“That a major TV network in 1975 can pump such idiocy into millions of American homes, without recognizing the subliminal danger of numbing viewers to the possible consequences, is astonishing. Deplorable too.”
NBC will drop the NHL three months later. The sport won’t return to network television for seventeen years. What Met Center hosted on January 4 was both a birthday and a funeral.
Met Center is Bloomington’s id. South Brook may sometimes feel like Walnut Mound, where nothing ever happens, but the city has also zoned 130,000 square feet of its eastern edge as a place where everything happens. Two weeks after Tom’s birthday—two Saturday nights later—Led Zeppelin opens its North American tour at Met Center in front of 18,600 pot-smoking, Schmidt-drinking, Satan-worshipping Minnesotans rocking red-tag Levi’s, Nike Cortezes, untamed hair, and incipient mustaches. Jim has just turned fourteen and could be any kid on the news filing into Met Center while flashing peace signs or middle fingers at the local news crews. Except he’s already bigger and looks more menacing. But he isn’t there. He channels all his head-banging these days into hockey.
From a filthy paperback copy of The Guinness Book of World Records in the Nativity library, I know that Led Zeppelin is the world’s loudest rock-and-roll band, or at least was: The Guinness Book at Nativity is perpetually three years out of date. But the 130 decibels the band produces, Guinness claims, are the equivalent of a DC-10 buzzing our house.
Led Zeppelin has chosen my hometown, in a building so close I can ride my bike to it, to play live for the first time in eighteen months. It’s here that Zeppelin debuts a new song called “Kashmir,” with its apocalyptic guitars leaking through arena walls and reverberating off Airport Bowl and the Ground Round and the Thunderbird Motel, still flogging its Indian theme in newspaper display ads:
BIG CHIEF THUNDERBIRD SAY SQUAW NO SQUAWK WHEN YOU TAKE HER TO THE TOTEM POLE FOR DINING AND DANCING. SO MAKE IT A DATE FOR BIG HEAP EVENING. THE THUNDERBIRD MOTEL. NEXT TO MET STADIUM AND SPORTS CENTER.
The rock critic for the Minneapolis Tribune, still in the throes of tinnitus, writes that Zeppelin produced “the sound of a dozen jackhammers digging at your cranium” at Met Center, cementing our reputation as the foremost place in the Midwest to induce head trauma.
It’s here that the graduation ceremonies for all three Bloomington high schools are held. We’ll all be delivered into the world from a Met Center stage, just like “Kashmir,” though Tom has matriculated already inside this arena, aged ten, while I sat at home with Mom, watching Carol Burnett and wondering when life will begin.
Soon “Kashmir” is all over the radio, the school-bus driver blasting it each morning from a single-speaker radio that hangs from its handle on the little metal crank that opens and closes the doors. I gaze out the frosted window as Robert Plant wails, “They talk of days for which they sit and wait, and all will be revealed.” And so I sit and wait, wondering very much the same.
It turns out that I sit at the center of the universe. On the first Saturday night of 1975, Henry Boucha and Dave Forbes necessitated a national referendum on violence here. On the third Saturday night of 1975, Zeppelin debuted “Kashmir” here. And on the Saturday night in between, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the Vikings win Super Bowl IX. Lou Grant bet two thousand dollars on the Steelers and is distraught when they lose, but I am elated—incautiously optimistic.
“If the Pittsburgh Steelers win the actual Super Bowl tomorrow,” Mary Tyler Moore says over the closing credits of the show, “we want to apologize to the Pittsburgh team and their fans for this purely fictional story. If, on the other hand, they lose, remember: you heard it here first.”
Of course the Steelers will lose. In Television City, they already have. Mary knows it’s the Vikings’ turn, Lou knows it, Father Zheel-bair knows it but asks us to pray for the Vikings at 10:30 Mass anyway, just to be safe. Giving the world “Kashmir” and the Super Bowl champions on consecutive weekends will cement Bloomington’s stature as the world’s greatest city, I’m sure of it. Carthage, Constantinople, Babylon, Bloomington: bellwethers of a time and place.
The Rushins are seven of the fifty-six million Americans watching Super Bowl IX on NBC. I make a sign to hold in front of the Zenith. Long after I’ve stopped watching Miss Betty watching me on Romper Room, I still suspect that TV is an abyss that is also staring back into me.
I’ve recently discovered that “alliteration” is the word for the pleasing repetition familiar to me from a thousand broadcast phrases: “Thufferin’ thuccotash” and “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” and “Libby’s, Libby’s, Libby’s on the label, label, label” and “Fruit Float, Fruit Float, Fruit Float.”
And so I drew bubble letters last night on the graph paper that Dad rations me from his briefcase and—tongue peeking from the corner of my mouth—I colored each one purple, Magic-Markering the headline: PURPLE PEOPLE-EATERS STOMP STEELERS, VIKES VICTORIOUS!
While the final score of 16–6 is also alliterative, the Vikings aren’t Victorious, Bloomington isn’t Babylon, and at the end of the game—as I imagine Howard Cosell describing the action in our house—“Stevie stomps upstairs, stunned.” The Vikings have now lost three Super Bowls in the 1970s, a streak that began six months after I arrived in Minnesota and unaccountably invested my hopes and dreams in these imperfect men.
Fortunately, material goods have yet to let me down the way my team has. Levi’s cords are available at a store called The County Seat, whose jingle—“Just direct your feet to The County Seat”—I’m pointedly singing to Mom at the dinner table.
“No singing at the dinner table,” Dad says. And so singing at the table joins running with scissors, jumping on the bed, and swimming immediately after eating on the long list of benign activities mysteriously prohibited by most parents.
Mom sighs. “Why should I buy you Levi’s?”
“Because you bought them for Jim,” Tom says. “And they’re the best.”
“Yeah,” I say. “They’re the best.”
“How do you know they’re ‘the best’?” asks Dad, putting the last two words in air quotes without ever lifting his hands.
“They just are,” Tom says.
“Yeah,” I say. “They just are.”
“You only care about the tag,” Mom says. “If there wasn’t a little white tag that said ‘Levi’s’ on the back right pocket, you wouldn’t know if your cords were from The County Seat or Sears.”
“It’s all marketing,” says Dad, who has added marketing—whatever that means—to his purview at Mickey Mining. “Ever heard of the three Ps of marketing?”
It’s unlikely that any of us has, considering that we’re five children ranging in age from three to fourteen, but we roll with it.
“I’ve heard of three peas in a pod,” Tom says.
“It’s two peas in a pod,” I say.