Name that tune
Music moves me. Music rules my life. I have loved it as far back as I can remember.
There is always a song playing in my head. It doesn’t have to be one I like. It’s just a constant soundtrack.
I cannot have a song as a ringtone on my phone because the music from the call will keep looping in my head. If it’s any kind of music at all it has to be really abstract.
When I was small my parents had a hi fi set in the basement. This pre-dated the advent of stereo audio by about five years. It was made by Voice of Music which was headquartered in Benton Harbor Michigan. (How’s that for foreshadowing?) Dad made a partition wall in one of the rooms in the basement. It was a divider which made a storage room about eight feet wide on one side and a playroom for the kids on the other. He made a platform for the record changer on the wall high enough so those damn brats couldn’t reach it and cut a hole high on the right side of the wall for the speaker. My parents joined a record club and got a lot of soundtracks for movies and musicals. The playroom side of the partition had toy storage and dad made a blackboard out of Masonite and some blackboard paint. Mom had her sewing machine down there too.
I loved music even then and it moved me emotionally. I can remember crying because a song sounded sad to me. Kids cry all the time, but I surprised myself with my reaction to the music, I even cried when it was good.
There was one early morning I can remember, this was before I started grade school. I was up early, I did that a lot, and there was a song playing on my parents’ clock radio. I loved it instantly and started dancing in my little kid way. I didn’t know what kind of music it was. I will never forget that moment. It was Dixieland jazz.
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The Beatles landed in the US when I was in second grade. My brother bought their first album and two of my sisters were instantly hooked. The Beatles played on the radio, they played on TV, and they were always playing on the portable stereo that my parents bought to supplant the V-M rig.
I did not really understand the excitement. They played good music; I just never understood the screaming frenzy that always accompanied the live performances.
The music that was there before the Beatles arrived was Motown. CKLW was a broadcast station with a studio in Detroit and the transmitter was in Windsor, Ontario. They broadcast 50,000 watts. They were the dominant radio station in my world, and I grew up listening to rock and R&B and Motown from “the big 8.” I got a transistor radio for Christmas. It had an earphone you could stick in one ear. Now I had tunes as I rode my bike.
As I got older my musical taste broadened. My brother sat me down with a set of headphones and a Jimi Hendrix album. I was instantly obsessed. I didn’t know it was blues influenced but I liked it. When I was old enough to have a paper route my first purchases were albums by Jimi and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
When I was in high school I became friends with Jerry Park. We were the same age, but his musical knowledge was more advanced than mine. I learned a lot from him as he introduced me to artists I never heard of. That’s when I started collecting records. That’s also when I started smoking cigarettes because all the cool kids damaged their lungs.
I have been told I have an “eclectic” taste in music. I don’t know about that. I like to hear music I’ve never heard before. Jazz and blues are the foundations of music I like. The good artists are ones that are always changing and trying new things.
Recently I sold the record collection I’ve curated since 1970. There were only about 200 albums in total. They’ve spent the past 30 years in boxes in the basement. The guy at the used record store flipped through every album. “Man,” he said, “You’re all over the place.”
That pretty much sums it up.
