Teen Dreams of an AOR Age

Not really a dream at all, but Scenes from an Italian Restaurant came on Spotify this morning, which for some reason bounced a memory out of the vaults from when I was a teen.

Remembered back to a time visiting my cousins in Florida – they were living in a house by a canal, where I would also gain a lifelong scar during the same trip (story for a different day). My older brother and the oldest of my cousins were about the same age – and were in the midst of teenager-dom (16ish? I think). My cousin was considered a bit of a “bad boy” by the family – for reasons I, as an early teen, didn’t understand – and later as an adult found were of course unfounded.

Older brother and older cousin were in older cousin’s room, listening to albums – as teenagers did, back then. Only The Good Die Young was playing, at a volume that my brother and I probably would never have played music in our house (although my brother at this point was falling deep into a Jethro Tull phase, which could be loud – but he preferred the quirky kinds of Tull like Thick as a Brick vs. the loud Tull like Aqualung).

I entered into the room boldly – a primary sin. I was only a couple years younger than my brother and and the cousin – so I naively considered myself the same demographic of teenager they were – which I clearly was NOT.

Brother and cousin were bouncing their heads up and down to the song, maybe there was a bit of air guitar, older cousin was singing along. On entering the room (unbidden, oops) I started singing along to the chorus “only the good die young, yeah yeah yeah” enthusiastically (the song was BIG then and all over the radio, so I knew it).

Both brother and cousin immediately stopped what they were doing, and stared daggers at me. One of them (don’t know which) said “You have no idea what that means!” and stopped me mid-sing. I spun on my heels and left the room, filled with early-teen shame at being excluded from a group that I assumed I was part of.

To be clear, I probably did NOT fully understand all the nuance and meaning tied up in what was (by then) kind of a cliche′ – “only the good die young”. There were all kinds of James Dean – Jimi Hendrix – Jim Morrison – Janis Joplin stories you could associate it with (but did it apply to those people because they were good people, or because they were good at what they did?).  I’m sure those associations “meant things” that maybe as an early-teen I didn’t grasp. Did other “good people” good people always die young?

One of the things I had forgotten about that particular song – because it was the 70’s, there was some measure of moral outrage because the song was about hoped-for pre-marital sex with a Catholic school girl that the protagonist had a crush on. This makes sense when looking back at the perception of my cousin as a “bad boy” and his and my brother’s reaction that showed that only people who were their age could understand what the song was talking about. Makes more sense now 😂.

In any case, it was one of those early-teen embarrassing moments that (I guess) was so formative, I still remember it. It amazes me how as we get older, we remember only very specific scenes from our youth, and it is left to us to unwind why they were meaningful enough to get stuck in our memory. I don’t hold anything against my cousin or brother because of this episode – they both grew up into perfectly fine people, and they were just acting their part as teenagers interacting with a younger sibling/cousin.

And yet, there that memory lies in my brain – waiting for a random Billy Joel song to trigger it.

1. “AOR” is short for “album-oriented rock“, which was a popular radio format during my teens – it’s pretty much the music you would find now on the “Classic Vinyl” channel on Sirius XM. WPLJ in New York City and WRIF in Detroit were leading stations in establishing that format.
2. The phrase “only the good die young” apparently has its roots in the writings of Herodotus from 455 BC, who wrote “Whom the gods love dies first” and also traced through William Wordsworth – who knew? 
3. Thick as a Brick was a full-album single song, that was made to be a parody of concept albums. It really is a fun listen.
4. Both Scenes from an Italian Restaurant and Only the Good Die Young are from Billy Joel’s album “The Stranger”, which was a mega-big album back when I was young, and gives a pretty great view of Billy Joel music at it’s heyday (before the horrors of We Didn’t Start the Fire and Uptown Girl.)