Events that crossed my radar and memories, these many years later. This effort is aided and abetted by reviewing Wikipedia’s listings of each year’s events, in this case, 1977 and 1978.
1977
By January of 1977 I had survived the first semester of my freshman year at Georgetown, dealing with the questionable decision to study Chinese, barely dealing with my roommate Ricardo Ros whom I spoke to less and less, spending many weekends at Barb’s parents house in Oakton, occasionally going to Charlottesville, and sometimes welcoming Barb at Georgetown.
According to Sue’s recollection and some photos of us together in Hong Kong, I must have gone back one last time for the winter break between semesters. You’d think I would remember but I don’t. I would have come back to Georgetown in mid-January to start my second semester. If so, it meant by that time I was traveling solo half-way around the world which, again, you’d think I might remember.
That means I may or may not have been in DC on January 20 for the inauguration of Jimmy Carter. In any case, I avoided any of the festivities, such as they were, whatever they were. He was not my favored choice and his championing of music acts like Willie Nelson was not my cup of tea at the time.
In March, a group of gunmen from the Hanafi Movement stormed DC’s District Building, effectively City Hall, and held more than 100 hostages for nearly three days. Future DC Mayor Marion Barry was injured by a bullet ricochet, in what would become just a footnote in a long, varied and sordid career. The hostage taking was a huge story in local news for a long time and was a taste of domestic terror in DC. There was little direct effect on me in Georgetown but it was a reminder that anything could happen at any time.
Barb and I spent spring break in Florida with Laurie, David and Maggie, our second visit to Casa Laurie. Via David’s records I started to listen to more of Ry Cooder, Derek and the Dominoes and James Taylor among others.
I guess relatively little penetrated my academic and social bubble that spring semester. The next news item of note was the release on Memorial Day of the first Star Wars movie. I can’t remember exactly where I saw it (maybe at Tyson’s Corner?), but I remember being stunned by the opening crawl (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”), the music and the appearance overhead of the first star cruiser. It was an immediate knock out. I saw it at least a couple more times that summer.
I spent much of the summer in Key West with Len where I worked as a busboy for a while and learned to drive in Len’s Corvette. Barb stayed with her folks in Oakton for the summer and worked at a McDonald’s in Vienna.
In August, Elvis Presley died which was not an earth-shattering event in my life but seemed to shake up quite a lot of folks older than me. Elvis had become “Fat Elvis,” mostly an object of ridicule for his Las Vegas residency and pandering to nostalgia. I remember one of Fred’s dinner table conversation-starters was to have us try to explain the Elvis phenomenon to an imaginary foreigner. Barb and I had a hard time playing that role. It was many years later that I started to understand the groundbreaking appeal of Elvis in his youth.
One way or another, I found my way into an apartment in Clarendon, Virginia with a roommate, Vas (and a few cockroaches). I enjoyed the freedom of being on my own even if the apartment was something of a hovel, and I didn’t mind commuting to school either by GUTS bus or walking the couple of miles.
Over the course of 1977 the first personal computers started to make an impact. The Apple II was released in June, the Radio Shack TRS-80 was announced in August, and the Commodore PET arrived in September. The Atari 2600 video game console also appeared in September. I didn’t run out and get any of these because they were expensive toys at that point and I couldn’t afford any of them, but I was intrigued. Instead, I spent a lot of evenings at an arcade near my apartment in Clarendon playing pinball and drinking cheap beer (the drinking age in Virginia was 18 for beer, 21 for everything else. It changed to 21 in 1984; I lucked out).
Besides Star Wars, 1977 films that made an impression on me included Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s most grown up film to date, Terry Gilliam’s disappointing Jabberwocky, the obnoxiously fun Smokey and the Bandit, a middling Roger Moore Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me (best thing: a good theme song by Carly Simon), George Burns and John Denver in Oh God!, Speilberg’s massive Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mel Brooks’ not-so-great take on Hitchcock, High Anxiety, and the unexpectedly entertaining Saturday Night Fever.
