there’s a place for everyone under Heartbeat City’s golden sun

What if you suddenly found yourself with the precious gift of time? What if you had time to rest, to think, to remember? What if you had enough time to physically return to the spaces that filled your young heart and mind with hope and wonder? Where would you go? I am living in this unlikely scenario. For fourteen days, I’ve been walking in the footsteps of my teenage self. Just as I did then, I’ve taken every step with a portable listening device cranked to full volume, filling my consciousness and blocking out the rest of the world. At certain stopping points along these walks, I grab my phone from my pocket to take notes or snap photos of the sentimental objects and spaces that remain from my world of 1984. If someone told me forty years ago that this would be possible, I would have thought them to be insane. A phone that can fit in your back pocket and wirelessly connect to headphones? Wait, say that again…tiny round vessels that fit inside of the ears? And you say this phone is also a stereo, and a camera? Oh really, I can type on it too? Right. Awesome.

This month’s Note celebrates the fortieth anniversary of The Cars’ album, released on March 13, 1984. Heartbeat City is the concept album for the year in my life when I understood with complete certainty that I was no longer a little girl. The adult world seemed a rather restrictive place for women, full of social constructs that limited their access to opportunities. Ready or not, I was going to become a woman, forced to live in a man’s world. This Note is my attempt to capture the magic and madness of being a teenage girl in 1984.

Throughout the decades that have come and gone since then, Heartbeat City has remained a consistent fixture in my listening gallery. Whatever the trending format–cassette in the 1980s, CD in the 1990s, both vinyl and digital since 2000, I treasure my copies and have listened regularly to this album. I have held a long-standing tradition between myself and Heartbeat City since the 1980s, and I’ve shared this annual experience with my daughter since 2020. On the first truly warm day in May, when all signs lead us to believe that summer is really coming back, I drive through the countryside with the windows down and the volume up to listen to every track, from “Hello Again” to “Heartbeat City.” Whether it be the words of Ben Orr or Ric Ocasek, we sing along in unison to every lyric, and never miss a beat or the double-click of the tongue following the line, High shoes with the cleats-a-clickin’.

When my daughter reached adulthood, I was in search of a second vinyl copy because I wanted her to have this iconic and important album in her own collection. A local record store owner/musician/friend asked me why this particular Cars album was so important to me. He told me that he preferred their earlier releases over this one. This conversation really got me thinking, because another respected music industry colleague/friend had asked me the same question years earlier. Just why are these ten songs embedded so deeply in the auditory grooves of my mind? For the past fourteen days, I’ve been listening to Heartbeat City in the grassy space where my bedroom existed from the time I was twelve until I was seventeen. The sun’s heat shines directly on my skin while I sit in the grass to write in the place where my bed stood during the five years when this was our safe and happy home. In the 1980s, that heat was diffused by the scarcely opaque, milky-white priscilla curtains that hung across the sun-filled east window of my bedroom which caused the pink and yellow flowers of my wallpaper to sparkle and glow, creating an enchanted garden scene. This was the quintessential setting for my wistful teenage self to listen, read, write, sleep and dream. Today, I walked from that empty lot to the practice field behind the high school with my forty-year-old baton and twirled it around and threw it in the air and actually caught it far more times than anticipated, while listening to Heartbeat City. So, fasten your seat belts, The Cars and I are about to drive you through my devotion to Heartbeat City. Then I’m gonna do my best to tie it all together in the end...no shackles, just bows…oh, twisted, under, sideways, down.

A few nights ago, a lifelong friend of Mom’s and of mine, asked a small group of friends gathered around a dinner table to recall “the time when everything changed.” Perhaps this was entirely coincidental, but more likely, it was a bit of Disney magic prompting her to ask this question, which I still wholeheartedly believe exists here in Marceline. Unbeknownst to her, or anyone at that table, I was midway through writing this Note about that very time in my life, the summer of 1984.

