Eclectic Company: Hep Cats of the 1970s

It’s hard to explain just why being in the know, an insider in the music world, has been so important to me, for, well, forever. Years ago, when we worked together at a fundraising company, and had been out of college for some appreciable amount of time, my high-school buddy Caryn and I felt the need to be the hippest cats in the room, and assumed the mantle of maven-ism (a Yiddish word meaning expert, but sometimes at least, it’s a sarcastic title) over a musical domain.

That meant knowing everything about the genres our peers might care about (Mellow Country, heavy metal), and everything about the musical genres the generations before (Big Band) and behind (punk) us might care about, and everything about show tunes while disdaining them and other forms of “old people’s” pop culture in public, and everything about any kind of novelty music, from TV show theme songs (“Meet George Jetson / doo doo doo doo doo doo / Jane, his wife / doo doo doo doo doo doo / his boy Elroy / doo doo doo doo doo doo / daughter Judy” etc.) to ad slogan snippets (“See the U.S.A. / in your Chevrolet”) to whacko recordings (William Shatner’s scenery-chewing “Mr. Tambourine Man”) and performances (Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through The Tulips”) by celebrities who should have known better.

Well one day, Caryn and I in a particularly know-it-all maven-ish mood (probably due to the fuel, or the moon) decided we had to hear androgynous punk poet/musician Patti Smith in person (she was going to be playing a hop, skip and jump from our offices at the Academy of Music in Manhattan) but we had to get ready for the experience. So we wracked our brains for a few nanoseconds, and aided by gallons of caffeine and days of sleep deprivation (did I say we were working as fundraisers at the time? All fundraisers are over-stimulated and under-recharged.) we decided to go in some fairly standard jeans and sneakers outfits, accessorized with tampon earrings. What we were going to do was use red marker to make the tampons look used, and loop them over our ears with the safety strings. Well we broke open some O.B. things without the applicators, but they were too micro, and didn’t absorb the red marker ink all that well, so we switched to some with applicators, probably the Kotex brand, because that’s the only other one I remember from that era. The finished results looked pretty realistic, which we thought would be really out there and punk, but we had trouble wearing them. The strings were actually too short to stay on our ears, so most of the way down to the theater, we kind of held them on by covering our ears with our hands. Face it, we were dweebs.

But we told each other we looked fabulous, or whatever word for totally hip we were using that week, and strutted down the street to the show. Where we discovered we were literally sitting in the nosebleed section, as I remember it, actually in the very last row, about 10 light years away from the stage. Which turned out to be perfect for us. While we could barely see Patti, who wore a white man’s button down dress shirt over skinny jeans (and if I remember rightly, also a flesh-colored tank top that was not a beautifying choice), or Lenny Kaye, guitarist extraordinaire (and supremely nice, approachable, not a stuck-up bone in his body kind of guy I learned some years later), or Jay Dee Daugherty, hidden behind his drumkit, and from our angle of view, the invisible man, no one could see us either, which as I say was a good thing. I can’t remember how long it took us to abandon our tampon earrings, but in fairly short order we dumped them because we were either too embarrassed about not fitting in with kids mostly 15 to 20 years younger than us, or too busy catching the energy, excitement and new songs with the crowd of maybe 5,000 screaming fans, who were on their feet from note one for the ENTIRE show. Ouch. Even though I was less than half the mighty age I am now, standing for that long was p a i n f u l, with a capital retch.

How did we know the songs off the new record, Easter, that she was showcasing that May night? I don’t think we owned a copy between us, and don't forget in 1978 there was no youtube, no downloads. At this distance in time, I have to suspect we absorbed them by osmosis, or we intuited them. I know we knew “Because the Night,” because that was actually playing on the radio in sufficient rotation to chart, and we certainly knew some of the covers, Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” Van Morrison’s “Gloria” (G-L-O-R-I-A), plus the old men’s hits for encores – Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” and The Who’s “My G-G-G-Generation.” The following year, when I or maybe Caryn and I together saw her perform “5-4-3-2-1 Wave,” the title song from her next album, we, that is the audience, stumbled over ourselves trying to move fast enough to perform the countdown on our fingers, just like Patti did.

Sometimes when I’m thinking about how lucky I was to be where I was when I was, what I got to see and hear that's now gone with barely a half-life echo to be remembered by, so much once-in-a-lifetime stuff (I relived Patti’s concert deets through the magic of the internet, and geeky guys who put up the set lists at www.setlist.fm, so I can find them as needed), wanting to feel again the rush of excitement of one mind-blowing ephemeral thing and then its almost immediate earth-shattering replacement, the energy propelling me until I found third, fourth, and fifth winds, I feel sorry for myself that I don’t have the stamina, or even the will, to stay up for days to soak up music, to eat, drink and not sleep it, all over again. But when I look back on my life, I can see my tombstone, my epitaph: “Hep cat.”

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