Music possesses the unique power to affect our moods and emotions. It can pump us up, soothe us, or make us melancholy, depending on the tempo, beat, rhythm, or instrumentation, as well as by the sentiments expressed in a song’s lyrics. Certain songs seem to bring back specific moments in time and evoke instant memories from the recesses of our brains. For example, when I was five years old, John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was one of the first songs I heard that had a visceral effect on me. The harmony in the chorus and the “so lonesome I could die” line seemed to permeate the marrow of my bones. I remember having to walk outside to our swing set in the yard afterward to have a moment of fun and reflection before the sun went down. I kept singing the chorus over and over on the glider until my mom called me in for dinner. I remember I was coloring with crayons at the kitchen table the first time I heard the Beatles “Let it be.” I recall being enticed by the melodious vocals and musical accompaniment, which captivated my attention, made me take pause, and compelled me to listen intently until the song reached its final chord before going back to filling in Captain America’s super suit and shield.
Music has been an important part of my life since I was a young kid, and it is interesting to note when and where my music preferences began and who or what influenced my musical knowledge and awareness. My mom always had the AM radio tuned to local WSBS in the kitchen and in our various station wagons, which we programmed in by pulling out and pushing in five black levers below the radio dial. FM stations would not appear in our rural area until some years later. Besides listening to my father’s old Johnny Cash 8-tracks, the first significant music influences were the old seventies 7-inch 45 vinyl records my father would bring home from the jukebox vendor at Graham’s Restaurant on Railroad Street in Great Barrington where he bartended nights. When the vender came in to change the records over, my father would take all the leftovers they were just going to toss out and bring them home to us. Though we had a couple of boxes filled with sleeveless 45s, some were still in their record company sleeves, and others still contained the pink and white jukebox card labels inside.
Some of the AM hits my siblings and I played down in the basement den included: “Another Saturday Night” by Cat Stevens, “Top of the World” by the Carpenters, “Run Joey Run” by David Geddes, and John Denver’s “Sunshine on my Shoulders” (I recall we used to sing a parody version: “Sunshine on my shoulders gives me sunburn, sunshine in my eyes and I go blind!”). We often began playing various records purely based on the look of the 45 label: the tan “REPRISE RECORDS” label with a red “:R” and steamboat, colorful words “MOTOWN” on a gray map with a star above a blue label, a red cow with “RSO” on its side, a moon with a tree silhouetted on it that said “EPIC,” another had “MCA” with a rainbow on it, just to recall a few. My little sister Jill liked the yellow cover of a 45 she called “Forky Porky,” but although I can picture the record label in my mind, to this day I have no idea what it really was. We had some 45 records of songs I’d heard (or would later hear) on television shows like Hee-Haw (we had a 45 of Helen Reddy’s version of “Delta Dawn,” although it was Tanya Tucker who I saw sing it on Hee-Haw), the Sonny and Cher Show (I recall seeing a cartoon video version of Jim Croce’s “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” and Cher–on horseback dolled up in a skimpy glitzy Native American two-piece bathing suit and proverbial chieftain headdress–singing “Half Breed”), the John Denver Show (“Sunshine on my Shoulders”), the Muppet Show (Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”), and Don Cornelius’s Soul Train (“Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation–my first foray into soul music), which came on after the Saturday morning cartoons just before mom made us turn off the TV and instructed us to “go outside.”
I was a somewhat sensitive kid and often drawn to introspective songs on the AM dial, like Harry Chapin’s poignant “Cat’s in the Cradle” and Don McLean’s epic ode to Buddy Holly “American Pie,” but it was Elton John’s classic “Daniel,” which always left me emotional (still does) wondering why Daniel had to leave. I realized even then that Daniel left, was not coming back, may have even died, and that the narrator was still feeling the pain “of the scars that won’t heal.” I would have to play that 45 when I was alone, just in case it got me too emotional because I didn’t want my older brother Tom thinking I was being a “sissy.” Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” seemed to speak to the very existential essence of my being, making me acutely aware of my mortality for the brief two-and-a-half minutes it played (and sometimes long afterward), so I often had to go take a swing set break after playing that one. I have to admit that all these songs, along with Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and Olivia Newton John’s version of “Greensleeves,” would tug on my heartstrings so bad I would tear up if in the right mood (those damned minor chords).
Some other memorable 45s were story songs, especially those with tragic tales of woo or controversial topics that I did not fully understand at the time, but could feel the seriousness in the singer’s voice: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Mr. Bojangles” (about a dancing man who still pines for his long lost dog “after 20 years he still grieves”), Arlo Guthrie’s nostalgic train tale “City of New Orleans” (with its incredibly catchy chorus and old-timey saloon sounding feel), Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again Naturally” (who sang about throwing himself off a tower after being stood up at a church on his wedding day), Terry Jack’s “Seasons in the Sun” (the narrator reminiscing his youth and saying goodbye to his family and sweetheart Michelle on his death bed, explaining how “its hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky”). [“Seasons in the Sun” was my sister Cheryl’s least favorite song (she called it “corny”), and it drove her crazy whenever I used to play it]. One song, Vicki Lawrence’s “The Night that the Lights went out in Georgia,” scared the living daylights out of me. It told a haunting tale of “the night that they hung an innocent man,” a line I had nightmares over. I had to prepare myself anytime I would listen to that record because I understood that the lady singing the song was confessing to being the real killer and that she was still out there somewhere on the loose. Before I ended up purposely dropping that one down the crack at the edge of the cellar stairs, I went back many times to hear that song when I wanted to masochistically elicit that terrifying feeling.