The Cars first captured my attention when I heard “Just What I Needed” at the roller rink in 1978. I had collected most of their 45s since then, including their first single from Heartbeat City, “You Might Think,” released in March of 1984. The second single was “Magic,” literally and personally. It was released a few weeks later, on May 7, exactly two weeks before I turned fifteen. I was immediately and absolutely spellbound by every element of this track, with its unknowable, yet familiar whirring sound in the intro that grows louder until it implodes into driving new wave drum and guitar licks, and then the synth kicks in! 80s pop was seriously such fantastical fun. A cassette copy of the album was the only thing I wanted for my fifteenth birthday, which I received from my mom on May 21, 1984.

We did not have cable TV by then, but we did have limited exposure to the avant garde media format of music videos, via a one-hour weekly syndicated program called Night Tracks. Although I’d heard his voice for five years, I had not witnessed the visual aspects of Ric Ocasek’s magnetic persona until the music video for “Magic” appeared on Night Tracks. I was utterly and instantly captivated by this remarkably tall and thin man. With his refined style and elegant long limbs outstretched like the plumes of a peacock, he coolly walked on water, across a full swimming pool in the backyard of the Hiltons’ Bel Air home. I was an awestruck fifteen-year-old girl watching music videos with my little brother in rural Missouri, not yet realizing how much my life would soon change. Just four years, two degrees of separation, and 1,764 miles from that moment, I would find myself at a party in that very backyard. That’s right, it’s magic.

Ric Ocasek was one of the most iconic artists of my teenage life. I first wrote about about my love affair with this album in 2019, while processing his death. So, if you’ve been following The Listening Gallery since then, some passages in this Note may seem as if you’ve read them before, because you have. But the version I wrote then was exclusively from the perspective of my innermost thoughts about music and life and love in 1984. I drew inspiration from the journals I wrote as a fifteen-year-old to write that piece when I was fifty. This time, I’ve attempted to look at 1984 and Heartbeat City with new perspective. The experiences of the past five years, a stretch of time that I thought would become the best years of my life, turned me upside down, in the best and the worst ways. These days, I’m looking both inward and outward, and forward and backward.

I believe the timing of the release of this album is what makes it so pivotal in my personal timeline. During the years between 1980 and 1983, I was a clumsy, dreamy, insecure girl. My gangly limbs had grown so rapidly that my joints could not keep up with my bones. I collapsed in the grocery store at age eleven, which resulted in requiring a medical knee brace in order to hold myself upright for the next three years. My mind could not compute the ever-expanding spatial parameter of my body, so much so, that at twelve years old, I hit my head so hard on the door frame while exiting the school bus that I knocked myself out cold. The bus driver had to call my grandma to come and take me to the hospital to be checked for a concussion. On the cusp of summer 1984, I had maintained my height at just a bit over six feet tall for three years. By my fifteenth birthday, I had finally grown accustomed to my frame and comfortable in my skin. Summer, it turns me upside down.

The year after our parents divorce was finalized, Mom bought what we all thought to be the most charming little home in town for her, my little brother and me. Despite living in about a dozen places while growing up, our cozy “Snow White” cottage with its rose red shutters was the one that my brother and I regard as “home.” Next door to us there, my high school journalism teacher lived with her husband and their three children. By 1984, their oldest daughter had become one of my closest friends. This week, with Heartbeat City pulsing at full volume through my earbuds, streaming through the caverns of my memory, I walked from that space that was once my bedroom to the place where the music room of our high school once stood. This was the path that my friend and I took to marching band practice in the early morning hours before the heat set in, during the summers of 1983, 1984, and 1985. My friend was a talented visual artist who could draw and paint well. She also loved to dance and to choreograph routines. I’d been a shy and starry-eyed dreamer who wrote scripts for musicals that I thought I’d one day take to Broadway, choreographed a dance routine for practically every 45 in my collection and spent entire weekends meticulously attempting perfect segues on blank Certron cassettes in an attempt to teach myself the skills of a DJ. A dreamer who’s only just begun. I mostly kept these passions to myself after sharing my love of Broadway in my kindergarten class where I learned that my interests were not cool. The cool kids in elementary school wanted to kiss photos of Andy Gibb and Shaun Cassidy in Teen Beat while listening to records, rather than choreographing dance routines.

