my neighbors and I got in BIG trouble with my dad that week.
ANYWAY. I decided to write an essay about three specific songs that knocked my teen socks off. I sent this to an online publication who declined it. Publishing it here is more fun than re-submitting it elsewhere. Thanks for reading!
The Ultimate Luxury
When I was thirteen, I lived alone in a quiet house with my depressed dad. In my bedroom, a little orange-and-brown suitcase—a portable record player—sat on my nightstand. What a luxury that was in 1977! It distracted me from my silent worries. I could sink into the gorgeous world of pop songs, without radio DJ’s and commercials—or my dad—yammering over them.
My mother had died two years earlier. I felt doomed by the world and I feared the boys at school. I saw them as mean and hateful, and I thought the rock bands they liked were mean too—bands like Aerosmith and Van Halen, their songs treating girls like prey. I liked the uncool Barry Manilow, and the Carpenters. I needed to hear from nice adults, and these singers had the sincere voices of people who cared.
One night as my dad drove home from our favorite pizza place, a song came on the oldies station that was new to me. I needed my dad to shut up, because this song was speaking straight into my soul. It was a song from the year I was born, “Don’t Worry Baby.”
I spent my allowance on the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer compilation so that I could listen to my song by myself. The soaring melody washed over me, so tender and brave the singing voice, so vulnerable that it drenched me in emotion. The boy in the song needed reassurance as much as I did, and his girlfriend’s love gave him confidence. He believed in himself because she did. I wondered if it was possible I’d ever feel so reassured, myself. “Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.” The lyrics relaxed me like a sigh.
Sometimes I imagined myself as the girlfriend. Would my love ever help someone? Was I so complete—would I ever be—that I could share myself and make someone else feel stronger? My mom had loved me as if I were her wildest dream come true. But nobody in the real world knew or cared about who I’d been in my mother’s eyes. My dad was floundering, talking to me about his sadness, filling me with dread. Would I ever be special again?
Most nights in my yellow bedroom, sitting at my green wooden desk painted by my dad, I played the whole double Endless Summer album. But I always began and ended with “Don’t Worry Baby,” on side three. When I hear it today, I have to stop what I’m doing and feel the fragile green hope of age thirteen.
The Kitchen Radio
The table was too small and was always littered with grains of salt or crumbs that stuck to my elbows. Next to the salt and pepper shakers stood a black portable multi-band radio—AM, FM, shortwave, weather, I don’t remember what all—that my dad had won in a drawing. Grubby from its life in the kitchen, it gave me the creeps to touch it, so I kept it tuned to the safe Top 40 station WMET-FM.
During 1978 my then-favorite act, the Bee Gees, led me to Otis Redding and to the Beatles, who led me to Buddy Holly. My best friend got me started on Elton John. I purchased used albums (for about $2.50 at that time) by all of these artists as my taste expanded.
Early the next year, while eating breakfast before going to school, I explored farther up the radio dial. The tuner seemed loyally attached to my old station. Rock station WLUP-FM, “The Loop,” was fuzzy with static. I tried to fine-tune and lock it in, but I couldn’t.
Through the static I heard an echoing radar ping, slow but aggressive drum beats evoking a pitch-dark room, and a decidedly unsafe-sounding raunchy bass line. A broken glass windowpane of sounds that I guessed were keyboards led to a strange voice, high and whining, almost fading out and then coming back in with yelps and growls.
Minutely I worked the tuning wheel with my fingertip and turned up the volume. Was this singer a man? Was he singing badly? He sounded almost like something was wrong with him, but my heart was pounding with suspense. The song thrilled me. My craving for more of it took me by surprise. Was this not scary, suspect, dangerous? Did I like weird stuff now?
Maybe so. Whatever this was, it was going to be mine—if I could identify it. When the song ended, and another song started, the DJ did not speak up. It was time to brush my teeth and go to school and hope I would hear the song again.
Weeks went by before I did, and again was electrified. It was “Take Me to the River,” by the Talking Heads. On my next trip to the used record store, the Talking Heads—I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say “the”—were my search target, and I was a fan.
“Take Me to the River,” the band’s cover of a funky, original Al Green song, retains its spine-tingling strangeness 45 years after I first heard it. Even Al Green himself said he thought it was magnificent.
The Talent Show Boys
I was so self conscious at sixteen that even watching other kids perform onstage made me cringe. That was until one of the acts in the Sullivan High School talent show of 1981 swaggered out on stage like shameless rock stars: four boys, seniors and juniors, naked (!) behind guitars, bass, and drums (but actually wearing Speedos). They took their positions and pretended to play as loud recorded music started, driving and tight and elastic. My best friend and I, bored in school-auditorium seats, sat up, looked at each other, and laughed out loud.
We’d never seen a guy in such a complete state of undress except at the beach—but then we wouldn’t look, for fear of being seen looking. In this setting, you were supposed to look. It felt like breaking a taboo. I can still picture the “musician” who stood on the right. Thick black hair, medium-dark skin, a little bit of chest hair, and muscled thighs. Must have been a senior!
The song was the Beatles’ “Birthday,” a familiar song I had never paid special attention to. The boys bounced and mimed with their guitars with as much chutzpah as if they were the actual Beatles—or so it seemed to 16-year-old me. After all, the only Beatles performance clips I’d ever seen were the ones in the movie A Hard Day’s Night, and that only once, when it was on TV a few years earlier.
The Sullivan boys awed me, not because they were naked but because they weren’t trying to fool anybody. The fakery was the performance, and the song carried the whole kit and caboodle.
“Birthday” had come out in a year I was too young to remember. But hearing and seeing this song this way made it as fresh as if it had just hit the charts. It rushed at me on high-speed rail, as wiry and fast as any of my post-punk favorites, and I wanted to throw myself under the train. I’d listen on my big cushy headphones when I got home. The song would become a lasting, thrilling favorite, forever evoking 1981.
