By William Cooper
Back in the mid-70s, I was in my early tens. Three major events were colliding in my life. I was in my first serious relationship with the girl across the street. The Captain and Tennille were hitting the charts in a big way with their unique brand of lounge-schmaltz. And the 1975 and 1976 Cincinnati Reds were in the middle of clenching two back-to-back World Series wins.
It was almost more than a young man could take. The girl had kissed me in the bushes, so it was obvious this was going to last forever. The music was some of the first “relevant” music I had been into and some of the first pop albums I had ever owned. And baseball was a passion I shared with my father, which involved such things as learning by heart the scoring notations, meeting both Johnny Bench and Pete Rose, and taking routine drives down south to Three Rivers Stadium to watch them play live.
I must have felt that I needed to combine all these things together in order to deal with them. So, like the Captain, I began wearing a Reds cap that I refused to take off. And that cap became part of my smooth operator operations in continuing to woo this older, sophisticated sixth grader. The two of us took photos with it, of it, around it. I must have worn that thing ragged for a solid year.
Eventually, the Reds stopped winning. Pete Rose fell into his own problems. My girlfriend moved on from my amazing wiles. And Captain and Tennille faded away to be replaced by Cheap Trick. But what of my hat, you ask? I’m not sure what ever happened to it. I like to think that perhaps it gained sentience and is off somewhere even now, bringing romantic confidence to some other hapless fifth-grader.
In this episode, we confront our own cheesy haplessness. We begin by battling basement and house clutter and move quickly into a rambling discourse on living the single life while married and strange ways our parents tried to alternately shelter us or prepare us for the world (and sometimes both at the same time). We end up taking on a three-cheese medley of music together, which transports us into the land of the bicentennial, the dubious plethora of variety shows in that era, and and the unsolved mystery of what William was doing locked in a closet in music class singing to the Bay City Rollers. Nibble on bacon and chew on cheese with us podcasting muskrats this week!
Links:
KC and the Sunshine Band, Keep it Comin’ Love
Bay City Rollers, Saturday Night
Captain & Tennille, Shop Around