I wish I had told my friend that her creativity had given me confidence in my own creative abilities. I wish she knew that our friendship had encouraged me to pursue a creative life and career path. Not only is she no longer in this town, she is no longer in this world. More than likely, I would never have seen her again even if she’d lived another forty years. We had not seen each other in nearly forty years. Like so many childhood friendships, we had drifted apart while we were busy living our adult lives. She passed away last October, a few hours before she turned 54. I thought about her that day. I wished I had her phone number. The day after her birthday, her brother, who still keeps in touch with my brother, called and asked him to let me know she was gone. Staring at the green door, living in the sky. You don’t wanna know it, you just wanna fly.

A few days ago, I parked in the lot at the public pool and queued up “Stranger Eyes“ on my car stereo at full volume and closed my eyes. Instantly, my heart and mind became flooded with every detail from the last day of summer, 1984. My wet hair and slightly damp swimsuit release an olfactory elixir of chlorine with Coppertone suntan oil from underneath my gray fleece mini-skirt and pink polo shirt with the collar flipped up, of course, (it was 1984). My laceless Keds squeak on the wet concrete as I exit the women’s locker room to begin my walk home. There he is, The Boy, leaning against a bench near the entrance. He is suntanned, so handsome, and even from a distance, I can see that he is even taller than me. The Boy is smiling at me with his whole face as he calls out my name. He has the most perfect teeth I have ever seen and his eyes are concealed behind black Ray Bans which add to the intriguing allure. I struggle to breathe as I gaze at the face of this beautiful stranger. Suddenly, I understand what Dolly Parton was talking about in that song from a decade earlier. “Your heart feels strange inside, it flutters like soft wings in flight.”

Meeting someone for the first time in my tiny midwestern rural town was not an everyday occurrence then, nor is it now. I managed to find the words to ask how he knew my name. The Boy confessed, “I asked around.” He told me that he had just moved to town, and that both of his parents had grown up here. Then, I swear to you, this is the absolute truth, he asked “Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” This was it, the moment!!!! A handsome stranger had arrived from some unknown, faraway place, and spoken to me in my love language of lyrics! I could not take a ride from a stranger, not even this breathtakingly handsome one. The pool manager had just locked up for the season and was standing next to her vehicle, listening to our conversation. She said she knew his dad and encouraged me to accept his offer. Reluctantly, I did. Danger? Stranger eyes.

The Boy opened the passenger door of his 60s-era red Chevy pickup for me. When he hopped in from the driver’s side and turned the key, the stereo blasted a song I’d never heard by a band I’d never heard of, “Roxanne” by the Police. The cassette case on the seat revealed the album’s title, Outlandos d’Amour. How appropriate for my first liaison d’amour. I was anxious and awkward and awestruck, but he seemed not to notice. The Boy slid the pair of black Ray Bans up into his sun-bleached hair as we exited the swimming pool parking lot and headed southward, the opposite direction of town, and of my home. I was slightly thrilled, but mostly terrified that perhaps he was taking me to ‘park’. This was the most commonly occurring activity for rural high school students in the 1980s. A boy would pick up a girl in his pickup, drive out to a shady place on a gravel road, park the car, and the two made out for hours. I’d never been on a date, never ridden in a boy’s pickup, and certainly had not kissed a boy.

He reached across the seat and gently touched my knee and nodded. As his eyes smiled warmly, a whole swarm of butterflies took flight in my chest. Then he removed his hand from my knee and patted the seat near him. I slid over so that he could put his arm across my shoulders. Throughout our country drive, no words were exchanged. At the stop sign where gravel meets pavement, at the precipice back into town, he removed his arm from around my shoulders to turn down the volume. He asked me where I lived. After I told him, he nodded and turned up the volume again, returning his arm to my shoulders. I was relieved there had been no attempt at parking. Everyone knew everyone in this tiny town. As he drove down Main Street and passed people on the sidewalks and in their cars, I felt a little ashamed and a little excited that this must appear rather shocking, seeing me in a stranger’s pickup, with a loud stereo playing this exotic European music. This was a version of me no one had ever seen, because it was a version of myself that I did not know could exist. The Boy stopped in front of my home and said, “See you tomorrow.” He leaned toward me and touched my knee again. I was certain I’d met a boy who knew my unspoken musical language of love. I need to feel your touch, it means so much.

