Member-only story
Rock On…! And Where Do We Go from Here…? (Growing Old with Rock & Roll)
It’s always a good time to get turned on to new music and the artists making it. But the weirdo terrestrial and extraterrestrial radio stations I tend to tune into to find it have been surprising me lately by playing stuff I already knew. Even the hip indie deejays are digging deeply into the aural comfort food lately.
Not all that long ago, on Bagel Radio for example, I heard “Rock On!” by David Essex for the first time in many, many, many years: “Still lookin’ for that blue jean baby queen, prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” Essex sang, “see her shake on the movie screen; Jimmy Dean — James Dean…”; and all those years fell away in my head as 1974 got right up in my face.
Spring of 1974, to be exact. Eighth grade Washington DC trip. Reminding me of tour busses. Nothing is more Rock and Roll than tour busses. Watergate was bringing Nixon down. I was 13 years-old and David Essex was asking the musical question “Where do we go from here?” We were heading for high school. One of, if not the first grownup books I ever read was A Confederate…