It’s January 30, 1977 — You’re A Teenager — You Live In L.A. — You Have A Fake I.D. That Works.

Gordon Skene
3 min readJan 31, 2021

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January 30, 1977 — KTNQ-AM — The Real Don Steele — Gordon Skene Sound Collection -

If they looked at your i.d. closely they would realize you weren’t 250 pounds — you weren’t 6 foot 6 and you weren’t 40 years old. But your Fake i.d., the one you got from a friend of a friend of a friend has been your ticket to the life of the party. You’re the go-to guy for keggers and Schnapps and Jagermeister. You’ve been to more parties in the past month than your entire life so far. Saturday night is all about you. And you are responsible for more hangovers than you can count.Only a year earlier you couldn’t get arrested — nobody would give you the right time of day and you never got invited anywhere. But this magic card and you now have status — you don’t even need to show it to the clerk at The Liquor Locker anymore — he knows you on a first name basis, even if the first name is the wrong one. He calls you Fred, but you’ve never been Fred — you don’t even look like a Fred. But you don’t care, just as long as you can get that gallon of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and punch a hole in the heart of Saturday Night you’ll be happy and your friends will be happy and life will be beyond amazing.Of course, the clerk at the Liquor Locker never asks why you’re always riding a bicycle. You actually haven’t gotten your driver’s license yet. You don’t even have your learners permit — you don’t know how to drive. You trundle around the streets of Santa Monica on your Stingray; Cutty Sark and Smirnoff’s clanking in the makeshift basket hooked to the handlebars. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It ain’t easy being the life of the party, but one of these days you’e going to get laid and your life will be complete — if you could just stop passing out and waking up on somebody’s lawn the next morning. One thing at a time.

And here’s an hour’s worth of The Real Don Steele on Ten-Q from January 30, 1977 to put it all in perspective.

Originally published at https://pastdaily.com.

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Gordon Skene

Two-time Grammy nominee, author and archivist of history, news, and popular culture. Runs Past Daily — runs The Gordon Skene Sound Collection. Hardly sleeps.