That night, I listened to Heartbeat City on my boombox while imagining my future with the most handsome boy I had ever seen in real life. I had to get a copy of Outlandos d’Amour immediately, so that I could learn, analyze, and discuss every lyric with him. For him, I wanted to be an equally informed fan of the artists he admired. This was not the kind of album one could acquire locally. This required cutting a Columbia House membership form from one of my Seventeen magazines. That night, I ordered that album along with all of the other albums by The Police, plus eight other cassettes. Twelve cassettes for only a penny, plus shipping and handling!

That night in my bedroom mirror, I rehearsed my delivery of the lyrical line, “Hello again,” to be followed with a breathless hush when we would pass in the hallway the next day. I would return the thrill of intrigue he’d given to me while I was riding in his car. You took the fall and then you floated down. You took the jump and you fell through clouds. I made a bright 80s pink lipstick mark on the back of my bedroom door that night so that I could practice the perfect lean-in for my first kiss, which I was certain would be soon. Oh candy smile.

The next morning, while preparing for the first day of my sophomore year, the butterflies returned not only in my chest, I felt that fluttering sensation from head to toe. As I buttoned my brand new Esprit block print blouse, I realized it was cropped just enough that when I would raise my hand in class, the tiniest bit of midriff skin might be visible. This felt equally thrilling and scandalous. I wore my chunky pink and purple bracelets and green triangle earrings, all perfectly matched to the blocks in my blouse. My new Guess? white denim mini-skirt and my brand new bright white Keds enhanced the appearance of my Coppertone suntanned legs. My hair was pulled back in a neon pink bandana, rolled and tied like a headband. My lashes were coated deep black and my lips were painted bright pink…eyes like mica, a lethal pout, hinting. The last day of summer had been pure magic. It had changed the way I felt about my body. I no longer believed that my height made me “stick out like a sore thumb.” A phrase I had overheard a friend’s mother use to describe me when I was in kindergarten. To complete my thoroughly chic and modern look, I chopped just a few strands of bangs so that they would hang down just below my eyebrows, my attempt at replicating Paulina Porizkova’s look on the cover of the 1984 September Issue of Vogue.

We finally passed each other in the hall after fifth period. The Boy delivered his best Billy Crystal, “You look mah-velous, Tracy Lane.” As our eyes locked, I forgot my line and my look, everything I’d rehearsed the night before was gone. Instead, what came out of my mouth was “Thanks. You look nice, too.” My heart sank. After school, the other Twirling Tigerettes and I were on one end of the practice field working on our routines, while the football team practiced maneuvers on the other end. There he was, The Boy was just fifty yards away! After football practice ended, my friends and I were sitting on the bleachers. They told me he was walking toward me. They told me to be cool and they quickly departed. I had no clue how to be cool.

He asked if he could drive me home. I said “Yes.” When we arrived in front of my house, he asked if I had a date for the Homecoming dance. I said, “No.” I tried to think of something cool to follow. I tried to think of a way to work a lyric into the conversation. I had nothing. He shut off the engine, got out of his pickup and walked me to the front step. I didn’t want to be presumptuous and assume that asking if I had a date was an invitation to be his date. I was so afraid of ruining this moment. The butterflies were soaring and diving and swooping through me, I could barely breathe, much less converse, or even think of a single word to say. The boy leaned in and kissed me gently on the cheek. HEARTBEAT CITY!!!!! I felt a connection that made my heart beat as if it would burst wide open, and flowers would bloom, and butterflies would come flying out of my chest, right there on the front step.

