Deirdre White on Bands That Start with B

People don’t believe me when I tell them that the Bay City Rollers were my first rock concert. It was 1977,  I was still a kid, but my older sister, well, let’s just say what happened to music at the end of the 70s happened to us. You either went punk or you went disco. And I frickin’ loved the Bee Gees. So that was that. 


But back to the Bay City Rollers, I was 12, so be nice. Woody, Eric, Ian, and Les. Those little faux glam rockers. They were dreamy. My sister and her friends and I had tickets! We waited outside The Tower theater in Philadelphia in a line that curved all the way around the block. We waited for what seemed like forever, waving our tartan hysterically while some boys in a Mustang circled around and around the block shouting at us from their car window as they sped by,  “Bay City Rollers suck! Zeppelin Rules!”  We were unfazed. When you are a Bay City Roller girl, you are in a secret world where no one can hurt you.  Two years later, I came to see how they had a point. 


But back to Disco. There wasn’t much time to decide: It all seemed to happen at once, “Saturday Night Fever” came out, I turned 13, my older sister and her friends became punk rockers. So that was that. I got the boogie fever, and my sister stopped inviting me to hang out with her and her friends.


The depiction of working class Italian American catholic men in Brooklyn in “Saturday Night Fever" was utterly exotic to me. They wore satin shirts with wide lapels! They stared at themselves in the mirror! That year I spent Easter Sunday in Brooklyn with an Italian American friend from school, and I waited outside the packed church watching everyone cram in the doorway waiting to take communion, then saunter out. Last night was Saturday Night!  It felt like I had just stepped into the movie. It was a world I didn’t understand at the time, not having lived on the East Coast for very long.

 
“Do ya think you could stand being friends with a girl, Tony?” Tony Manero’s dancing partner asks him sarcastically. That line always stayed with me. It’s with me still.

The Bay City Rollers marks the end of my childhood, maybe the end of innocence for me. Maybe my first rock concert was the last time I was able to use my girl power, right before I disappeared into the undertow of Tony Maneros.

Disco was just a minute really, but the Bee Gees’ songs are with me now forever; they’re part of my DNA. And that’s not my fault, it’s the Bee Gees’ fault. So I’m disco.  Maybe it was just a flicker in a lifetime, when we danced without drugs because the music was that good.

By 1979 I was stoned and listening to Pink Floyd, The Who and, okay, yes… Zeppelin. Those boys were right. But I never became a punk rocker and my sister and me, we were never really friends again, not like before.

| Deirdre White is a painter and San Francisco native who spent her formative years in Philadelphia. She teaches drawing and painting at CCSF and at UC Davis, and is married to the singer/songwriter/guitar player Tom Heyman.