On The Tip of the Needle

I am down with muscle aches and an upset tummy.  Lori is cleaning house and listening to her vinyls on the turn table.  Ha.  Google that young ones.

Her favorite records include the K Tel records that were mass produced in the seventies and early eighties.

"K Tel presents, "Rock Ballads of the 70's."

"K Tel presents, "Disco To Dance To."

We've been jamming to those tunes now for several hours and I love them all.  I didn't like a lot of the music when it came out.  It was adult stuff.  My aunties and my mother danced to this music.  They made embarrassing faces and gyrated in weird circles around living rooms and in the kitchens.  "Eeew, yuck mom, that's gross," was my comment when they made kissy faces.  Who could blame an eight year old?

Forty years later and I am the one dancing and making weird, embarrassing faces.  This music was AWESOME!  I have a lot of life experience behind me now, and with that knowledge tucked away in the far side of my brain, I GET IT.  This is music to dance to when you get home from the Piggly Wiggly after a crappy day shift, have whipped up a batch of Kraft macaroni and Hamburger Helper for the offspring, and you just want to cut lose.  This is music that allows you to imagine you have enough energy to pounce on your man when he comes dragging in after his double at the Coke bottling plant, or he managed to convince an older couple to buy the lemon down at the corner used car lot where he tarnishes his soul every day to put bread on the table.

With that apron slung low on your birthing hips, you grab the spatula and move to the music.  In your head you are on a stage and are wearing you very best "baby wanna mess around wit' me" Bobby Brooks pantsuit.  Your man is sitting nearby and you are weaving a web of seduction for him.  The children are shoveling in the mac and cheese and don't notice that you have been transformed.  If they do, they choose not to notice.  They cannot comprehend.

Meanwhile, out in the garage, the man has cranked up the AM/FM player in the station wagon that he traded a few years back for his Gremlin that wasn't so hot but had so much potential.   He shuffles over to the corner of the garage and pulls out the little bottle of stress relief and his pack of Pal Mals, takes a tug and lights up a cigarette as some AC/DC pushes the limits of the low side of the speakers.  The crackling from the tenor side bothers him but he does not care.  The guitar riffs are washing away the bad taste in his mouth where he swallowed his pride in front of the man:  the one who signs his paycheck, and knows that at least a hundred more of him can be had at the drop of a hat.  That riff and the words, "back in black," lift him up and he is strutting with his buddies down home room hall. He has a girl.  They don't.  He is king.

The needle passes over the hills and dales of the vinyl landscape and dreams float along a series of wires and explode from a cheap pair of speakers.  Its bad poetry and three cords, but forty years later, it still wrangles memories from tired heads.  Small boned, tenor boys belt out love tunes in short verse, and girls elude to heavenly exploits in the realm of Zanadu.