Category Archives: Memories

A Teen Memory and a Song

I was looking through old pictures online the other day and came across a set someone had posted from Astroworld in Houston.

While I’m from Louisiana, we lived back and forth between there and the Houston area all of my life. When I was in 8th grade and the first year of high school, I’d wash cars and mow lawns around my neighborhood to make enough money to hang out on the weekend. At that time I lived in Pasadena and there really wasn’t a great spot to hang out there so my Mom would drop a couple of us off at Astroworld on Saturday morning and come back and pick us up just as it was closing Saturday night.

Back in those times, 1976 or so, no one worried about their kids being at a place like that so it was one of the spots to mingle and meet new people, with a minimal chance of getting in trouble.

I graduated high school when I was 17, so that would have made me around 12-13 when I was a regular at the park. I would have been about 5’10, with another inch or two of hair, and weighed about 140# tops.

The best part was as some parents were dropping off carloads of boys, other cars were dropping off carloads of girls and, with any luck, by 1 or 2 in the afternoon, you’d found someone with whom you could share the rest of the day.

At some point, Astroworld picked up on the disco craze and added an open-air dance floor with the panels that change color, the disco ball hanging from the ceiling, and music of all kinds, not just disco, blasting away so when the sun dropped, everybody made their way there for at least a couple of hours.

I remember several of the songs they played since they are now considered classic rock but I’m putting the video below of a band that kind of bridged the gap between rock and disco and was really more of a “funk” sound so us non-disco long hairs could justify dancing to it (or, honestly, trying to dance).

Here it is, directly from the Midnight Special (who remembers watching that and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert waaaaay before MTV came along?)