Many readers of this site may be familiar with my deep antipathy towards the Mormon church ever since its meddling into California’s Proposition 8. Getting to know several ex-Mormons through this very venue and hearing myriad stories of their experiences in the church has only increased my troubled resentment for the religion that I know primarily as one that has hurt people I care about and overreached across state lines to help distort the bigoted marriage policy in my home state.

However, I recently began a loose examination of the trajectory of the peaks of my musical fandom over my lifetime, and I must set aside my own prejudice to honor something that I’ve come to realize has been absolutely formative in my life as a music freak. I’m going to share something sensitive with you now, so please be delicate in your inevitable mockery of me.

Okay. Like pretty much every one of you reading this, I’ve been obsessed by pop and rock music for as long as I’ve been alive. My parents insist that just after I learned to walk, I incessantly sang, or at least droned, “Boots” by Nancy Sinatra (I am not making this up). Perhaps this was the first step towards becoming the devout bootist I am today.

(This isn’t the sensitive part, by the way, although it’s not gonna get as cool as Grizzly Bear and Yo La Tengo, I’m just warning you [but don’t worry; I adore Sonic Youth, so don’t kick me out of Record Club]). In elementary school I sat up nights listening to the countdown—I collected printouts of the local station’s Top 40 at the record store each week, and had an ubergeekishly color-coded system to mark which songs I knew (and later, which songs I owned on seven-inch). “Undercover Angel” by Alan O’Day and “Hot Summer Nights” by Walter Egan were big faves–I can’t really explain why. (I got pretty excited when I recently learned that Egan had a thing with Stevie, though.) I memorized lyrics and had, still have, pages of notebook paper where I would painstakingly write them out with my ear to the radio. Didn’t we all?

This brings me to my first concert, which was EARLY: 1973 at the San Diego Sports Arena. Given the year, you might be imagining Foghat, or Genesis, or who knows what, like I was rolling fat doobies in elementary school or something. Nope—and here comes the confessional part of the post, so be gentle. My best friend’s mom gave us the incredible, overwhelming gift of taking us to see our early-childhood idols: the Osmonds.

I must now respectfully demand that you suspend your scoffery for 2 minutes and 50 seconds and let me lay this on you.

How’s that feel? You shakin’ your white ass just a little?

You may think that video was supremely uncool, so much so that you feel somehow itchy or sweaty, but I strongly disagree and I want to tell you why. When I found this video about a year ago, I knew I had been right all along about this band. Okay, I will admit a few things. Perhaps you could wish for smaller smiles, in the name of hipness—the boys are a bit too beatific to allow me to forget their religiosity. I’ll give you that. Despite his mostly successful attempts to be the soulful one, you might find lead singer Merrill’s spin awkwardly slow in that one part. Fair enough. Maybe you would prefer less Draculaish collars. Who wouldn’t? I cannot help but notice that a couple of those men are, for my comfort level, simply too old and too tall to be engaging in such moves. I can recognize now where the booty-shakin’ veers dangerously close to what would later become Lord of the Dance. It’s an obvious argument that their cultural counterparts, the Jackson Five, were so much cooler. Cut me some slack—I was very, very young.

However. That is nonetheless some balls-out grooving. The choreography can only be called unembarrassed, which I kind of have to admire.

And let’s talk about how perfect and mod that set is! That set is so viscerally exciting to me that it makes me anxious—it’s almost too intensely what I want from the world. If I could live in that set and have those backdrops moving like that—no, never mind, it’s too much to imagine.

Let’s not overlook the song itself: groovy, heavy(ish) bassline, hooky, lots of parts. Lyrics are what’s important to me, though, and while perhaps a bit pedestrian in the emotions it expresses, the song’s use of extended metaphor is pretty dang masterful. The yo-yo, ah, leitmotif, if you will, is sustained consistently and cleverly until the end. I have to appreciate that.

But it’s the outfits, once I rediscovered them in this video, that really offered me the opportunity for some self-examination when it comes to my taste in rock styles. The results of this examination were overwhelmingly positive for me. Let’s start with the spangles. I am a fan who likes her rock stars to acknowledge and emphasize their glamour. I do not want to see Marc Bolan without glittery lip gloss, or Steven Tyler without a scarf. It’s just distasteful. Revisiting those jumpsuits explained everything for me: the bell bottoms, boots, sashes, and chokers comply with every demand my adult self ever made on rock stars. I just never realized the wellspring of this requirement.

