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I just drove TS1 to a daylong art class at Deanza College through grey dreary skies, puddles from an overnight shower up and down the roads and when Earth, Wind and Fire’s September came on the radio for the last few minutes of the ride home I found myself thinking back to the ’70s and specifically to the fall of 1975.
The most memorable event for me was the release of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Never before had a record consumed and connected with me in such a deep way. In the months before hitting the stores, the title tune was constantly on the radio and for the first time I was at Sam Goody’s the day it came in. I think it was 1976 before another record got on my turntable. Through all the years since only U2 has come close to Bruce in my affections. Not that I don’t love the music of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles almost as much but–perhaps because I was too young for the most part when their big releases arrived–with them it’s just the music.
The question I’d like to see you answer isn’t (necessarily) about the music of the year you were 14 but this: What did you want to be then? What future did you wish for yourself? Was it about a job, or to be a music or movie star? 14 is too old for cowboy, astronaut or fireman boy fantasies, though not more earnest desires for those jobs, of course. Despite reading deeply in the science fiction backlists, my desire at the time was split in two opposing directions: rock star or accountant.
Strangely, or possibly not in the post-’60s hangover yet not quite punk/disco sunshine, I didn’t think much about having a wife or family. I spent a completely expectable amount time fantasizing about girls and sex, mind you, just not about what might be happening with one of them ten or twenty years down the line. Even when I gave a few cycles to what being an accountant might be like I never completed the suburban image with a pretty Jewish wife and a son and daughter.
What aspect of being an accountant attracted me isn’t clear any more, if it ever was, but I know the person who put the thought in my head. Our family’s accountant was a man named Jack Kaye and if I wasn’t reading science fiction or about rock and roll I was reading about the stock market. Like the recent scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia, 1975 had front page headlines about companies (Boeing, for instance) bribing foreign government officials to win deals. Interesting, meaty stuff. Oddly I didn’t think of working on Wall Street, that didn’t happen for another none years. There was just something about Mr. Kaye that put the thought in my head.
Rock star, well I suppose 82.7% of 14 year old American boys wanted that future and the same number’s probably still true today. I never came close to making it happen–people who know me now might easily laugh at the thought–but I did give it a try. A couple of years earlier I’d taken drum and then piano lessons. Drums were too loud for my mom and the piano I guess took up too much space in the living room so it got traded in for one of those family fun organs after a year.
The next year I talked my way into an electric bass and lessons from Rick Kerner, at whose mother’s school I’d taken dance lessons in the pre-Bar Mitzvah season of 1973. A few months in my mom learned a lesson of her own: she would’ve been better off keeping me on drums or piano. I had always set the volume on high and, for accompaniment, had a record playing even louder.
Rick also had a business providing bands for Sweet 16s, Bar Mitzvahs and other occasions, which he hired me into after maybe six months of lessons. Sadly, being too young to drive (this was spring of ’77) and not talented enough to outweigh the hassle of arranging transportation, my first gig was my last gig. I did have fun since the party was some girl’s Sweet 16, fresh territory because it was a town or two over from where I lived so none of the girls knew me.
But back to ’75. This was also the after-party for Watergate and the Washington Post and the New York Times were still mining the rich fields of both parties’ backlog. I suppose it was about this time of year I began to read about Jimmy Carter. Not that I realized he’d be the next president though I did know that the Republicans were roadkill. Gerald Ford was such a non-entity that the idea he might win election on his own name was simply laughable and the open question for me was whether the Democrats would take every seat in both houses as well. Yes, that was a naive thought but 14 year olds are generally not political cynics.
I believe I was peripherally aware of the first baby steps a few companies were taking towards personal computers. Mainly, though, my expectations were simply that computers would continue to advance and become ubiquitous. I wondered, and to a large degree still wonder, why science fiction authors haven’t accounted for this in stories. Star Trek, the original TV series that is, did one of the best jobs even if they were completely ridiculous in the number of blinking lights and variety of sliders, knobs and buttons.
1975’s conception of 2005 was unsurprisingly far too optimistic than our reality; if we avoided Trek’s World War III and genetically engineered supermen, well, the margin was narrow and the light at the tunnel’s other side is still faint in the distance. Despite ending the Cold War without launching a single ICBM in anger, an outcome which many Americans thought nearly as probable as not, the path to it, work done in its name, nonetheless scattered seeds that have recently grown into a crop perhaps more dangerous from the likelihood that we’ll be unable to disarm the combatants in any meaningful way.
At 14 I was far more excited to meet the next 30 years. Girls were turning lovely and on rare occasions felt the same about me. Music could take me to some distant place for minutes or hours at a time. Nixon’s campaign at empire had left marks on me but Woodward and Bernstein’s triumph had erased most of them. I wanted to be an accountant or a rock star and both were attainable.
Tell me about you at fourteen, your aspirations and expectations in life.
BillSaysThis 
