The Clock Radio

The idea had been mulling around in my head for maybe a month or so.

I was 12 years old and can’t imagine there was all that much up there to mull around, so why it took so long to actually sit down and start the list I have no idea. But I do know I'd been entertaining the idea for some time, and then, on May 3, 1983, a Tuesday, I started my Top Ten. An on-going list of my ten favorite songs.

I had recently gotten a clock/radio of my own, AM only, with the number panels that were on a spool and flipped down, but it was good enough for me. For the first time in my life I was in control of the songs I heard on a daily basis.

I lived in an apartment with my mother and sister, older by a year and a half, in downtown Niagara Falls, NY. We could see Canada from our dining room window. From my bedroom I could see a parking lot with a dumpster and sometimes a drunk person peeing on the dumpster.  

In earlier days, when my parents were still together and we all lived in a house, my sister and I would listen to our parents’ records. The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland and Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones were our two favorites. Those were the ones with “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I probably took to the The Stones album because it had a cake on the cover. On the reverse the cake had been destroyed, and it always bothered me. "Look at that," I'd say to myself. "A perfectly good cake. Ruined."

My parents had an 8-track player in our green Volkswagen Beetle, and The Stones’ "Angie" still reminds me of when my sister and I would fold down the back seats to make one flat surface, and we'd kneel up and hang on to the neck-rests of the two front seats, me behind my father, at the wheel, and she behind my mother. We'd end up with the lumpy impression of the textured seat-backs on our knees, and it would hurt, but somehow it never stopped us from continuing to do it.

After my parents separated in 1978, my father moved to Chicago and my mother, sister, and I moved in with my mother’s family: my grandmother, my uncle, and my great-grandfather, Frank, who was born in 1885 and was 93 years old at the time. He spoke with an Italian accent and slept on a sofa bed in the den because he couldn’t make it up or down the stairs. We spent a lot of time with him in that den, mostly because that’s where the TV was. He called me Louis when he couldn't remember my name, which was often.

For three years we lived there, and during that time my uncle, in his late-twenties, would often play music for me, mostly classical, but occasionally something contemporary like The Bee Gees or Debbie Boone. “You Light Up My Life” was a big hit at the time and I thought it was the most beautiful song ever made. 

My sister had control of the one radio in the house, so anything I heard was filtered through her. Blondie. Pat Benatar. Stevie Nicks. Actually, I did have a radio, a transistor in the shape of Scooby Doo’s head that my grandmother had given me, but I could never get anything more than static and an oldies station on it, which, back then, meant 50s or 60s, and once the 9-volt battery went dead I never asked to have it replaced.

It wasn’t until 1979 when I heard “The Logical Song” that I wanted an album of my own. I most likely heard the song on the car radio, which was controlled by my mother and secondarily by my sister, who, being older, always had the front seat. Not that I cared. I kind of liked the solitude of the back seat, having the whole thing to myself, even if I did have to listen to songs I didn't particularly want to hear.

So my mother took me to Cavages and bought me “Breakfast in America,” Supertramp’s classic, with the cover image from an airplane window of a smiling, giddy waitress holding up a glass of orange juice on a plate as a stand-in for The Statue of Liberty with condiment bottles and boxes forming the New York City skyline behind her. To me it was simply a picture of a waitress with orange juice, which, with the album title, made perfect sense to me. Breakfast. Orange juice. I liked things that made sense.

My mother moved us to the apartment on Rainbow Boulevard in December of 1981 and it was soon after when I got the clock radio. It died eight years later, my freshman year of college, when it was old and could barely breathe, its motor coughing and wheezing with every second that passed. The clock numbers could no longer flip down, they just sort of stopped in mid-flip, as if to say “Aw fuck it, I’m too tired,” and only with a good slap to the side would they fall into place. By the end it made so much noise Ted, one of my two roommates, unplugged it in the middle of the night and threatened my life if I plugged it back in. Not knowing him all that well at the time, I decided to take him at his word and bought a new clock.

But that old one served me well. It was beside that clock/radio, on May 3, that I made my first Top Ten list. To be considered, the songs had to be current and they had to be on the radio. I had decided I would update the chart every 4 days. I was too impatient to wait a week, 6 days, or even 5, and 3 days didn't seem quite long enough for my opinion of a song to change all that much, so 4 it was.

Every 4 days I updated the list.

For 13 years.

I ended the Top Ten in April 1996, just a couple months after my grandmother, the one we had moved in with, died. It wasn't because she had died that I ended the list; it just happened that way. Unexpectedly, like her dying. The last Number 1 of the last list I made was the Mariah Carey/Boys to Men song "One Sweet Day," about a loved one no longer around. Seemed fitting. A good way to go. Besides, I was twenty-five years old and music had changed. Or maybe I had. I once read somewhere that songs leave the greatest impression on people up until the age of twenty-five, which is why we hold on to the songs from our youth.

When I look back on the songs of my youth, the ones I loved over those thirteen years, I'm sometimes, often, embarrassed for myself. Why I ever thought "Cool It Now" by New Edition was such a great song I'll never know. Same goes for "Bad Boy," a forgotten ditty by the Miami Sound Machine. But good or bad, they all bring back memories. Specific ones. Of snow storms, of school. Of my grandmother's house and how she taught me to garden. Neighbors she had. Cutting the grass. The way things smelled. Television shows. Saturday nights. Sunday dinners. Where people sat. Things that were said. Clothes I wore. Parties. Homework. And visiting my Dad in Chicago. Then Dallas. Then Chicago again.

Lionel Richie’s "Hello,” is, admittedly, sap but will always remind me of spending my seventh-grade Easter break in Chicago, in April of ‘84, alone with my Dad, when he took me to see "Footloose" and bought me a new jacket, a maroon Members Only. And I like that memory. I like them all. 

To begin, this was the first Top Ten List:

May 3, 1983

1. Beat It, Michael Jackson

2. Flashdance, Irene Cara

3. C'mon Eileen, Dexy's Midnight Runners

4. Jukebox, The Flirts

5. One on One, Hall & Oates

6. Little Red Corvette, Prince

7. Der Kommissar, After the Fire

8. She Blinded Me with Science, Thomas Dolby

9. Solitaire, Laura Branigan

10. Shadows of the Night, Pat Benatar