SLADE – COZ I LUV YOU
Since I’m already on a nostalgia kick and feeling older
every damn day it makes sense to be listening to songs from when I was 12 years
old, struggling with burgeoning pubescence and sprouting hairs all over, and I
know it’s hard to believe now but I wasn’t always this cool and back then I
couldn’t get the girls to even look at me, let alone talk to me. Back in 1975, I’d thrown a birthday party for
my 12th birthday, it falling just a week before Christmas and being
the last year of primary school which had finished just a few days before, I invited
all my school friends to celebrate the coming of age and the end of our primary
school years, even asked some girls including ‘Lisa’ *, a girl born on the same
day as me so she was sort of my twin, and I wished my soul mate so it was kind
of to celebrate her birthday too. Or at least that was what I told her as I
blushed and mumbled my way through the party unable to tell her that I actually
“liked” her, not that it was much of a secret anyway, I was pretty shit at
hiding my feelings. As far as preteen, innocent 70s era country town parties go
it was okay even if there was a lot of teasing and joking and as Lisa left, the
car pulling out of our driveway, four of the boys grabbed me, an arm and leg each
and carried me out the front calling for Lisa to come and give me a birthday
kiss. As much as I was struggling and wriggling and calling them names, I was
hoping against hope that the car would stop, that Lisa would leap from the back
seat and in sloooow motion, run to me, declaring her own crush instead of the
usual snigger and sarcastic comment. Of course it didn’t happen, the car kept
going and the boys, tired of the sport, dropped me on my arse in the driveway
and headed back to the food.
I’m pretty
sure I played Slade’s Coz I Luv You at
the party, more than once too, cos those hormones had me held down and
simpering. Still it was a fair song at least.
And anyway, I had other crushes, pop star Suzi Quatro for one, her
poster hanging on the wall above my bed, then there was Heather*, 18 years old
and married to the town’s gun full back Garth*, they were a “power” couple –
young, sporting, beautiful, a country town version of F.Scott and Zelda I
guess, though of course I didn’t know F.Scott from billy the kid back then. For
my birthday they gave me a cassette of Status Quo’s Hello album. “Time to
educate you,” Garth said as he handed it over, “Stop you listening to that
poofter music.” Which was kind of funny
since he had T.Rex on 8-track, the kind of music he considered poofter music. I
knew, I played it and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath every time we were at their place,
which wasn’t nearly enough for my burgeoning hormones. I gave Heather the Janis
Ian single “at Seventeen” for Christmas. She took it gracefully. I didn’t tell
her it cost me all of five cents, hell I just mumbled and blushed and beelined to
the 8-track player to put on T.Rex – Great Hits so they wouldn’t notice I
hadn’t got Garth anything. I’d only just
discovered T.Rex, sure I’d heard some of his songs on radio occasionally but he
was on his way out by 1975, not that it mattered to me. That collection with
all the hits - Telegram Sam, Metal Guru, Children Of The Revolution, Solid Gold
Easy Action, The Groover plus b-sides like Jitterbug Love, Midnight and Shock
Rock– all of them just blowing me away no matter how many times I heard them,
that was the tentative start of my Bolan fixation. Garth wasn’t the only one with T.Rex albums
either. My school mate Dave had a big
brother whose collection was ripe for the raiding and I would go around to
Dave’s when his parents weren’t home and play them on the family stereo. As we got older we were allowed to borrow
them but for now it was Dave’s lounge room and we’d pour over the record sleeve
looking for clues, reading lyrics and looking at the photos while Bolan held
court.
I’d finally got secure, got to the top of the small town
school heap in 1975, after years of stupidity and teasing, fights and shyness,
unable to live up to my own expectations and now I was heading back to the
bottom, high school was looming but summer was still fresh and I still had a
month or so of good times before I had to take the bus ride to the ‘big’ school
in Millicent and I was going to make the most of it. The hormone induced
ballads, the rush of hearing T.Rex, Sweet, Slade, Kiss, the smell of freshly
cut lawn, the sprinklers on the football oval on those stinking hot nights when
even the grasshoppers couldn’t be bothered moving, riding our pushbikes to the
caves, the dump, through the pines and backtracks, lapping the block over and
over, trying to cram everything we could into every day of the holidays, Dad at
home for the Christmas break as he was every year, relaxing, beers at the club,
soft drinks for us kids and then there was the swimming lake, the beach, the
heat and the girls, finally, the girls. I wasn’t completely innocent, just
naïve. There had been the usual ‘doctors
& nurses’ games with the girls but it was usually a stomach ache or leg
strain, teasingly close (though we still weren’t sure what it was close to!)
but never more than that. I lacked the confidence to really talk to the girls
other than goofing off and playing the fool, at least then the girls laughed
with me not at me. There was a weekend
at South End though where the girl didn’t laugh at me, in fact she seemed
genuinely interested in me. It was a
strange feeling, especially after being rejected or was that just plain ignored
by Lisa. We had gone down to the beach
side town because friends were camping there, well caravaning anyway and in
the next van was a girl, Beccy, from Victoria.
She was my age and a little bored I think and I soon found myself
walking along the beach with her hand in hand.
It was like a movie scene, a pristine beach, the sunset and two
teenagers, (okay, nearly teenagers) walking hand in hand on the sand. All it needed was Slade singing Coz I Luv You
over top instead of my nervous chattering.
Beccy had to go home two days later but at least for a couple of days
I’d had my own summer romance, as short and innocent as it had been. It would have to do for now and the rest of
the summer was spent roaming the pines,
building forts, playing records, riding bikes and trying to ignore the fact
that high school was looming. Funny now when I look back and realise that
though I thought there were no girls interested in me, there were a few. It’s just that we were so innocent back then,
so naïve, that the girls I attracted just wanted to hold hands. The romance of comics and books, Archie and
Veronica, there was no way of knowing what the hell to do with each other’s
bodies anyway, or at least we were too scared to do anything about it. So I stumbled through those early years of my
teens with “good” girls (some of who actually weren’t but gave up waiting for
me to realise it!) and naïve hope.
Listening to Slade brings that back, I’m still naïve but now I ain’t so
innocent. Still not sure if that’s a
good thing…
*names changed to
protect these people being seen as being as lame as I am…
Labels: MUSIC, words
