A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Themes

In my sixth grade Social Studies class, we often read silently out of the textbook for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. My teacher, a music fan, would let us bring tapes in and play them on the cassette player while we read. It couldn’t be too distracting, though, and most of the time it ended up being instrumental.

I had recently bought my first cassette recorder, a boom box the size of a toaster, and started recording songs off the radio. I didn’t want to get any of the DJs’ voices on my tapes so there were always clunky segues between songs. The DJs would just jabber and say dumb things before the vocals kicked in. I’d be missing the whole intro to “My Sharona” or “Heart of Glass.” Then if they started talking again at the end, I’d have to cut the song there too. But my ears got used to it because that was the only way to listen to my favorite songs over and over.

My teacher played only one of my tapes for a few songs before changing it.

I turned to another passion. Theme music. First, I mail ordered an album of music from the National Football League. Found in the back of a football magazine, the ad said it featured orchestral pieces that were used by people like Howard Cosell during the football highlights they showed at halftime on Monday Night Football. There were a couple of songs in particular that really got me excited—“Heavy Action (Monday Night Football Theme)” by Johnny Pearson and a crazy sixties-type bebop song called “The Lineman” by Sam Spence.

I also perfected the art of recording my favorite theme songs from TV shows. I held the boom box up to the TV speaker and pleaded to the family to be quiet when the show was starting. I was partial to the cool, stylish themes like the ones from Barney Miller, Taxi, and Welcome Back, Kotter. Upbeat tunes like the ones from Happy Days and The Jeffersons were also favorites. Still, the teacher wouldn’t play the tape in class because it was from TV, which represented the opposite of reading.