A number of records were in constant rotation on our red and white suitcase record player. Paul McCartney & Wings’ raunchy rocker “Hi Hi Hi” was a personal favorite. It had a great sound and got us moving, shaking, or nodding along with its chugging rhythm, but I had no idea what the singer meant from the get-go. When he sang, “When I met you at the station, you were standing with a bootleg in your hand” I pictured someone literally holding a pant leg or a boot. When he said he wanted the girl to “lie on the bed, get you ready for my…” Body gun? We could never figure out just what he was saying in that line. It was years later that I understood what he was really suggesting when he said, “I’m gonna do it to ya, gonna do ya, sweet banana!” The B-side of that record was the funky reggae “C-Moon” that I also liked, because it was so loose (“Was that the intro?”) and seemed more of a kid-oriented novelty song. Some years later, my aunt Loretta gave me a 45 single of The Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There”/“I Want to Hold Your Hand” that she bought after seeing them on the Ed Sullivan TV Show back in February 1964. It blew my mind when I finally realized that it was the same singer singing on all these songs, “Uncle Albert” (another 45 we had with a green apple label), as well as that song “Let it be” that had caught my ear and changed by DNA all those years ago.
I frequently put on Steely Dan’s enigmatic smooth jazz hit “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number,” which began with what sounded like a bird cooing, had some great cascading piano phrasings, and little rhythmic swirls and intriguing dynamic percussive beats that made it unique. The lyrics piqued my innate curiosity, and left me wondering just who this “Rikki” guy was, and what was so special about that number he was given by the narrator. The Eagles’ anthem “Take it to the Limit” was another 45 we played quite often. We loved the trudging bluesy feel, the harmonies in the chorus, and especially the main vocal (I still look forward to hearing Randy Meisner hit that high note in the end of the song as it winds down). My sisters would go out and buy the new 8-track of the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) album with the eagle skull on it. Another favorite 45 was Orleans’ catchy “Still the One,” which had a distinctive low bass backing vocal harmony like in Olivia Newton John’s “Let Me Be There” (which I used to think was a reference to Fruit Loops cereal: “Let me take you through that wonderland that only TOUCANS share”) and “Driver’s Seat,” a catchy 70s one-hit-wonder radio hit by Sniff ‘n’ the Tears. I’d try to sing the low part each time I played any of these records, especially in the solo a cappella vocal break sections.
In June 1976, Egremont’s neighboring town of Alford marked their bicentennial with a celebration that included a public sing-along session led by Alan and Roselle Chartock. During this performance, Alan played Pete Seeger’s rendition of the folk song “The Titanic (When That Great Ship Went Down).” I was intrigued by the chorus’ refrain of “Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives. It was sad when that great ship went down,” which we cheerily sang along with while Alan plunked out the ironically bouncy and upbeat melody on his banjo. This was the first time I’d ever heard of the famous ocean liner’s sinking, and the empathy I felt for the people on the ship both frightened and fascinated me. Later that year, we acquired a 45 of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which had that same effect on me. This tragic tale of the sinking of the bulk ore carrier S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, chilled me to the bone, tantalized my overactive imagination, and evoked a melancholy mood of desolation each time I heard that reverb-laden ghostly guitar riff and eerie vocal. While this long song played, I could picture the doomed vessel caught in a horrific seasonal storm and swiftly and mysteriously sinking like a stone to the bottom, taking the lives of the twenty-nine crewmembers to their watery graves. The song was, and still is, quite haunting and yet sublimely beautiful.
Later 70’s hits like Hall and Oates’ “Rich Girl” and Billy Joel’s “Big Shot” were deemed cool by my siblings and me because they (scandalously) used the b-word in the lyrics. Growing up in an American Catholic household (photos of the holy trinity–JFK, RFK, and JC–adorned our hall wall), we weren’t even allowed the tamest utterance of “damn” or “hell,” much less any of the other more intense curse words. We’d have to change the car radio station any time Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s version of “Blinded by the Light” came on since mom would undoubtedly ask “What is he saying?” after the chorus came on. While down in our kid world in the basement den, away from any adult’s watchful eyes and ears, we’d robustly sing along and yell out the “Go on and cry in your coffee, but don’t come BITCHIN’ to me!” line or turn up the speaker as loud as it would go when Darryl Hall adlibbed “She’s a rich bitch girl” during the record fade out.
EPILOGUE: When my father abandoned our family before the beginning of the next decade, ironically the music world he’d introduced me to would become my saving grace when I found myself burdened by complex emotions. Years later, when cassette tapes were our latest listening vehicles for music, my siblings and I brought handfuls of our unwanted 45 records up to the pasture and tossed them around at trees, down at the ground (where the muddy marshy soil swallowed them up), and inadvertently at each other. They flew farther and faster than Frisbees, but without any controllable trajectory, so we sometimes had to duck or jump out of the way as not to get struck by one of the hurling discs whizzing by our faces. No one was ever maimed, but we came close. I cringe every time I think about the final days of those wondrous records. Over the many decades that have followed, my musical tastes have changed, evolved, and expanded to more rock, alternative, Indy, and Americana music, but to this day whenever I hear any of those 70’s gems come on the airwaves, in stores, or on YouTube, I am immediately transported back in time to my younger years, “free my soul” and “drift away” down to the cool cellar basement den, a time of innocence, discovery, and awakening listening to the tinny tiny magical sounds that crackled out of the small side speaker of our glorious red and white suitcase record player.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all-access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class, and all our online communities.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher and our online community.