The deaths of Donna Summer and Robin Gibb this past week got me thinking about my youth, and the role that music played in it.

My father never played an instrument and is fairly tone-deaf — i.e. he has a hard time humming the note you play for him on the piano. My mother, on the other hand, could (and probably still can) play piano in the dark. She taught lessons. (Not to me. She wisely refused and sent me to another teacher.) Still, our generations were very different. My parents did not have a soundtrack to their lives. This is probably due to technology as much as anything else. Music was not portable to them. When they were teenagers in the early 50s, music was limited to static-filled radios, jukeboxes, and gigantic phonographs.  My mother told me stories of working as a lifeguard one summer and listening to Bill Haley and the Comets sing “Rock around the Clock” over and over. But as far back as I remember, their music was only for special occasions, like candlelight, pearls, and cologne. They’d break out Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Barbara Streisand, and the Ray Connif Singers for dinner parties, but not for everyday enjoyment. Even in the car, they usually listened to talk radio. By the time I discovered pop music, they put up with loud sounds coming from the basement, but I wouldn’t say that they were fans.

My generation was different. We grew up with music, took it with us, and played it whenever we could. Now, as adults, we share musical tastes with our kids. We may not like all the same music, but there is definite overlap, and we share the same need of having music as a background to the events of our lives.

Watching coverage of the passings of Summer and Gibb, I couldn’t help but reflect on my high school years, specifically 1978-1980. I was a bit young to have been a participant in the disco era. We suburban high schoolers were not sneaking into places like Studio 54. Plus, as the oldest child in my family, I had no older siblings to provide a musical education, or to cue me in as to what was hip and happening. I had to figure it all out without a roadmap. My earliest memories of music happened in the homes of some of my friends in grade school, where I discovered the Jackson 5, Credence, and Alice Cooper. Later, it was sneaking an AM transistor radio under my pillow and listening to Wolfman Jack do a countdown of the hits on WLS. I wondered what these strange people looked like, these singers of songs like “Kung Fu Fighting,” “The Best of My Love,”  “Philadelphia Freedom,” and “Lady Marmalade.”

By high school, I mainly hung out with three different groups, each with their own musical roots.

The jocks, strangely, were a music-free zone. Walkmen and iPods did not exist. Portable radios were fragile and had these low fidelity ear phones, and usually only for one ear. Thus, workouts and practices were silent and music-less. The only sounds were squeaking tennis shoes, crunching pads, and the clanging of weights. There were no tunes playing in the locker room, the weight room, or on the track. Bus trips to away games were silent affairs. We were like Amish athletes training for the music-free Olympics.

Then there were the guys I hung out with. They were rock and rollers. This was pre-punk or alternative. They were mostly into crunching guitar bands like Zeppelin, Kiss, Nugent, and Cheap Trick. We started a little garage band. We only did covers. We called ourselves Midnight. Lame, I know. I hadn’t yet entered into the creative phase of my life. I played an electric piano that made these rather “bloopy”-sounding tones. Very little of what we played called for piano. They were nice to let me in. We actually played some gigs wearing these hideous, polyester jump suits made by the mother of one of our friends. We were like a forerunner of Devo, without the hats.

The third group was the theater kids. I had gotten into theater at some point because I had hurt my back weight lifting and was ordered to desist activity for a while. The theater director was a former football player himself who had also worked in the Houston Musical Theater. He sort of made theater “cool.” To us, he was like Roy Scheider in All That Jazz. He was in his twenties, but looked older — cigarette smoking, gruff temperament, and much more visionary than most high school drama teachers. It was at the theater cast parties that I was introduced to disco music. I didn’t love it, but as it played and played during our Old Milwaukee/Meister Brau drinking parties, it became a part of the soundtrack of my youth. I never owned a Bee Gees album, including the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, but I knew it front to back. In fact, to this day, I have never seen the movie all the way through.

