Parenting & Family Quote by John Tesh

At 23, you don’t “cover” a city so much as let it cover you, and John Tesh’s line leans into that hectic bargain. The phrase “a wild time” is deliberately blunt, almost undersold, as if the only honest way to describe late-70s New York is to gesture at the noise and let the listener fill in the fear and thrill. Then he hits you with the list: blackouts, Studio 54, Son of Sam. It’s not just recollection; it’s credentialing. The rhythm mimics news copy and street talk at once, a rapid-fire montage that compresses glamour, panic, and civic failure into a single breath.

The subtext is about proximity to history before you’re old enough to mythologize it. “Everything that blew up” works as a reporter’s cliché and a literal description of the era’s volatility: infrastructure collapsing, headlines exploding, culture combusting into spectacle. Studio 54 stands in for excess and celebrity; Son of Sam for the city’s paranoia; blackouts for the sense that modern life can snap off without warning. “And all of that stuff” is the kicker, a casual shrug that signals both emotional self-protection and the way constant crisis can flatten into background hum.

Coming from a musician best known for smooth, reassuring adult-contemporary polish, the memory doubles as origin story: before the calm, there was chaos. He’s framing his early career as lived intensity, an argument that his later composure wasn’t inherited - it was earned in the static.