A nostalgia stream is flooding me today. First it pushed me to consider old television shows, then I began googling places where I used to live, using the street view to remember those childhood places.
Music then came up. While I was discovering rock, pop and its bubblegum variations were very active, with a presence from groups such as the Osmonds and the Jackson 5. When “ABC” and “One Bad Apple” were big on the radio airwaves, I read a newspaper article in the Pittsburgh Press about whether Michael Jackson or Jimmy Osmond would have a successful singing career after their voices changed.
So, in memory, here’s “ABC” from 1970 on ABC’s American Bandstand with Dick Clark.
My family had moved away from Wilkinsburg, PA, to a housing plan in Penn Hills, a few miles away. My friends were in Wilkinsburg and I kept going back to see them. In one of those early trips, the only friend I found on my old street, McNary Boulevard, was Richard O’Leary. A bluff and big good-natured child, Richard was a few years older than me, but had failed a few grades, becoming my classmate.
Richard lived in a small, narrow house on the brick-paved Wesley Street. It was a classic, hugely steep Pittsburgh hill. Richard’s family was large, with one older sister still living at home with her own little sister. They were a poor family, too, a point that pained Richard.
Having all those older brothers and sisters kept Richard knowledgeable about pop music. That early Sunday morning, he was raving about the Fifth Dimension and a song called “The Wedding Bell Blues”. Richard kept singing the opening lines, “Bill. I love you so, I always will.” I suspect that his older sister’s boyfriend, the father of her child, was named Bill, so the song was being played often in the home.
It’s a fond memory of an early sunny, cool, Sunday morning.
I remember telling other neighborhood children stories that I made up, often citing them as my dreams. Sometimes they started as a dream, but I often just began telling an incident. I remember that once a dozen children a year or two younger stood in my cousin’s garage, listening to me tell them a story that I was making up as I stood there.
I’m streaming the “Logical Song” by Supertramp today. This little ditty was released in 1979. It remains a relevant song to me. As I grew, I thought I understood logic, but learned that logic is rooted in different areas for people. Where their logic has its roots defines how their logic will be applied and the results. This bastardized version of logic often twists compassion, reality, and common sense.
I later read an interview with the songwriter, Roger Hogdson. Some of his comments about what we’re taught as children stayed with me. I found the interview today after thinking about the song, and post some of it here.
This song was born from the questions that haunted me about what is the deeper meaning of life. Throughout childhood, we are told and taught so many things, and yet we are rarely told anything about the purpose of life. We are taught how to function outwardly, but are rarely guided to explore and find out who we are inwardly. From the innocence and wonder of childhood to the confusion of adolescence that often ends in the cynicism and disillusionment of adulthood, so many end their lives having no idea of who they truly are and what they came here to learn. In “The Logical Song,” I ask the fundamental question that is so present in the psyche of today’s modern world but rarely spoken out loud—who are we and what is our true purpose of being here? And that is why I believe it continues to strike a chord in people around the world. I’m continually told how the lyric is often used and discussed in schools, which tells you something.
I think about what and how we’re taught as children. Many of the words thrown at us by adults are tossed from anger, irritation, and frustration. The adults issuing the words rarely realized their comments’ impact on young minds because they were dealing with their life and world issues, and speaking from their frustrations, resentments, and irritations. (I prefer to think that the adults didn’t realize it, and weren’t being callous or deliberate in what they said, knowing what it would do to a young mind.)
But sometimes, there were adults who understood. They were the ones building us up, giving us confidence, and pressing us to read, learn, and think.
I had a wild night of dreams. After awakening, feeding the cats, and thinking about the dreams, I began humming this song from 1972. Because the dream had large segments about seeing and trying to understand what I was seeing, I realized my mind had started streaming, “Doctor My Eyes” by Jackson Browne. The song came out when I was sixteen and straying along the hinterlands border between being a child and an adult. (Even at sixty-two, I still frequently reel and weave along that border.) I laughed at the connections my mind had managed to find between life, the dream, and memories.
I found this live version today and just went with the flow.
In a lovely piece of cynicism, my mind looked at the map of Oregon’s wildfires today and the smoky blue sky outside and began channeling Boston’s “Smokin'” from 1976.
I don’t know how I became so cynical. Of course, my mother is cynical, as is my father, so it could be in my genes. Or it could be from all those protests during my formative years in the 1960s, or the corrupting influence of rock and roll. Maybe it was all the reading I did when I was a child, or how the stars were aligned when I was born or conceived, or my years of government service.
Cranking up a childhood favorite, “I’m Going Home” by Ten Years After, as played at Woodstock. The song’s frenetic energy at the beginning and end appealed to me as a thirteen-year-old. Now I think the guitar riffs capture the feel of the original rockers. Well, they sample quite a bit of others in this medley.
Of course, in the military, when a deployment was ending, and then later, in marketing, when a show was ending, and then in management, when I could finally leave corporate headquarters and go home, this was my internal joy song – “I’m going home!”
Lot of memories of time and place embedded in this song for me.
Thinking about music from 1974, the year that I celebrated my eighteenth birthday, I recalled “Smokin’ In the Boys’ Room”.
I like the song’s rocking simplicity of being in school, breakin’ rules, and our permanent records. Brownsville Station did it in 1974; Mötley Crüe covered it almost a dozen years later. Not bucking the normal status quo, the younger folks often prefer the Mötley Crüe version. That’s how it is, right? Newer equals better, or preferred. I, tsk, tsk, prefer the original. Not surprising, either; I’ve heard that from older people about things that my generation later re-interpreted.
(I like that cycle. Didn’t use to, but I’ve come to enjoy, admire, and respect it.)
But 1974 was the year I heard the song, my formative era, if you will, and all that I associate with it. That’s the year I graduated high school, became an adult, moved away from home, and joined the military, so I’m loyal to Brownsville Station’s version.
Michael Seidel, writer 