1978: Blue Oyster Cult. Some Enchanted Evening.

The 1970s created the live album. For whatever reason, hearing a band’s unpolished performance, bad taping, and angry response to drunk audiences made for more sales. Love You Live. Europe ‘72. Live at Budokan. Live put the classic in classic rock. And so did death. Some Enchanted Evening’s cover repeats the trope of death found on so many other ’70s bands albums. Black Sabbath. Meat Loaf. All had some element of death on the cover of at least one disc.

My favorite reference to Blue Oyster Cult is in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “Do you have any Blue Oyster Cult tickets,” the kid asks ticket scalper Damon. “No Cult. I ate twenty four pairs of Blue Oyster Cult tickets last time around. I was this close to working at 7-11.” Fast Times, like other high school comedies, is the tale of the under-achiever. The under-achiever is the perfect consumer of ’70s rock (slackers, heads, burnouts). I never owned Some Enchanted Evening. But I was crazy for one of its hits, Godzilla.

Oh No!

There goes Toyko

Go go Godzilla

Monsters. Death. Japan. The theme of the ’70s. Early morning television often featured either an Abbott and Costello movie or a Japanese monster movie where turtles and dragons battled it out over the streets of a screaming Tokyo. Somewhere, in an unidentifiable future, toys or backyard pets had grown to enormous stature and breathed fire. Japan was already a threat in the American eye. Japanese technology signified our impending doom. While the Walkman was introduced into the American market in 1979, the technology for a portable stereo player was patented in America in 1978.

History shows again and again

How nature points up the folly of men

All technology is introduced as folly. The first generation VHS players shocked the entertainment industry in 1978. Jack Valenti’s rants against the VCR appear silly now that video sales and rentals prop up the inflated movie business. What is new media if not folly? Predictions of promise. Predictions of doom. Each new media event heralds sudden literacy or the end of literacy. And what better way to express that folly than Some Enchanted Evening’s repeat performance of Blue Oyster Cult’s best known song, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”?

40,000 men and women everyday… Like Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men and women everyday… Redefine happiness
Another 40,000 coming everyday…We can be like they are

Death. Literacy. These are the topics of 1970s literary criticism. The death of the author. One could merge the ’70s technological revolution with its counterpart in literary criticism and find a subtle Blue Oyster Cult theme lurking.

I see that theme in my 1977-1978 Stanford Achievement Tests results. The Achievement Tests (do they still do these?) were meant to track students’ progress through the school system and predict student ability to succeed at various levels. What strikes me about these results are the scores for Reading (82 percentile) and Math Computation (96 percentile). For someone who can barely add and who chose a career in English, the foundation of literacy studies, I find the results striking. The mixed results prompt the often repeated analogy: standardized testing is the death of the student. That death, of course, is metaphorical for it stresses the folly of “men” who spend their pedagogical time assessing and assessing and assessing and still cannot produce adequate measurements of prediction. Yet, here is the bigger folly: math is the basis of technology. 1s and 0s. Computations. The age of new media, one would think, should be the age of math. For people like me, however, the opposite has occurred. The age of new media is the age of literacy. Death of the math author, maybe?