When I talk about the Scottish knack for making music that digs deep into my soul, Nazareth's definitive version of the Everly Brothers' standard "Love Hurts" is one of the songs I am thinking about.
This song hit the charts in early 1976 when I spent my days enraptured by a girl in my class named Erica. I was the class outcast, of course, and she was one of the cool girls from one of the fancy housing developments that were popping up at the time. So there was nothing to come out of this infatuation except humiliation and heartbreak.
The highpoint of that school year came when my teacher picked us to do some special project together. After that blissful afternoon, I dreamed that I was an astronaut coming home in the pouring rain from a space mission. Erica was waiting for me in the kitchen and confessed her undying love. When I woke up from that dream Olivia Newton-John's "I Honestly Love You" was seeping from my radio, which I kept on all the time.
Back in the real world, Erica openly mocked me in class when I gave her a Valentine's Day card. She wouldn't be the last to do so. I was even more smitten with her the next year when she got braces- she looked even cuter with them. I was so beside myself with desperation I planned on buying one of those fake mustaches advertised in comic books to impress her. Happily, I was talked out of this idea.
The funny thing is that I only vaguely remembered some of this, but listening again to "Love Hurts" brought it all back.
But as we've seen with many child stars, Nature has a strange way of growing beautiful children into unexceptional or even homely adolescents. Erica fell into the former category. She never hit her growth spurt and put on some extra poundage in high school. What's more, she fell into the dowdy, sporty, quasi-feminist mode that was very popular with New England girls in the late 70s/early 80s. She went from being gorgeous to merely cute. She even took to saying hi to me in the hallways on occasion, since I myself had blossomed into a right stud, thank you very much.
Needless to say, I was satisfied with this little bit of karmic kompensation.
