Going to parties as a teenager was fraught with difficulties. There was the whole problem of the opposite sex and getting close to them. We all desired it to happen but none of us knew how to make it happen, leading to inevitable frustration.
The only way I knew how was not to be witty and interesting, no, it was, of course, through records. The more hip the record was, at least in my eyes, the more a girl would be impressed by me. That was how much I knew about such things.
So the important task in the days before the party was to consider at length which record you were going to take for maximum impression. Now I’ve already told you about my hissy fit at having my copy of Traffic’s ‘On The Road’ taken off the turntable in favour of Elvis Costello, I think it was.
After that vague humiliation, I thought the best thing to do was to take just one single. If it was cool enough, that’d surely be all you needed to have girls flocking to you like wasps to jam but it was only 3 or 4 minutes so even if the philistines there didn’t like it, it would soon be over. Question was, which record to take?
I put a lot of work into my choice in the weeks running up to this social gathering and bought secondhand several contenders, eventually deciding on a 1970 release on Harvest by Dave Mason, ‘Only You Know And I Know’ b/w ‘Sad And Deep As You’ which I deemed hip enough to impress but not so obscure as to look nerdy! Yes really! That’s how my mind worked.
I did consider taking the album Alone Together which both tracks were on, but it was a coloured ‘splatter’ vinyl copy and I didn’t want to risk it being ruined as it was and still is quite rare.
I still love those two songs today. I thought I was onto a winner, and it was confirmed for me after getting off with a long term target. It must have been the Dave Mason record. It had to be. Who wouldn’t be wooed by such a record?
Of course, it’ll be no surprise to you to learn it was nothing of the sort. She’d actually been in the garden when I played it (both sides) and hadn’t even heard it. No, I later learned from her friends, the way you do, that she’d had her eye on me for months when she was in the same class for a particular subject.
My whole theory was a bust and it taught me a valuable lesson: not everyone cares about your records, let alone thinks anything at all about Dave bleedin’ Mason. However, when I met Dawn about three years later, my first reflex was to refer to a few obscure records as proof of my desirability! So it never quite left me. Dawn correctly identified this as an attempt to impress, by a shy lad who hid behind records and used them as a defence against the world. Thankfully she saw through me. I was lucky really because without her, I'd probably still be trying to do it today.