I watched a lot less TV in 1977 than previously. There was only one crummy TV in our Georgetown dorm common room and the only thing I can remember watching there was Saturday Night Live and various sports. Roots aired in January but I missed it, only hearing about the cultural controversies and finally seeing a rerun later. The Fishers weren’t into TV much, other than Family Feud and any Redskins game. Once I got my own apartment I got a little black-and-white set but I still didn’t have much time or interest to watch.
Music was much more important in my life. Wikipedia says 1977 was the peak year of vinyl sales…and I helped. I spent a lot of time (before and after summering in Key West) with Jimmy Buffet’s Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, learning to play along on guitar and exploring his previous Keys-inspired albums, A1A and Havana Daydreamin’. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was ubiquitous on the radio but I didn’t actually buy the album. I tried to make sense of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s pretentious Works Volume 1. Supertramp’s Even in the Quietest Moments was big for me, as was Dave Edmunds’ Get It though it would take me another year to discover it. I liked the mix of acoustic jazz and electric funk on Herbie Hancock’s live album V.S.O.P. James Taylor’s JT was not bad.
Elvis Costello’s mid-year debut, My Aim is True, was revelatory, kicking off New Wave music for me, which I found more palatable than Punk which had been bubbling for several years but hadn’t really grabbed hold for me (though the terms hadn’t really separated yet). Talking Heads: 77 came out shortly thereafter but I wouldn’t really discover the band until the next year. Ian Dury’s New Boots and Panties was fun. I took a crack at the Sex Pistols’ controversial debut but didn’t love it.
Pete Townsend and Ronnie Lane’s Rough Mix was a throwback album I really enjoyed. Randy Newman’s Little Criminals was huge for me and kicked off my appreciation of his back catalog, especially Good Old Boys and Sail Away. Steely Dan’s Aja, like Rumours, was all over the radio but this time I bought the album. I finally bought a Rolling Stones album, Love You Live, and started to see the appeal of their earlier stuff. Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams had a bunch of hits, including a great version of the Stones’ Tumbling Dice. Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell was operatic tongue-in-cheek rock at its best and worst. Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty was sublime (and recorded partly at Merriweather Post in Columbia!).
1978
Looking over Wikipedia’s list of global events in early 1978, it seems it was prime time for creepy people. Ted Bundy killed sorority sisters (Chi Omegas, later Allie’s sorority) in Florida, the “Vampire of Sacramento” was arrested, Roman Polanski skipped bail and fled to France, the Hillside Strangler killed his final victim in L.A., the Red Brigades kidnapped and killed former Italian Premier Aldo Moro, the first Unabomber attack occurred, and the “Son of Sam” was sentenced to 365 years in prison. And that was just in the first half of the year. Also, Jimmy Carter was still President and Francisco Franco was still dead. Fortunately, other than raising general anxiety that the world was going to hell, none of these events directly affected me. Scanning through the rest of the headlines for the first half of the year, not much else really did. I recognize lots of the events but they did little other than float by my consciousness.
I spent most of the summer of 1978 in Clarendon, working a couple of jobs as an audit clerk at Sears and a warehouse assistant at a mattress shop. I was eager to finally earn some money to save up for a car, among other things. I think Barb worked that summer as a teller for First Virginia Bank, a step up from McDonald’s though with less fringe benefits.
The world’s first test-tube baby arrived in July, a controversial new step in human procreation. In August, one Pope and then another died, paving the way for John Paul II, a Pope that was actually charismatic and the first non-Italian in over 400 years. The Sandinista seized power in Nicaragua which seemed like a step forward after 40 years of Somoza family rule.
I stayed in the Clarendon apartment with Vas for my junior year at Georgetown, so no move was necessary. Barb settled into her third year dorm on Monroe Hill with a new roommate, Mary Marshall.
The Camp David Accords in September offered a hope for peace in the Middle East and perhaps the peak of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. In November there was truly horrible news when more than 900 misguided people died in the Jonestown murder-suicide in Guyana. Creepy people ruled the day. It was a strange and sad year, in many ways.
I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t paying close attention to what was happening in the world. I was in the second semester of my sophomore year, still struggling with Chinese and concerned about when and where to see Barb on weekends.
