Bay City Rollers: Palladium Pandemonium

One Night as a War Correspondent, 1977.

It's so hard to be a fan today. This morning I was reading "The Darkside of Fandom," the latest post by musician/writer/statistics wizard Chris Dalla Riva on his Substack,

Can't Get Much Higher

. It's an interview with a woman who was "exiled" from the One Direction "stan," or super-fan community, for some act or acts of apostasy. It made me sad, these internecine wars that so often characterize K-Pop, Swiftdom, boy bands, hip-hop, and other fan communities in the rotting world of social media.

During the last week, I've been pondering a more innocent era of fandom: The brief but intense love affair girls of a certain age (middle school/high school) had in the mid-1970s with the Bay City Rollers. A huge phenomenon in the U.K., the Rollers, from Scotland, owned the front pages of the music weeklies and tabloids, in which they were covered with the fervor given to the activities of the Royal Family. Their first U.S. single, "Saturday Night," went to number one at the end of 1975, and for at least two years B…