Where do these often lame titles for my musical eras come from? In my mind, my less than perfect memory and desire to categorize and organize has always had these “groupings” for the music that I have collected over the years. There are maybe half a dozen main categories. You’ve already been through The Scratchy 45 Days and what I’ve called The KISS Age. As you seen there are little side spurs to the trail that often go unidentified. The next section has been known as BFMS which stands for Bellows Falls Middle School. It could have been called something like The End Of The 70’s. I don’t know why I chose BFMS. it is kind of like the nickname you don’t really want but it is the one that sticks. I guess BFMS made sense since it covers the music that I was listening to while attending BFMS.
This a somewhat of a departure from the naming convention used so far. The Scratchy 45 Days were named for the hundreds or 45 rpm records that mom had. The KISS Age centered around the band KISS which tells you how impactful I believe they were. No other bands have risen to the level of having an Age named after them as far as I can tell. With BFMS, the name comes directly from the school and is the first era in which the window of time is given this much weight. Again, I will have to apologoze to chronology fans. As with previous eras and ages, BFMS is not an orderly manifest of musical release but rather a bucket in time in which all the music has been carelessly tossed. I’ll be pulling these out of the bucket with little regard to release dates or charting appearances. The basic window runs from September of 1977 to September of 1979. That would be 7th grade, 8th grade and the follwing summer leading up to high school.
A couple of the most impactful selections came courtesy of my younger cousin Jamie. BFMS had the annual magazine drive to raise funds for the school. The kids were sent out to sign up anybody they could for magazine subscriptions. There were prizes involved if you could sell ridiculous amounts of magzine subnscritptions. My cousin Jamie was highly motivated. She sold enough to get a stereo system and a bunch of albums. I think I got a giant slo-poke for subscribing to SKI magazine myself.
The stereo she got wasn’t anything ultra amazing. It was a good sounding 1970’s style unit with a turntable, AM FM radio and possibly an 8-Track player. When I compare it to some of the systems I bought just a few years later, it makes for interesting design conversation. Anyway, it sounded good and the music she chose, well I have no idea where she got the idea. These next few came from Jamie.
Billy Joel – Rosalinda’s Eyes. Up to this point my exposure to Billy Joel was only Piano Man. Jamie got Billy Joel’s 52nd Street which to this day is still my favorite Billy Joel album. Is it for sentimental reasons? Perhaps, maybe it was because everybody plays The Stranger including me a couple years later. I don’t know there is something about it that takes me back to sitting on the hardwood floow in her room listening to Billy Joel by the glow of the dials on her new stereo. I wrote about 52nd Street at BunchoShizzo.com you can check it out there. I just did I wrote that a year and a half ago and said a lot of the same stuff I said here. interesting. You may not know that 52nd Street was the first album to be commercially sold on this new format called Compact Disc. I was 7 or 8 years away from my first CD player and at the time when Jamie and I were listening to 52nd Street almost nobody had heard of CDs.
Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven. What possessed Jamie to get Led Zeppelin 4? It just seems so uncharacteristic. I had never formally heard of Led Zeppelin but quickly became a fan of this album.
Donna Summer – On The Radio. Quite a departure from KISS, eh? Disco had reached the country roads of southern Vermont. I thought Donna Summer was beautiful and the songs on this album may not have been classics but they certainly are unforgettable.
Bee Gees – Night Fever. I’m so glad that she got the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack. I never would have. This album had so many great songs and evokes such emotion. Again it is the nostalgia of innocent middle school dances that I’m referring to not the excesses of Studio 54.
Kansas – Magnum Opus. Wow. Kansas amazed me. It seemed to blend the orchestration that I like about John Williams and the London Symphony and popular music. So much more intricate than KISS. Leftoverture would become one of my favorite albums of the time.
I have to thank my cousin Jamie for sharing her music with me.