Long Post On Music Appreciation

While I was having a late lunch at my favorite high-calorie diner in Sacramento I was listening to the music track the owner plays. Since it was all Sixties music, many of the songs brought back memories. So while breaking New Year’s resolution #1 by eating a French dip sandwich, I started to go over in my head the various songs that moved me from when I was a kid to today. It got to be an interesting list (in my head, anyway), so I thought I would share it with you. It would be nice if some of you would list the songs that you remember being a big part of your lives too.

Other than my grandfather loudly singing Onward Christian Soldier in church (in an unrecognizable key), the first song that really hit me as something special came on my first day at school on the second time though the second grade. I remember Jon Thoits running around the playground singing, She Loves You by the Beatles. Overnight it seemed everyone knew that song, so I guess that’s where the notion of becoming an “overnight sensation” comes from.

In the ensuing years I remember listening to my Japanese transistor radio and waiting for songs like Honey and Little Green Apples (I know, I was young) and any Beatles songs. About a year later, my parents took us to the music store and allowed us to buy one 45 rpm record (parents, please explain what a 45 is to your kids) and I chose Love Is Blue by Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra. I think Bill bought Sugar, Sugar by the Archies and Peter bought a Moody Blues song. We played those songs in order all day long back then.

My first album really blew me away. My parents, in an attempt to seem sophisticated, saw the movie The Graduate and then bought me Sounds Of Silence by Simon and Garfunkle (it was the only album you could buy some of the music from the movie at that theime). I wore the grooves out of that record and still listen to that music often.

Almost every week my family ate at Buddie’s Pizza Parlor in downtown Grand Rapids. My parents gave us a nickel to buy three songs from the jukebox, one song for each son. Bill always, and I mean always, played something from the Archies, Peter bought a few different songs like California Dreamin’ and Monday, Monday and I usually chose Build Me Up Buttercup by the Foundations. I think the pizza was good, but getting to choose our songs was the real treat.

My family used to drive to Florida every spring and my father’s Cadillac came equipped with an 8-track player (parents, explain 8-track to your kids). Each trip my dad bought new tapes so he could drown out our complaining about how far the drive to Florida from Michigan was. One of the tapes I remember wanting to listen to over and over was Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, again by the Beatles. It seemed every track was a leap forward in modern music. I had the same feeling when he bought Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon and Garfunkle a few years later. I always link those two albums (and Juicy Fruit chewing gum) with those trips. And, thinking back now, my dad was pretty hip to be buying those albums back then – although he also bought 101 Strings Play The Beatles and When You’re In Love, The Whole World Is Jewish.

Some songs have strong meaning to me because what they represent. I remember when the Beatles released Hey Jude. At that moment, music changed from something you danced to, to something you listened to. It also changed the way radio stations played music from the typical 2-3 minute song to the entire 7:09 of Hey Jude. It also meant that when the song was played at my local roller skating rink when I was 12, it was time to find Lynn Andrews and beg her to skate with me. I doubt she wanted to spend seven minutes with me, but I did with her.

A year later I went to my one and only junior high dance in Michigan at the end of the school year. Knowing that I was moving to California a month later I was feeling a bit sad at the dance. Then Lynn Andrews walked up to me! Finally my years of scheming for her had paid off, or at least it seemed that way. She asked me if I would do her a favor. Anything for Lynn, of course. She wondered if I would be willing to dance with Lynn Shackleford (not the basketball player) so she could dance with George Skiff, who was the other Lynn’s date. Damn George. Naturally I obliged and then had George killed that night and exchanged Lynns as the objects of my infatuation. Lynn and I danced to Touch Me by The Doors. Then I must have said something improper because it was our one and only dance.

When I came to California, there were certain songs that just seemed Californian. Joni Mitchell was big as was Melanie, Santana and Canned Heat. But the group that stood out in 1970 was Crosby, Stills and Nash and their great song Suite Judy Blue Eyes. It was very apparent then that CSN had replaced the Beatles and the Stones as the latest "super" group.

The first album I bought for myself was Who’s Next by, coincidentally, The Who. I’m not sure if I bought it because the group was photographed peeing on a monolith on the album cover or because it seemed kind of cool to be buying a record by The Who. Just the same, I played Behind Blue Eyes and Baba O’Riley until my dad threatened to turn the record into a Frisbee. A year later, my girlfriend at the time, Cindy, told me I had to visit her and listen to this new album that had just come out called Harvest by Neil Young after he left CSN&Y. Every song was a masterpiece, especially the very haunting A Man Needs A Maid, which is still one of my favorites. The title song of that album also carries some delightful meaning as I think it was the first song I stole lyrics from to impress a girl. And she even married me despite it!

When I was about 16, I used to go to morning swim practice at a huge pool at Miramar NAS. Each morning I mooched a ride to practice from either John Hagey or Stuart Henshall. With John I got Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman or Mona Bone Jakon, and with Stuart I got Best of Bread that Mrs. Laz forbids me to play now. No matter the mooched ride, the songs on those albums played in my head as I tried to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to get the nerve to dive into a freezing, dark pool.

For my 18th birthday I got albums from one new girlfriend, Beth and from the aforementioned Cindy (I was a playa!). Beth bought me Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road, an incredible musical breakthrough in my humble opinion, and Cindy bought me Band On The Run by Wings, which was the best album you could have when craving the Beatles.

During my college years (or the years people of that age are supposed to be in college) there were a number of songs that inspired a number of fond memories. I remember coming home with Phil after watching his brother’s band play an all-night party and, barely awake, hearing the song Miracles by Jefferson Starship on the radio. It was the first time I heard the song and, in a state of no sleep and the sun just rising, the song had a very strong impact on me. Phil and I also played Chicago 2 and the Doobie Brothers’ Captain and Me until the windows of his house shook.

