[Today: One of the albums that made my dad's bachelor pad swing...]
My parents got divorced in 1980, way before it was the fashionable thing to do. In fact, all of my 10 year old friends’ parents were still married, so I was entering into uncharted territory, and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I knew one upside of the whole thing: no more parents fighting, and that couldn’t be a bad thing. The big downside, of course, is that I saw much less of my dad (although in truth he’d worked odd hours for years, so it wasn’t as much of a shock as it could have been). When my brother and I did see him, we would usually spend the weekend at his apartment near Main St in “downtown” Springfield.
His place was a simple one bedroom that was still very much in the 70′s. Wall-to-wall white shag carpet. Sparkly stuff stuck in the popcorn finish on the ceiling. Huge poofy pillows instead of a couch. And of course, the requisite hi-fi system and a big box of records (he and my mom at some point divided their record collection – I’d give my left arm to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation). My brother and I, being spastic kids with more energy than options, played with those records endlessly. I’m convinced that my life as a crazy music fan and record collector was more or less hatched in the blue glow of my dad’s stereo receiver.
Among the Beatles, Eagles, Jim Croce, Billy Joel, Alice Cooper, Kool & The Gang, and Whispers records was one altogether different album that especially held our attention: The Stones’ Some Girls. The fact that the inner sleeve of the record was part of the outside design, and that the group members were in drag wearing lipstick was just too much for our combined 17 years to process. Also intriguing were the colored blocks that eerily filled some of the cut out faces. I thought this was intentional, implying the shallow nature of modeling (or however I would have expressed that at age 10). It was only years later that I found out the group had used famous actresses images without clearing the rights, and had to pull the original album art in favor of this colorful cut and paste cover up – the version of the sleeve that my brother and I were handling (see above).
Some Girls combined all of the elements of my dad’s record collection in just two album sides. It was disco, but it rocked. It was dangerous, but it was funny. It was endlessly interesting, but easy to understand. It’s a great album on its own merits, but for me this is an all-time masterpiece because it vividly conjures a time and place that is so long gone that it feels like it’s just my imagination…
Listen: Before They Make Me Run
