A kiss for luck on New Years (Jan. 1, 1977)

January 1, 1977

I don’t even know why I went last night. Maybe I just missed the band and wanted to see the players again after more than a year apart.

Half my social life involved the band and without it, I didn’t have one.

The two sisters intrigued me: Chris and Linda. They talked like truck drivers and were instructing a young girl on how to satisfy a man.

They were near enough one of the microphones for me to hear the whole thing through the headphones I had put on.

This was New Year’s Eve in the basement of one of their houses – I don’t know whose – and the place was full of instruments and gear—some of which I remembered from the previous band in which they had Jack as lead singer instead of Jimmy, and practice in Joe’s hall on 8th Street in Passaic, a few doors down where Jimmy and Garrick.

The two guitarists, both named John, had invited Jimmy to come check out the stuff, and the new bigger and better band they had put together. Their lead singer was ten years younger than the rest of us, filled with the punk adrenalin we all lost when we finished with puberty.

Both Johns kept telling Jimmy that they wanted a more seasoned singer for some of the songs. The kid was all right for some of the punk stuff but didn’t understand the older variety of classic rock the way Jimmy did.

I was listening to this in one side of the headphones, and the dirty talk Linda and Chris were giving the younger girl in the other.

Chris was dressed in a silver pants suit and looked like someone out of a David Bowie song about spiders from Mars.

Rich Gordy was no longer with the band. They had a tall dude named Bob – Chris’ boyfriend on bass. Eddy Banks was also gone, replaced by a guy named Jack. But the core of the band was still the two Johns, who hoped to lure Jimmy into climbing on board as well, sharing the load of singing, playing a little bass on the punk songs, and acoustic guitar on some others, while just singing the way he used to in an earlier version of the band.

Everybody was getting high. Someone was always passing Jimmy a joint and with each toke he seemed to like the idea better, especially when they started to jam, and let him sing some of the old songs again.

I liked hearing them, too, and seeing Jimmy back behind the microphone. It made me think 1977 might be a good year after all.

I had moved back to Montclair from Passaic and was lonely and wished I could go to see the band on weekends again.

Then, came midnight, and everybody cheered, and some woman I didn’t know, a friend of a friend, pulled me aside, kissed me hard so that I shook, head to toe, then vanished again as if in a haze of pot smoke when I wanted more.

A bit of a tease, but perhaps a foreshadowing of something to come.

Even Jimmy looked pleased, high as hell, and not just on pot smoke, his voice filling the room as the band played, old songs from the good old days, suggesting the days would be good again.