There's something uncanny about a lot of 1970s pop and rock -- it walks the line so treacherously between being really terrible and really great. I was just watching an episode of "Daryl's House," where Daryl Hall hosted the Rockford, Illinois band Cheap Trick at his digs in Millford, New York. This was the heaviest rock Daryl Hall has likely ever played -- guitars, distortion, train engine drumming and vocals that test the gonads.
It must be said that guitarist and songwriter Rick Nielsen learned his Beatles lessons well. He could write a punchy chorus and he gave the band's best songs odd, little touches that adorn the tunes like the extra twirl of a vine or placement of a small metallic bug in the ironwork on the façade of a building. I'm thinking of the peculiar, ringing open chord that launches their teen anthem "Surrender" or the key-threatening B major to G major chords Nielsen plays in the pre-chorus to "I Want You to Want Me."
But Cheap Trick, being titans of 70s pop rock, also had some overcooked numbers in their repertoire and they played one on "Daryl's House" -- the hangover-inducing, "Heaven Tonight." Heavy, brooding and apparently drug-addled, it is a song that wears its Abbey Road influence on its sleeve. Though Cheap Trick is far from a prog band, the song showcases the most maddening feature of prog rock: an attempt at being deep and portentous that sounds somewhat ridiculous. The song's brush with The Terrible is reached in the chorus, when a group of rough and tumble guys chant, in falsetto, the coke-on-the-mirror line, "Do you want to go to heaven tonight?" It can fill a listener with despair.
Hearing the song today brought me back to an emotional experience I felt constantly growing up in the 70s: ambivalence. I loved and I hated that song by… Elton John, Jim Croce, Don McLean, The Commodores, Pat Benatar. I loved and I hated being at school – seeing friends and seeing girls was great, but I felt so restless there. Even my feelings toward my parents veered from affection to bewilderment. “Playing with those felt puppets you made was fun, Mom!” But who are you? Your old life with nine sisters in Boston is unknowable to me. “Playing catch on the sidewalk was great, Dad.” But I have no idea what you do all day after you leave the house and I don’t understand how somebody could smoke cigars.
Like many Gen Xers, my folks grew up poor in the city and rose into the middle class, riding the wave of the postwar boom economy. This meant that while I grew up in a bucolic suburb (fortunately for me, one that was home to eclectic and eccentric University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee professors and their families and within biking distance of the Milwaukee’s arty East Side), the urban village where my Irish Portuguese parents grew up in Boston felt like something from a different land and century to me. A sense of dislocation and rootlessness can take hold among children in such a family. This feeling can even extend to the suburban landscape. Ambivalence can arise with a fierce love for the extant wilderness that hangs on in the area existing alongside a revulsion at much of the bland conformity that defines the pavement and the manicured lawns.
Many artists of my generation, famous or simply loved and appreciated within their local scene, are already gone - the bewilderment, the malaise, and perhaps the ambivalence of their youth never resolved and they succumbed to suicide or drug addiction. I am grateful to have made it to age 53 where I find I’m able to sit back and enjoy Cheap Trick or Elton John without feeling pulled down by the aura of excess that tainted their music for me when I was a boy. We were born into landscapes defined by confusion, forged by markets. Good music, friendship, love and beautiful verse remain for those of us lucky enough to continue on.
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