Category: childhood

Today’s Theme Music

Nineteen seventy-four: I had my license and a car. The car was a nineteen sixty-five Mercury Comet sedan. Forest green and an automatic, its two eighty-nine V-8 hustled me around the hills of southern West Virginia.

I graduated high school. My wife, who was then my girlfriend, was a year behind me, and had gone to Europe for a month. I was working odd jobs at the oil and gas distribution center when the Air Force recruiter called me. What the hell, I decided, and enlisted.

It was a shock to my girlfriend. It was a shock to everyone.

It wasn’t the greatest decision, an impulse because I was impatient to get out of there, to be free, to be my own person, impatience that still haunts me.

There’s no doubt what song represents that year best: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I used to sing it to my girlfriend, to entertain her.

Yes, we were in love.

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Today’s Theme Music

‘Smoke On the Water’ was a big hit for Deep Purple in 1973.

I was finishing my high school junior year when this air guitar-inspiring, head bopping power rock of the finest vintage. That it was based on a true story and had interesting references in the lyrics was an added bonus. Crank this song up and the walls would throb while the windows rattled. Peers, though, would share my grin. Guys loved it; girls tolerated it. We couldn’t hear anything else, but what the hell did it matter?

It was a good song for lighting up a doobie, which sometimes happened back then.

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Today’s Theme Music

I moved in with Dad in nineteen seventy-one. I was fifteen. He was in the U.S. Air Force, and had returned from Vietnam by way of Germany (where he had a gorgeous blue Mustang convertible). Now assigned to DESC, Wright-Pat AFB provided administrative support. We lived on Page Manor military base housing.

That lasted about three months. Presented with an opportunity and having his years in, Dad retired from the Air Force. We moved to southern West Virginia. After moving into a place, it burned down. If we didn’t lose our possessions to fire, we lost them to smoke and water damage. He and I spent a month living in a friend’s home but it was small and cramped. Unable to find anything else, Dad bought a seventy-foot long, fourteen foot wide mobile home and rented a space in Doy Mobile Home Park.

In retrospect, Dad lived through an interesting period then. He re-married when I was sixteen, almost seventeen. New offspring soon followed. Graduating high-school, and with a second child on the way to join Dad’s household, I joined the military and left.

Dad had two young sons by the year’s end. One of them was killed in a car accident. The loss destroyed his marriage. He ended up having an affair with a co-worker. Her marriage was disintegrating. Her husband was already suffering emotional issues, and committed suicide. Dad moved in with the widow. That all took place in a six year run.

From that era comes a song that makes me laugh. Ranked as one of the greatest pop songs of all time, it came out in nineteen seventy-two. Carly Simon’s song, You’re So Vain’, stays in conversations about who the song is about. She’s given clues. Others claim she’s confided in them. Men like Warren Beatty insisted the song was about him.

Whatever. Here it is.

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Today’s Theme Music

I’m still streaming from my childhood years in the Pittsburgh area today. This one came out while I live in Penn Hills. Those days were filled with school and snow activities in the winter, and sports and friends just about every day. When the sun heated the days into the eighties and nineties in the summer, Penn Hills was a gorgeous backdrop to growing up. Baseball was our big thing. With Maz, Steve Blass, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Al Oliver, Manny Alou, and big Dave Parker, the Pirates under Danny Murtaugh had become a force. The Steelers’ emergence remained a few years away.

The era’s music seemed customized for our lives. This song, ‘Psychedelic Shack’, by the Temptations, is from nineteen seventy. The lyrics are easy to learn and the beat carries me like a wave.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s selection is streaming from nineteen seventy-one.

A year of personal change, this was the year I moved in with Dad. He’d just returned from Germany and was assigned to DESC in the Dayton, Ohio, area. We lived in Page Manor housing.

I was fifteen. It was the year I met my wife, although that didn’t become known to me for a few years. This song, ‘Signs’, by the Five Man Electrical Band, suited my milieu. Tesla later did a decent cover, but my stream is sentimental today, so I hung with the original.

I was a long-haired freaky person, so the words speak to me: “Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Blocking our scenery, breaking my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the signs?” I was rebelling against signs and the conformance they urged and demands they made. Signs still inundate our lives, and if there’s not a sign, there’s probably an app.

Here it is, ‘Signs’.

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Today’s Theme Music

Visiting with Mom, my brain stream naturally turns toward the music I heard then. One of my favorites of nineteen seventy-one was ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Rolling Stones. I was fifteen then and thought, “This is rock and roll.”

Hope you have a good Sunday. Hope you enjoy the song.

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Today’s Theme Music

Marcus reminded me of an excellent song for pattering through the day.  A dance song, they provide instructions in the lyrics:

It’s just a jump to the

And then a step to the right.

With your hands on your hips.

You bring you knees in tight.

(h/t to Metrolyrics.com)

From nineteen seventy-five and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, ‘Let’s Do the Timewarp Again.’ It’s such a rousing, crazy song, part of a rousing, crazy movie, that it’s inspired cults. The cast was excellent, the plot was unpredictable, and the plotting was frenetic.  Beyond all of that, I could really use a timewarp today. Forward or back, left or right, I don’t know where I’d go.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is a lighter, softer melody. Don’t know what year it came out. It’s one of those songs that’s part of an album, and is included on a compilation album, and then merges into your personal cloud. You don’t know when or how it got there, but it’s there.

Bachman-Turner Overdrive – BTO – emerged from Canada onto the early nineteen seventies rock scene with several hits. While I was very familiar with their hits, like ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, this song wasn’t a hit. Looking it up on Wikipedia, I confirm it’s BTO, from their nineteen seventy-five album, ‘Head On’. Here it is, from sometime in life, BTO, with ‘Looking Out for #1’.

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Today’s Theme Music

I’m visiting ‘home’.

The area was home to me for three years, culminating in my high school graduation and subsequent military enlistment. That was childhood’s end. But this is where my wife’s mother resides, so here we are.

Its patchwork roads connect patchwork towns. Old schools have been re-purposed as hopeful enterprises but they already look enervated. As I drive around, noting changes and the lack of change, I’m reminded of cancer. So much of the area strikes me as blighted. Fast food businesses and gas stations dominate with their neon, plastic and bright colors, as the businesses of the last century lay barren beside them, empty and crumbling. It’s sad art, expressing the truth of the area, and America in general.

Remembering ex-classmates, I peer at each face about my age and wonder if I know them. I doubt few of them planned to live a patchwork life, and mock myself for thinking, that because I moved away, I’m living more than a patchwork life.

Out of that cesspool of reflection comes some Green Day. From 2004, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’. 

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Today’s Theme Music

Ah, today, we have a classic. Ray Davis took his music seriously. I’ve done one of the Kinks’ songs before, but it’s time to bring on ‘Lola’. I vividly remember talking about this song with my sister and my neighbor, John. Sis was two years older. It was a warm summer day in 1970, and we were in our backyard in Penn Hills, PA.

I later saw the Kinks in concert in Germany. We were in a pink marbled concert hall. It was so damn elegant, it was amazing, washing the Kinks concert experience with a surreal veneer.

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