Did I mention that while introducing them before this 1971 performance, Flip Wilson calls them his soul brothers?

Alas, people change, and “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers” by Donny Osmond fell out of heavy rotation as I moved into puberty (but do give it a spin sometime, just for me). In junior high school, despite the aforementioned painstaking airwave research, my already questionable tastes hit a career low as I dove into the river Styx for at least a year. This was improved (and though I was mocked for it at the time, I now know I was right on target) by my full-body embrace of ELO and the Bee Gees—all seven of whom knew how to rock a belted jumpsuit and a flying collar when it was called for.

From there I catapulted to the sublime and unmanly lyrical glories of Rush, becoming their only living female fan besides Lisa Parrish, until finally, grandiosely, and all-encompassingly, I fell for the Beatles.

This was a big phase that lasted a long time—the buttons on the jacket, the silkscreen poster on the bedroom door, the trivia game, the plans for a “BEATLES” personalized license plate when I turned 16 (as if), and the eventual complete tour of Liverpool to see the Strawberry Fields orphanage and the double-decker buses marked “Penny Lane” and Paul’s pediatrician’s office. Although I wasn’t the hugest fan of the early suits, I did like the boots, and later, the shiny uniforms with sashes and ribbons and piping and buttons that all matched, sort of, but in different color schemes. Hmmmmm . . . not really sure when that interest could have begun for me.

Before I made it to Liverpool, though, I had moved on—well, not past the Beatles exactly, as I did not leave them behind, but perhaps as a lateral move, I decided to become the biggest Who fan in the county. The multiple midnight screenings of The Kids are Alright, Quadrophenia, and even Tommy (yes, even Tommy) really sustained me through the weeks where they were showing The Wall or The Song Remains the Same instead, though I went as often as I could regardless of which one was playing (and who among us hasn’t seen all those films dozens of times?). The Who were my identity; they were my first concert as a real teen (1982’s “farewell” tour—I KNOW, I KNOW, there have been ten more since then), and also the beginning of my deafness in my right ear as I squirmed too close to the stage on Pete’s side. (As I’ve griped ever since, it was the ONLY show on that tour without the Clash on the bill—we were treated to John Cougar and Loverboy opening instead. In the 20 years of intensive concertgoing that followed, did I ever get to see the Clash? No. Do I blame Loverboy? Yes.) Though the original draw was my mistakenly falling for Roger Daltrey’s blue eyes (of “behind” fame), it was Pete who ultimately earned and has maintained the top star on my walk of fame. Hmmm, and in my all-time favorite footage of him, he’s wearing a white jumpsuit. Coincidence?

Next I moved into a hard-core new wave phase (particularly starring Psychedelic Furs, Adam Ant, and Echo and the Bunnymen, but I reveled in the whole genre with all its boots and buckles and brooches and eyeliner and little braids). This quite naturally became a gateway to my Sisters of Mercy period. (Tim Wager will remember and mock my desire to start a band called the Black Darknesses.)

After that, REM was the last band I really went all out for (it ended for me around Monster, with Life’s Rich Pageant as a major peak). I did some major crushing out on the whole Urge Overkill vibe for a minute or two. I strongly condoned nail-polished men in the ‘90s. And of course, David Bowie comes through it all with flying shiny metallic colors; I think Ziggy Stardust will retain its status as my favorite album of all time, cause “Moonage Daydream” will always make me swoon. In case you weren’t sure, he definitely is much hipper than the Osmonds, just by virtue of the fact that he wouldn’t dream of smiling that much (even after he got his teeth fixed).

However, when I go back to that “Yo Yo” video, I can see the germs of almost everything I ever loved about pop, and with the possible exception of REM, I can draw all the lines back to the Osmonds’ style: snazzy, mod, fey, overly ornamented guys who shake it (albeit SO whitely) to the groove they’re feelin’.

Check out “Down By the Lazy River” and tell me I’m wrong.