72: Argent, "Hold Your Head Up"

By Wm. on July 20, 2025

The summer I turned 8, we moved. After spending almost four years at a church in Stanford, a small town forty-five miles south of Lexington on U.S. 27, Dad accepted a pastorate in Walton, a small town twenty miles south of Cincinnati on I-75. Decades later, my mother told me that, at that moment, Dad had wanted to shepherd a larger congregation than those he'd served to date; Walton Christian Church was not that. Mom's desire to get closer to the area where she'd grown up, where her older sister lived, where her parents would soon be returning after my grandfather's retirement, won out.

Moving day was about two months before Amy and I were to begin 2nd and 3rd grade, respectively, so our first social interactions in the new place were at church and/or with the kids on Bedinger Ave. or around the corner on Plum St. There were several within a year or so of our ages. Julie, Rebecca, sisters Ramona & Ann, siblings Ricky & Rodna, and brothers Keith & Kevin were all in the neighborhood from the beginning; I think it was a bit later, perhaps another year, that brothers Les & Jeff, siblings Bonnie & Ron, and my first best friend Terak arrived. I was just young enough that it's almost impossible to reconstruct much of what those first weeks in town were like for me and my six-year-old sister. It does seem like getting to know these new peers bit by bit, mostly by playing outdoors, would have been the order of the day. I was already a baseball card collector to a modest degree and maybe even had a tiny weekly allowance to pursue that habit, should I be able to convince Mom to swing by the drug store in town that sold them.

The neighborhood kids occupied a decent-sized part of my life those next few years, on school day afternoons, over summer vacations, on weekends. Board games, riding bikes (though I'm sure Amy and I were pretty restricted as to how far away we could stray from home), flipping baseball cards, doing what we could to sing popular songs of the day (I recall one effort surrounding "The Night Chicago Died"). Over time I starting hanging out with just the guys more frequently. Since we were spread out in age a bit, moving on to junior high came in waves (the combined junior high and high school was in Walton, while the elementary school was several miles away in the even tinier Verona). Over time my friend circle gradually moved away from the Bedinger-Plum crowd; in the words of Peter Case's "Black Dirt & Clay," we grew up and we grew apart, I suppose, everyone finding other social niches, their own set of activities to purse.

I sure wish I had a picture of that bunch of pre-teens populating our street in that '72-'74 period.

I'm Facebook friends with several of the people mentioned above (unfortunately, Julie passed away a few years ago). It's been a good while, over forty years in some cases, since I've seen any of them. I suppose that based on their posts, I have some sense of who they are now, what they've done over the years. If any of them happen to read this, I hope they'll realize that I appreciate the moments we shared back in the 70s.

In the summer of '72 I was also too young to associate songs with the moment they were popular--that wouldn't really start for about another 18 months. So some of the big hits of this period--"Alone Again (Naturally)," "Song Sung Blue," "Rocket Man," "How Do You Do," for instance--feel disconnected from time and space; that is, they've seemingly always been there. Another one for which this is true is the #29 song from the 7/22/72 show, "Hold Your Head Up," by British rockers Argent, on its way to #5. I've always dug the song's iconic opening guitar riff and soaring melody line. Several years later, Cincinnati radio did their part in trying to break Russ Ballard's "On the Rebound." It didn't register at all then that Ballard had been the vocalist on "Hold Your Head Up."

When we arrived in Walton, it probably wasn't anticipated that we'd wind up staying long enough for Amy and me to graduate from high school. Looking back, I'm grateful in many ways for the continuity she and I were afforded.