When I told my friends what had transpired that evening, they asked why I hadn’t said yes and why I hadn’t invited him in. I explained that I wasn’t sure if he had asked me about Homecoming or to Homecoming. They explained that of course he was asking me to Homecoming, and that I blew it. In just twenty-four hours, I believed that my first foray into romance had ended. When I saw him in the halls at school, he no longer smiled at me with his whole face or called out my name. The music video for the single, “Drive” was released in October, and I felt as if I were watching myself on screen as Paulina moved through the emotional whirlwind of the upward escalade and the downward cascade of young love. She was only four years older than me, and already a career icon for me, before this video. Afterward, I felt as if she would have been the perfect friend and confidante to help me understand what I was experiencing. I didn’t know then, that she was actually in love with Ric Ocasek. They would go on to be married for nearly forty years, until his death. While reading her autobiography last year, I learned that the final years of their marriage had been quite like the tragic scenes of “Drive” come to life.

The Boy went to Homecoming and everywhere else thereafter, with someone else. I remember the pain of a thousand tiny daggers through my heart as I looked out into the audience during our twirling performance in the Homecoming pep rally. The Boy sat in the first row of bleachers with her legs draped over his lap. She shot at me with those love darts in her eyes every time she saw me. Somehow, she knew. I maintained a silent sadness for the rest of the school year, never revealing to anyone that I just could not heal the wound The Boy had inflicted in my chest on my front step after the first day of school. When the month of May came around again, I turned 16 and began working at a little gift and flower shop with the lyrical name of “Our Favorite Things.” The Boy graduated and departed from this little town as abruptly as he had arrived.

When the midsummer sun begins to cast beams of light that stretch long into the late evening hours, just as the heat begins to break, you can feel a little flicker of magic in the air, if you believe in it, are open to receive it. One such evening in the summer of 1987, just about closing time, The Boy walked into the shop and smiled at me with his whole handsome face. He asked if he could drive me home. I asked how he found me and he confessed that he’d asked around, because he’d heard that I was leaving town. “Yes and Yes.” I accepted his offer to drive me home right away this time, and confirmed that I was moving to Los Angeles at the end of the summer. We headed northward, through town and past the turnoff to my street. He drove us to a shady space on a gravel road and we parked. We watched the stars pop out of a deep blue sky and we talked about music. We held hands as we kissed, so gently, so sweetly. Somewhere, sometime, when you’re curious, I’ll be back around.

My lyrical notes have always been written from my perspective. I’m the narrator of every story in every song I have ever chosen to write about. I want to explore the interpretation of lyrics from the perspective of someone else, perhaps even from the perspective of my outer actions, rather than always from my innermost thoughts. I think I can learn a great deal about how my mind works, by trying to challenge it in a new way. But, It’s late and a storm is moving in, and I have committed myself to publishing this Note on this date, so tonight is not the night to spend on that process. This remembering of people and places from my earliest years of life that are gone forever, has resulted in many pensive days of wondering why I’ve spent so much time working. What did I achieve during all that time at work? I wish I had written more. I wish I’d made more time for visiting with some of the people I loved, while there was still time–for them. Now that I am faced with more time than I can fill, I find myself in an endless search to ensure that the next thing I do will be something that will matter, in the time that I have left–for me.

I’ve chosen a room in every home I’ve resided in to be a place of solace, a listening gallery where I can intently listen and learn every lyric of every song I’ve ever loved, just as I did in my sun-filled bedroom back in 1984, and the bedroom before that, and the bedroom before that. I’ve continued to write my interpretations of my favorite musicians’ words into notebooks. For a time, I named this collection my Notes on Notes, later it became Notes from the Note Girl. In the home where I lived longest, the home where I lived with my daughter from the time she was four until she was twenty-four, our sundrenched cozy little living room became known as the listening gallery. These days, the listening gallery and I have taken up temporary quarters in the apartment above the shop where I worked in high school. It seems highly unlikely that this is coincidental. I believe magic’s got a hold on me, here in Heartbeat City, where all you need is what you’ve got.