Midnight Magic

 

Christmas came early for me in December 1979 — about a week early, in fact.

This pre-Christmas Christmas was necessitated by the fact that my mom, sister and I were preparing to move to Chicago from Los Angeles, where we'd spent the past year living with two of my aunts, my uncle and my two young cousins in their airy Spanish Revival duplex on Sixth Street. Our plan went like this: My mom was flying to Chicago to meet Froggy, her fiancee, while my sister and I would fly to New York City to spend Christmas (and a few days before and after) with my dad and stepmother, and then we'd meet up in Chicago in time to start the new year (and new decade) in our new home. So on December 19th, our final evening in Los Angeles, my sister, mom and I exchanged presents with the rest of our L.A. family.

Among the more memorable gifts I received that night were a Strat-O-Matic College Football set, a copy of The People's Almanac #2, and a copy of the Commodores' Midnight Magic LP. In retrospect, it seems kind of strange that the one record I got that Christmas was far mellower than the music I'd gotten deeply into that fall through local FM radio station KMET, as well as via various friends — new wave-ish things like Cheap Trick, Blondie, the Knack, the Cars, the Records and Bram Tchaikovsky, and older hard rock stuff like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Foghat and Jethro Tull. But I'd been a fan of the Commodores since the summer of '77, when "Easy" oozed like cosmic honey out of every radio in earshot, and they were one of those bands that my mom and I both shared an affection for (even if she'd aptly described them as "corny" on more than one occasion).

And frankly, I wasn't the kind of kid who got off on pissing off my mom with my record collection; I happily absorbed the harder stuff on my own time, but also really enjoyed the times when my mom and I would listen to music together, finding common ground in the melodies that transported us. So when writing out my Christmas list that year, I thought Midnight Magic would be a better bet to ask for than, say, Get The Knack, because I knew with the latter that it'd only be a matter of time before my mom's ears picked up the line "When she's sitting on your face" from "Good Girls Don't," and an awkward conversation would inevitably ensue...

Since we were due to leave the next day, my sister and I immediately packed up all our new presents — except for the Strat-O-Matic game, which I insisted on taking with me to NYC — in a suitcase for my mom to take with her to Chicago. I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to listen to my new album for another ten days or so, but then again it gave me something to look forward to, a new thrill to savor once the excitement of spending our first Christmas in Manhattan was over.

I finally got a chance to pierce the album's shrink wrap on our first night in Chicago, while we got comfortable at Froggy's one-bedroom apartment on the 67th floor of the John Hancock Building. From his living room window, Froggy pointed out a black, glass-and-steel rectangle below — the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed apartment building on Lake Shore Drive where we'd all be moving in a matter of days. For now, though, we'd ride out the remaining days of '79 in his comfy bachelor pad in the sky, which came complete with a wooden-based BSR turntable that I popped Midnight Magic onto at my earliest opportunity.

Up til this point, I had only heard "Sail On" and "Still," the album's two hit ballads; the country-tinged verses of the former seemed a little odd to me, but I loved how the song built to a mighty chorus crescendo. "Still," on the other hand, I didn't dig at all — in retrospect, the sappy ballad was a dry run for Lionel Richie's solo career, but at the time it just seemed both convoluted and dull. Nevertheless, I was a loyal fan, and remained hopeful that Midnight Magic would contain a funky track or two along the lines of "Brickhouse," or even "Too Hot Ta Trot". In that respect, I would be sorely disappointed; once I finally spun the record, it became apparent that there was nothing on it that could touch the funkiest highlights of the Commodores' back catalog. However, the upbeat cuts like "Getting It," "Sexy Lady" and the title track were a different (and appealing) animal altogether — they were clean, smooth and sophisticated in a way that somehow seemed to perfectly befit our new surroundings.

But the track that I really connected with was "Wonderland," which opened Side 2. A lush, slow-grooving seduction ballad, the song found Lionel promising to sweep a girl off to the land of love with a ride down "Paradise Drive," if she'd just take his hand. While "Wonderland" was entirely too "adult" for me to relate to on a literal level, I was completely enraptured by the luxuriously silky sound of the track, and completely caught up in its evocative promises. "Hello, honey, this is your lucky day," Lionel sang, and yeah, this was my (and our) lucky day — after a year of scraping by in Los Angeles with so little money that I'd felt guilty about asking my mom to take me shopping for new clothes, she was about to marry a guy who lived in a skyscraper, and who was about to move us all into a sleek apartment building with an actual door man. The building was even located on Lake Shore Drive — not Paradise Drive, perhaps, but damn close enough...

I played the album again that unseasonably New Year's Eve, shortly before we boarded a CTA bus to take us up to Rogers Park, where we quietly rung in the new decade by watching a late screening of Going In Style — a bittersweet heist comedy starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg — at the 400 Theater. On the way home, as our bus cruised southwards along Lake Shore Drive, I looked out at the lights of Lincoln Park, which seemed to bob and beckon in the distance like fairy lights, and heard "Wonderland" playing in my head. I knew next to nothing about my new home at this point, but I couldn't wait to learn everything — couldn't wait to become a part of this historic and enchanting metropolis where I'd been lucky enough to land. I was so pumped, I wasn't even stressed about having to enroll in a new school the following week, which would be my fourth school in less than two years.

Sadly, life never flows as quite smoothly as a late-70s Commodores track. In time, Froggy would turn out to have deep-seated anger issues that primarily manifested at me; living in a Mies Van Der Rohe building would prove a cold (often literally) and depressing experience; and my desire to fit in with the rock-loving, WLUP-listening kids at my new school would eventually cause me to renounce my love for all things Commodores. But for a couple of weeks at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, Midnight Magic represented all of my hopes and dreams I had for the new year, the new decade, and my new life. As I sit here in Chicago on a bitingly cold New Year's Day, I listen to "Wonderland" and can still feel the same heady sense of excitement, promise and wonder — that same Midnight Magic — that I did thirty-eight years ago. And I find myself wondering where the hell all the time went.

 

 

Comments

[Marco]

Excellent piece, Dan, in the same way Honky Tonk Tourist was excellent. I very much enjoy reading the seamless integration of your journey in life with your musical journey in life.