Movies in 1978 occupied some of our spare time. Baby Boomer consumer power was coming to the fore, as was synergy between movies and film soundtracks following the outrageous success of Saturday Night Fever at the end of 1977. The film of The Band’s Last Waltz concert came out in April and I belatedly got hooked on their music after they broke up. Another music-oriented movie, FM, came out at the same time — it wasn’t very good but had a great soundtrack. The same could be said for The Buddy Holly Story a month later. July brought a very disappointing version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but also the unexpectedly funny and disruptive Animal House which introduced a new set of stars and built on The National Lampoon and SNL’s snarky comedy. Late in the year, The Deer Hunter was a powerful depiction of lives shattered by Vietnam and Pennsylvania coal country that boosted its own crop of young stars including Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep. Superman began the still-running wave of comic book films. Heaven Can Wait was a fun remake and the only Warren Beatty film I remember liking.
There were a lot of less stellar films that I admit I saw but barely remember, like The Boys from Brazil, The Brinks Job, La Cage aux Folles (original French version), California Suite, Caravans, Death on the Nile, Grease, and Pretty Baby. There were also some notable films that I avoided or missed entirely like Coming Home, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman, Up in Smoke, and The Wiz.
Television was increasingly a wasteland of shows I didn’t watch, but a miniseries, Holocaust (again with Meryl Streep who was starting to show up everywhere), was an exception. Another big miniseries, Centennial, was not nearly as good. The Rutles: All You Need is Cash, simultaneously marrying and spoofing the talents of Monty Python and the Beatles, was wonderful. I regularly watched Saturday Night Live, M*A*S*H and increasing amounts of college basketball (Georgetown was getting good as was UVA in the ACC) and pro football. Barb remained hooked on The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Quincy. I missed the ill-fated Star Wars Holiday Special and haven’t seen it since.
March 1978 alone turned out to be a huge month in music releases for me, including Elvis Costello’s second album, This Year’s Model (a few months earlier in December 1977 Elvis turned in an exciting and transgressive performance on SNL, calling an audible to play “Radio, Radio“), Nick Lowe’s debut Pure Pop for Now People, The Rutles album, Jimmy Buffet’s Son of a Son of a Sailor, and Little Feat’s Waiting for Columbus live album that turned me on to their whole catalog. A few weeks later The Band’s Last Waltz album came out and did the same for me. I wore out both those multi-disc albums trying to play along and they still rank as two of my favorites all these years later.
Later in the year, Joe Walsh’s But Seriously, Folks dropped with its essential song, “Life’s Been Good“. Graham Parker’s live album, The Parkerilla, was good but not as great as a radio concert that later came out as a promotional album, Live Sparks, including a killer version of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”. In June, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, his long-awaited follow-up to Born to Run, came out (I caught his November show at the Capital Centre). The Cars debut album was fun. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls was one of the better studio albums and their first with Ronnie Wood. Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food was the first of their albums I bought. The soundtrack to the bloated Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band film was mostly terrible, but I bought it, too.
In August, The Who released the largely forgettable Who Are You, but the following month their maniacal drummer, Keith Moon — one of my favorites — died from an overdose which was a sad but seemingly inevitable waste. The same month, Devo’s debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo! seemed like something from another planet. Their SNL performance was also one of the show’s best.
Dave Edmund’s Tracks on Wax in September was another album from the Nick Lowe/Rockpile assembly line that was my real introduction to a new favorite artist. Linda Ronstadt’s Living in the USA was a pro at work; newcomer Nicolette Larson’s debut Nicolette was in a similar vein (I expected more from her). Jimmy Buffet’s live album, You Had to Be There, was easy to play along with.
As much music as I listened to and bought, I still missed out on some important albums and artists that I would come to appreciate in later years, including debuts by Prince, Blondie, The Police, Squeeze, XTC, Van Halen, Kate Bush, Dire Straits, Midnight Oil, The Blues Brothers and good albums by Warren Zevon, The Ramones, Patti Smith, Parliament/Funkadelic, Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison, and The Clash. It was also the year of Macho Man, Grease, “Le Freak” and other inescapable fare.
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