If you're over, say, 36 years old, you
probably remember this tune. I was fourteen the year it came out (1978), and I used
to hear it when I was adhering my dumpy, not-yet-fully developed body to plastic lawn
chairs in my folks' back yard on Saturday afternoons, attempting to appear somewhat less
waxy and gelatinous, reading Harlan Ellison and listening to WKRC (probably the last year
I did so, because after this I quit listening to AM altogether), back before we
knew the intimate details of the hole in
the ozone layer, which made sunbathing tantamount to suicide.
I'll be honest. I had no idea this was a 10cc song for many, many years. It
just was one of those songs -- and there are a few -- that I just didn't really like at all,
the first time I heard it. Or the second, or probably the third or fourth. By
the fifth time, I think it had managed to attach to me like lichen, however, and I mostly
recall the song fondly.
I suppose it's really weird that I remember knowing Things We Do For Love was 10cc, but
never catching on until well into the '80s that Dreadlock Holiday was, as well.
Not that I cared -- I was never a huge fan of 10cc, though it has nothing to do with
artistry and everything to do with the fact that by the time some people in the U.S. were
getting hip to 10cc, I already had started listening to FM, and immediately thereafter discovered Cheap
Trick, the Police and Talking Heads. All of whom were, in their own ways, reductionists. Overproduced,
slick, Cali-sounding Brit pop was so over for me by 1979.
But Dreadlock Holiday is one of those tunes that makes me think of bacon. No, wait
-- it makes me think of sunbathing when I was fourteen.
(And the difference would be ...?)