Having sung in choir, and played the piano and french horn, I think I was drawn to a wider variety of music than the 3-chord guitar bands of my buddies. I got into Elton John and Rush and Fleetwood Mac and Chicago and Stevie Wonder and Genesis and Steely Dan and Boston and Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Queen. The closest thing I owned to disco were the Commodores and Earth, Wind & Fire. Sorry, but I don’t consider either “Brick House” or “September” to be disco.

(Side note: At the time, I don’t think it ever occurred to us that Elton John or Freddie Mercury were gay. And would it have mattered? I’m not sure we even knew what “gay” was. They were just flamboyant like Alice Cooper and Roger Daltry and David Bowie and Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger. Remember, unless you went to a concert, you only ever saw them in still photos, if that.)

Then, a funny thing happened in the seventies. One genre of music went to war with another. Rock and Roll decided that Disco Sucked. I don’t think this has ever happened since. I can’t imagine Indie Rock or R&B declaring war on Country & Western. But back then, there were limited radio stations for teens and some of the rock and roll stations were suddenly becoming disco stations, which didn’t sit well with the Rock and Rollers. Steve Dahl was a popular radio personality in Chicago. He led all his listeners in an avid anti-disco campaign. We all went along because he kept us entertained at our crappy summer job all through the sweltering summer of 1979. It culminated at a White Sox game that summer where you could get in for 98 cents (WLUP 98.5) with a disco record. They were going to collect them all and blow them up between games of a doubleheader. The Sox were only drawing about 6,000 fans a night that year, but that night, they packed it out. The Sox were not prepared and the event was not well thought out. Let’s just say that they weren’t there to see a baseball game. The LPs became dangerous projectiles. After the records were blown up,  kids began to run onto the field. They began to tear up the grass. They took over the rolling batting cage and began to push it around the field. There weren’t enough cops. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game. Here’s some footage from a documentary.

I was not there, but that day is burned into my memory. We listened to Dahl’s show at our crappy job leading up to the event, and especially the day after. It was also at that job that we listened to the Beatles White Album all the way through about forty times. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine….

I know this is a jumble of memories, but this is what has been running through my mind this past week. Soon, the era would be over. By the time I was old enough to go to clubs, disco had given way to Dire Straits, the Eurythmics, U2, Laura Branigan, the Police, R.E.M., Hall & Oates, and Spandau Ballet. Kiss and Ted Nugent gave way to ZZ Top and Van Halen. And the clubs seemed to run a continuous loop of “Ride the White Horse.”

But I do find myself sort of nostalgic now and then for a Bee Gees fix. Hey, no other band other than the Beatles had three songs in the top 5 at the same time. But I prefer the pre-Saturday Night Fever stuff. And never has a band’s voices and faces been so strangely mixed.

And here’s a golden oldie from 1975. Extra credit: try counting all the keyboards.

I was NEVER really in to Donna Summer, but this song was always the last one played at ever dance. If you hadn’t worked up to ask that girl yet, now was the time.

It’s funny how music brings back a flood of memories. In this case, it’s a bunch of kids with blow-dried hair driving around town in a large gas-guzzling Suburban, just looking for party. The girls either had the Dorothy Hamill wedge cut or the Farrah Fawcett flip. The guys all tried to look like Willie Aames or Bruce Jenner. Me, I went with more of the Gabe Kaplan look, without the mustache. Nice, I know. Those were nights of cheap beer, grabbing a burger at Yankee Doodle (the local fast food joint), and cruising around Glen Ellyn, Illinois, without finding much else going on. Despite our stupidity, we were fairly harmless. I don’t remember anyone passing out or throwing up. We really didn’t overdo it. Drugs were not big, or if they were, I wasn’t invited. There were some bongs here or there, but I remember being scared to death of drugs in general. To me, one taste and you were instantly addicted and on your way to becoming a junkie. I was pretty sheltered.

I’m pretty sure that all these memories have been fit with rounded edges and soft focus in my memory. But I have a much warmer spot in my heart for the 70s than I do the 80s. The 80s were filled with drama and more stupidity and pain and struggle. I really didn’t get my act together until the 90s. But I don’t think I’m alone in that. And that’s a story for another day. In the meantime…