Thanksgiving night, much like Christmas night, once was a time when we’d have our legal limit of the family, flee the house and hit the bars with our friends.
But it was a cruel tease, especially if you were in college. You had a long weekend, then had to head back to campus for to grind it out for roughly three weeks — including finals — before you could return home for Christmas.
You’d come home, disconnected from your hometown, out of the social loop. You’d make a few phone calls — or hope that someone would call you — to try to figure out who was around and what was going on.
This is the first such Thanksgiving weekend for my nephew Jake, who almost certainly has relied on texts and/or Facebook — who makes phone calls anymore? — to try to figure out what’s happening around his hometown.
When Jake drives back to school on Sunday, he’ll take the same road I did in November 1977, after my first Thanksgiving home from college. Our schools are about 25 miles apart.
So, Jake, wanna hear what your old unk was listening to back then?
Ah, didn’t think so. Too bad, man. Gonna cue it up anyway.
“Gettin’ Lucky,” Head East, from “Gettin’ Lucky,” 1977. The LP is out of print but available digitally.
That never happened during Thanksgiving break. Or Christmas break. Or summer break. This tune, written by guitarist Mike Somerville, rather neatly sums up that futility.
Head East was one of those Midwest rock bands we dug at the time.
“I Never Dreamed,” Lynyrd Skynyrd, from “Street Survivors,” 1977.
This laid-back tune about a spurned lover’s remorse comes from a record that got plenty of play at our tiny off-campus apartment that fall. Dig the sweet instrumental intro and outro.
AM, Then FM 
I remember Head East playing at the SIU student center and a bar or two around Carbondale when I was there. They were sort of on the same track as REO, just a year behind. Last I heard some of them were living in Southern Illinois and playing around there. Small world.