Leo Sayer and the Saviors of Rock & Roll

a coming of age moment in a long island mall

[an old story that has been published elsewhere, making its debut here as a promise to the new subscribers who signed up today]

The year is 1978. I’m in high school, beginning of junior year. There’s me and three guys and we are best of friends. We go nowhere without each other, we make no convoluted plots to take over the world without all of us present. We move like stealth bombers in the night, all army jackets and worn out jeans and Genesis t-shirts. We are the cutting edge of a white-bred suburb, which really isn’t saying much, but we think we are the coolest people on the face of the earth. We listen to prog rock and punk rock and never pop rock or disco or, god forbid, Journey. We think guitar solos are passé but drum solos rock the house. We think Peter Gabriel is a genius and bands like Kansas need to be silenced. We secretly listen to Van Halen but no one tells the other until years later, when we laugh about David Lee Roth from the safe distance of many years.

We don’t hang out at the mall like the other kids. No, we hang out in Kenny’s room with the black lights and Emerson Lake & Palmer posters, or we hang out in Paul’s garage with the drum set and the Ramones “Road to Ruin” playing over and over. Every once in a while though, we are drawn to the mall, because Record World owns us. It is the only reason to get on public transportation. It is the only reason to beg someone’s older brother for a ride; to buy records and look through the stacks of vinyl and pray that you will find some obscure punk rock album in the cut out bin for 99 cents, but all you can find is Heart and Blue Oyster Cult and a 45 of Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” that you play 50 times in the next three days.

One of those weekends arrives when there’s nothing to do because Kenny’s mom won’t let us hang out in the house and Paul’s mother is having a garage sale so we can’t hang out there. We decide to hop the bus and go to the mall, where we will pool our money together to buy an album, and have enough left over to ask Kenny’s brother to buy us quarts of beer when we get home.

Perfect day.

We get to the mall and the first thing we notice is there’s more security guards than usual. This is suburbia. There’s not much trouble at the mall. We figure there’s some kind of protest going on. So we make our way through the mall, wanting to just get to the record store and get the hell out of there without encountering any cheerleaders or football players or giddy junior high girls that always try to flirt with Tommy. We are about two feet from the record store when we are stopped by a short, fat security guard and a velvet rope going across the length of the mall.

“You cannot get through this way. You must go around the other entrance to the mall and wait on line.” The guard stands with his hand in his pocket, as if he is believing his own lie that he’s a real cop and there’s a gun hidden away there.

“Wait for what?” I ask him. “What’s the line for?”

He rolls his eyes at me.

“The show. The concert.” I can almost here the “Duh!” coming out of his mouth.

We look beyond the velvet ropes, past the throng of middle aged women and giggling teenagers forming what looked like a huge conga line. There’s an amplifier set up on each corner of the square the ropes have formed. There’s a makeshift stage in the middle, really just a few planks of wood.

A concert. A show.

“So, who’s playing?” Kenny asks the guard.

He rolls his eyes again.

“Leo Sayer!” He says this with pride and arrogance. As if we should have known that the whitest artist to ever grace pop music was playing in our very mall today.

“Leo Sayer,” I say.

“Leo Sayer,” The other three say.

We look at each other in the way that only friends who have performed sinister acts of rebellion together in the past can do. The look. The glance. The unspoken words that pass between us. The guard senses something going on. He looks us up and down, sees the clothes and the hair and the patches on the jackets and you can just about watch the light bulb go on over his head.

“Hey! You’re not here to see Leo!”

“Duh,” I say. “We’re here to buy some records. Can we go in?”

“No. Come back tonight. And don’t make any trouble. I know your kind.”

“Sure,” Tommy says. Sure. We’ll be on our way now. You take care, ok?” His words were the equivalent of patting the guy on the head.

We walk around the other side of the mall. We stake the place out, eyeing the set up of the amps and the positioning of the security guards. We synchronize our watches and hatch our plan and wait. We are patient.

Fifteen minutes until Leo Sayer bounces on to the stage, white boy afro and squeaky voice, ready to rock the world with “You Make me Feel Like Dancing.”

We must do this. In the name of good music. In the name of Peter Gabriel and Joey Ramone.

Five minutes til Leo.

Finally, we hear a squeal rise out from the crowd. The sound of 200 or more tone-deaf women swooning at the site of a guy who looks like the poster child for geeks. We assume our positions. We wish each other luck in our mission. It is time.

Leo is escorted onto the makeshift stage by his manager and two mall security guards. The women swoon. The music cues (this is the 70’s, he’s going to lip sync) and we run in four opposite directions. Within thirty seconds we have done it. We have unplugged Leo’s speakers. The music stops. Leo is just about to “sing” the first words into the mic and everything goes dead. He’s mouthing words to dead air. Silence.

The security guard who spoke to us earlier spies me as I am walking away from the northeast amp. “IT’S THEM!” he shouts, pointing in my direction, and then swinging around to see Kenny running the other way. He points at him, at me, yelling at the other security guards, his face red and sweaty and alarmed. I’m having fits of laughter while I’m running, thinking that the guard is acting as if we just killed the president. I keep thinking about book depositories and grassy knolls and this too fat mall cop running after me because some disco pop boy had his amp unplugged.

The four of us meet outside at the bus shelter and we decide it’s too risky to wait another ten minutes for the bus to come so we start the long walk home, stopping every once in a while to roll around on the sidewalks in fits of laughter.

We get home, tell Kenny’s brother about we did. He buys us beer and lets us drink it in his room. This is the big time. The older brother’s room. He tilts his quart of Miller toward us. “Rock and roll!”

Rock and roll.

[I lost touch with all three guys after high school, except for the occasional facebook birthday greeting many years later. Also, I would eventually grow to appreciate disco and, yes, Leo Sayer]