The debut on the radio was in the very early part of 1974. The timing of the song, like so many more I’ll speak of during this year, was impeccable as far as my life was concerned.
The bass and the reverb which one hears at the beginning of the song took a hold of me and got my immediate grabbed by the neck attention. And as the song unfolded, I thought to myself that it felt like David Essex had been secretly witnessing my life and my dreams and that he was singing those very dreams of mine back to me through the two speakers jammed up against my left ear on the floor of my bedroom. It also felt as if he was clearly defining my whole life’s philosophy in words and what was to come.
The first hint of my transitioning from being a child into becoming a teenager came with the haunting lines which still reverberates frequently as as I march forward. “And where do we go from here?/Which is the way that’s clear?/Still looking for that blue-jeaned baby queen/prettiest girl I ever seen/See her shake on the movie screen-Jimmy Dean”.
I fell in love with the song. Simultaneously, I learned to fear it as well. This was a first for me. This song and the immortal lines set out what was to be for me what has been the rest of my life up to this very moment. This song may have been the one which drew the line of demarcation with the subconscious announcement (only to be clearly deciphered at least two decades later) in my mind that I had better enjoy 1974 and soak it in with all of my ability to take in what I held dear to me. My changes and chaos were coming. That reverb was not soothing. It was menacing. My sense of how I defined my rebelliousness was meeting straight on with the reality of how the course of my life was going to be charted out.
I didn’t know about the word paradox back then. But the weird sensation I felt deep within myself over this song made it imperative that I pick it up and make it my own. You take a song you love and you learn to understand why it makes you feel fear. That was a first as well. And then you learn to grow with those fears. The fears no longer become monsters. They become what you are striving to find. Are they monsters? No. They are the obstacles which get in the way of what you are trying to get.
Sometimes a song comes along which makes you realize some new fears. As you recognize those new fears, the old ones begin to fade away. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me prior to my last angiogram. Some fears of mine hadn’t gone away yet. But the song quickly grew into a part of my identity and gave me something to hang on to when I got to San Francisco. And when the procedure was over with and I got the news that I could do what I wanted to, some old fears were replaced by some very new ones. What still scares me is that some of those newfound 1974 fears are still with me to this day.
I can chart back my loneliness and longing for female companionship as far back as the late Fall of 1967 or the First Quarter of 1968. After the angiogram and as a result of hearing this song tell me so much about myself, my new fears were the same old ones. The difference was that they came back with a sharper clarity. It was in 1974 when I realized that my struggle was not going to be as easy to overcome-not by a long-shot. Over the passage of time, the clarity of the struggle was going to become much more pointed, barbed and then outright razor sharp.
If there was ever a song which was made for me to take personally. This was it. I have learned about the context of this song and how it basically came about over the years. People within the music industry were beginning to look back to the earlier days of Rock and Roll as the Glam movement was locking itself in pretty firmly in the musical landscape of the times. 1974 was to be the final year of my personal sense of forward progression from the medium which had influenced me the most-AM radio. I had no idea that I was about to simultaneously leap from one format and into another and taking the leap into another phase in my living. The timing of both would become very profound to me then and even more so when I became an adult.
David Essex was, in essence, telling to me to deal with all of the shit I was going to deal with ahead of me in the same way that I had been doing before. Rock on. Rock on proud. Rock on with stubborness. Rock on with rebelliousness. Rock On when when anybody or anything stands in your way. Just don’t forget to Rock On. I was to Rock On no matter what kind of music I was listening to in the ensuing years. I was to Rock On no matter how many people would come and go in my life It was Rock and it would keep me going. It would keep me wanting to not let go of the prize I strove for.
This song sounded so big on KFRC in San Francisco. They had that big sound that no other station had. When you combined it with the reverb that was already in the mix of the song, you could hear the sound of the attempt by so many forces to prevent me from finding that blue-jeaned baby queen. David was describing my fight and he was standing there alongside me as a brother in arms.
Up until then, this song had a sound like no other I had heard before. Hell, it may sound blasphemous to say, but this may have been my own first personalized alt./sound I heard. And the thing is that this wasn’t going to be the only one for the year of 1974. It was only the beginning. It was a foreshadowing clue of a song. It was my post-something song before I was to ever realize that I was in a post-anything state of mind and living.
The song told me that I was to hold on to my dream even if I was to have to do this alone. There is music going on in the song in a very minimal way until the brassy chorus chimes in the middle section, but you felt like Essex was completely alone as he was singing it. But I was to share that loneliness with him. And as the years have gone on, that minimalistic approach to the song was to mirror the feeling having people I knew, for whatever reason, fall by the wayside to the point that I felt like I was doing this search all alone. This has damn near come completely true as I type this right now. I am now almost completely alone. When I hear this song played on the radio nowadays or when I listen to it on one of my Rhino label Super Hits of the ’70s compilations I have, it comes back to me with the same torrential force as it did back when I heard it as it walked alongside among my thoughts, my dreams, the Bay Area fog and the people with whom I shared my life with. My God! There was so much more intensity to come and from some unexpected places.
Tags: "rock on", 1974, am radio 1974, david essex