About that time, I shacked up with Sladed and he turned me on to Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd (and man-love). Besides the obvious big name songs by those groups, the album-long song Thick As a Brick by Tull and Obscured By Clouds by Floyd were the most memorable. Other albums coming out at that time that shook my music world were Breezin’ by George Benson, Silk Degrees by Boz Scaggs, Rumours (by Fleetwood Mac) and the very remarkable Songs In The Key Of Life by Stevie Wonder -- maybe one of the best albums of all time. All were playing on my turntable at all hours.

There was a special song from Neil Diamond that meant a lot to me personally (and one other person) and shall remain, well, personal for personal reason, and that was his song Lady-Oh. I guess Mondern English’s I Melt With You falls into the same “Bolero” category as a song I have a personal relationship with. On the heels of these songs came a few artists Mrs. Laz introduced me to; Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. The standouts were For A Dancer and The Late Show by Jackson and River and Little Green by Joni.

There were two songs from Texas that have a special place in my heart. While exiled to Tyler, TX, I was a two-bit reporter for the local two-bit newspaper and knew all the two-bit radio and TV people since we were the only people in town in the “entertainment” business. I mentioned to a radio DJ that I liked the song Lou Rawls had just recorded, Wind Beneath My Wings (sadly no link), still the best rendition of that song, I think. As I was driving for my final day at the paper before moving back to California, the DJ played that song and said it was for me and that I would be missed. So I was kinda important, in a small-town sort of way.

After the Boy was born, we bought a house that was near a very picturesque lake. I remember taking him down to the lake one day and I held his hand and watched the sun set across the lake. At that moment I could hear Willie Nelson’s Hands On The Wheel being played at the lake’s clubhouse. Because it is a song about simple times and fairy tales, I always associate the song with that very fond memory.

Speaking of the Boy, there were a couple of songs that we loved because he loved them and I associate them with his youth. Not particularly masterpieces, but he really liked Tequila by The Champs and I Just Called To Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder. The Girl was partial to the Shoop Shoop song from the movie Mermaids, Wolly Bully from the movie Splash, and Kiss The Girl from the Little Mermaid soundtrack (I am sensing a certain mermaid pattern here).

The kids inspired other music with me, too. I remember the Boy turned me on to Nirvana, and we used to listen to them when I drove him to school in Virginia, especially the David Bowie re-do of The Man Who Sold The World. I also remember playing Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and TLC’s CrazySexyCool with the Girl in Virginia. My musical range while driving into Washington, DC was fairly limited to U2’s Zooropa (I’ve since learned it was far from their best music), anything by Van Morrison and the Gin Blossom’s New Miserable Experience.

Disco killed a lot of music in the Eighties and Nineties and Rap finished it off in the Nineties and into this decade, so I am sorry that most of my best musical memories are from days gone by. But I do remember hearing Eva Cassidy singing Fields Of Gold for the first time and wondering, a decade later, why I had never heard of her before. I still get goosebumps hearing that song. Norah Jones had that same affect on me with Don’t Know Why and Natalie Merchant with Wonder, an ode to River Phoenix.

Recognizing this post has becoming excruciatingly long, I will just mention a few of my other favorite musical moments, many coming from movie soundtracks. In no particular order, I was deeply moved by a few opera songs when I first heard them, like Puccini’s Musetta’s Waltz first heard from the movie Moostruck, Nessum Dorma (also Puccini) that I heard in the movie the Witches of Eastwick, and O Mio Bambino Caro (also Puccini) just from general opera listening. I will also never forget the first time I heard Vladimir Ashkenazy playing piano on Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto (Emperor); it made me want to learn the piano, something I fell well short on, but did a reasonably good job on part of the adagio. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I once watched a man play Handel’s Ombra Mai Fu on his trumpet on a solitary street in Munich. The music bounced off the wall and draped over me. Simply wonderful.

Even though I may get giggles with some of this, I was really mesmerized by Tamyra Gray singing Bachrach’s A House Is Not A Home. I had heard the song before, but never the Luther Vandross version she performed on American Idol. The other sort of silly one was from Sister Act II, of all movies, when Lauryn Hill sang His Eye Is On The Sparrow; pure beauty.

There are songs from other movies that I will list, not because they are the best songs ever written, but because of the mood they set in a particular movie. In no particular order, they are: Hotel California by the Gipsy Kings in the Big Lebowski, Mrs. Robinson from the Graduate, Rhapsody In Blue by Gershwin in the movie Manhattan, Cat Steven’s Trouble from Harold and Maude, Joe Cocker’s version of Bye Bye Blackbird from Sleepless in Seattle, Down To The River To Pray from O Brother Where Art Thou, Dry The Rain from High Fidelity, Van Morrison’s Philosophers Stone from Wonder Boys, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Coal Miner’s Daughter from the movie of the same name, Springsteen’s Secret Garden from Jerry McGuire, Nina Simone’s Sinnerman from The Thomas Crown Affair, Silent Sigh by Badly Drawn Boy in the movie About A Boy and, finally, two from Garden State, Coldplay’s Don’t Panic and Simon and Garfunkle’s The Only Living Boy In New York as they are staring down into the infinite abyss.

As long as this post has become, I have a feeling I left many songs out. I know there are the easy ones like Over the Rainbow and almost anything from the Sound of Music, but I was just trying to limit the songs to the times I sat in awe listening to a song for the first time. Please think of what some songs meant in your lives and list them. Let’s have some fun with this.