My ninth birthday celebration was memorable. It must be memorable because I remember it like it was yesterday. We drove into New York City from our Long Island home. (We, by the way, included my parents, my brother and my sister).
Back in 1970, Radio City Music Hall would premier a new movie and, before it began a dance troupe named the Rockettes would entertain the audience. For almost a century, the Rockettes have been American icons. They have appeared at Radio City Music Hall in hundreds of stage spectaculars, and have participated in many historic and memorable events. To me, they were these unbelievably beautiful women who did everything in unison.
When the Rockettes were finished and the orchestra went silent, the theater went dark and the movie began. The stage was now empty and the screen was terribly large. The movie was called Cactus Flower. The only thing I knew was that it featured Goldie Hawn, the silly dancer from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
After the movie, we walked to the General Motors Building and had dinner at a table in the shape of a racing car. It was fun and, as I said, memorable but the highlight was when we arrived home. My parents gave me my present, a tape recorder. With no idea what to do with my new gift, I turned it on and recorded side one and side two of the album, John Barleycorn Must Die. I didn’t own the album, my brother did. His bedroom was the other side of the thin wall in my bedroom and whatever music he played, I heard perfectly.
I went on to tape the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead, Chicago’s Debut Album, Paul McCartney’s Debut Album, the Allman Brothers Band, Idlewild South, and every single released by the Beatles. I was unaware of good music or bad music. I just knew I heard these songs every night. On Saturday afternoon’s I would hear the new album my brother bought after spending his allowance at Sam Goody, the music and entertainment retailer for the next best group who I never heard of, but after a week I could sing every track by heart.
I became the go-to music guy in the third grade. If anyone had a question about Jimi Hendrix, they asked me. I just listened to my wall and my brother’s stereo and it all came to me.
Classic Rock stopped somewhere in the mid-1980s for me. Don’t get me wrong, I really like U2, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Billie Eilish, and Alanis Morissette among others. But I am very sentimental and must say that when I hear some of these 1970s albums I am no longer a fifty-something-year-old man. I am transformed into that nine-year-old child who learned about music from his wall and knew the lead singer for Traffic was a guy named Steve and chuckled when my dad questioned my brother on why he had an album by a group named the Who. (“What happened? The What was taken?” he joked).
Music has a way of taking us to another time and another place. I suppose that one day “God’s Plan” by Drake may hold special meaning to one of my sons but I wish they would just one time listen to in a gadda da vida with me and not think that I am some sort of monster.