The Soundtrack to My Youth

"I think George Michael may have died..."

I was sitting at the dining room table at Mom's, having just finished Christmas supper, when I received the text.  The year two thousand and sixteen, already cursed with so much darkness and death, had claimed yet another.

I suppose you never know how news like that will hit you until it does.  But amidst all the usual Christmas gaiety - the excitement of the nephews and niece, the adults talking, some Christmas movie on the television -- it took everything within me to keep from weeping openly.

I walked down the hall for a moment to gather myself.  When I returned, I told my sister the news.  She looked shocked for a second, then sang a couple of lines of "Faith" and moved on.  She didn't get it.  She was a bit too young then.

"Then" being somewhere in the vicinity of 1988.

Faith.  Father Figure.  Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.  One More Try.  Careless Whisper.  That music was the soundtrack to my youth.

For me, it represents those sweet spot days of thirteen to nineteen.  First cars and awkward first kisses.  Bonfires and pep rallies and hanging out at the mall.  Falling in love and first broken hearts.  When the real world had mostly yet to begin to erode the innocence.

I remember being on a field trip.  We were going to Helen Keller's birthplace, I think.  On the bus, I had strategically positioned myself on the seat in front of Annalisa Gray, on whom I had a little crush.  She was listening to the "Faith" album on her Walkman, which made her even more appealing.  

Though I had both the "Make It Big" and "Music From the Edge of Heaven" cassettes from the Wham! days, I had not yet procured my own copy of George Michael's first solo album.  I daydreamed that we might share headphones while listening to it, but as reality would have it, I think she loaned me her Walkman long enough to listen to one song.

The next year, she and I would perfect the art of the tongueless kiss.  (Is art the right word?)  I got my own copy of "Faith" and flat wore it out.  As it almost always does, the music outlived the crush.

I guess eventually the music outlives us all...

"I'm looking out for angels, just trying to find some peace..."

How Old We've Gotten, How Many We've Lost

It was the spring of my discontent.  One of several.  I had been unemployed for about two months, ever since I called out one Friday night at the Food Fair so I could attend the county basketball tournament.  At the tender age of seventeen, I was on my own.  

Well, that's not entirely true.

I mean, I still lived with my parents and they fed me and stuff, and I was still in high school.  But...  I had stocked my last gallon of milk, fronted my last aisle, stolen my last grape... (What?  They're like half a cent each.  I ate like three a night.  Who amongst us hasn't absconded with a bit of produce without paying, let them cast the first stone... OWW!  Who threw that?!)

That May, I landed a weekend job at the local AM radio station.  It was, um, quaint.  They still had a fifteen-minute swap-and-shop phone-in program (think of it like Craigslist on the radio) every weekday.  Each morning at 7:57 they (we) aired the funeral announcements (think obituaries on the... well, you get the idea).

It also happened to be a country station.  The year was 1990.  Up 'til then, I had not been all that keen on country music.  In fact, we were just coming out of my favorite decade of pop music, and I was pickin' up whatever Casey Kasem was countin' down.

As it turned out, my hiring coincided with a remarkable country music boom.  Garth had come out in '89, along with Clint Black and Alan Jackson.  George Strait, Alabama, and Reba were all in the long sweet spots of their careers.  Brooks & Dunn were about to break through, along with Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and on and on.  Coincidence?  Well, as I just used the word "coincided," then yes, completely.

I still remember the first time I played/heard "Friends in Low Places."  It was on a 45 (think compact discs for old folks).  Perhaps it was because I was still a few months away from my first crippling heartbreak and had never tasted beer, but the song didn't strike me as all that remarkable.  In fact, I predicted then and there that Clint Black would indeed have a longer, more successful career than Garth.  Still waiting to see how that one turns out.

I saw the change from vinyl to CD's to mp3's.  Commercials went from carts (think re-recordable 8-tracks) to mini-discs to mp3's.  And within a couple of years, the station applied for and was granted an FM license.  Eventually, I moved to full-time working the night shift on a real FM radio station (think SiriusXM for old folks).

Anytime someone would ask about my job, the answer was always some variant of "I'm only doing this until I find something else/figure out what I want to do for a career."  I assume it was part of my Peter Pan syndrome, always waiting for some fantastical ship whose arrival was always just around the corner.  

Then one day, it was twenty-five years later.  And I had spent approximately twenty-one of those working for various radio stations filling an assortment of positions, from DJ to reporter, producer to high school football scoreboard co-host.

So why did the career-that-wasn't end?  Well, consider that except for the most recent, every other radio station I had worked for has since been bought out, changed format and moved, or shut down entirely.  I have never spoken truer words than these: Clear Channel killed the radio star.

Perhaps I'll write more about my radio days later -- I can sense the masses clamoring.  But what got me thinking about those days were last week's CMA Awards Show.  My sister texted (think Snapchat for old folks) the day after the Awards to see if I had watched.  I had not.  

The last station I worked for was classic country, '50s through '90s, which probably contributed to my being mostly abhorred by what passes for current country music.  (And while I'm at it, you pesky kids, you get off my lawn!)

She went on to inform me, due to it being the 50th Anniversary, there had been a tribute of some sort and quite a few of the old guard had appeared.  So I spent a bit of Thursday scrounging around YouTube watching clips.

Soon I found myself on the outskirts of Nostalgia-ville, cruising down a warm and fuzzy stretch of Memory Lane (one of my favorite roads as you may have noticed over the years).  There was a montage of some of the legends who have passed, including Waylon, Haggard, Cash, Keith Whitley, Tammy Wynette, and George Jones.  

I had not expected to become teary-eyed, yet there I was.

The music had played a significant role in my life, certainly that was some part of it.  I think it's fairly common to feel a connection with the people and things who share our little strip of time.  The singers and bands, actors and athletes, songs and TV shows.  In all the years of creation, these were ours.

But mostly I suppose it had to do with that old familiar reminder of time's swift and certain passage.  Watching Alan Jackson, George Strait, Dwight Yoakam, Vince Gill, Randy Travis, Alabama, and others on stage, I soon had the thought, "Wait a second.  How did they become the old guard?"

For you may be able to convince me of many things, but you will never convince me that the early '90s were twenty-five years ago.  Feels more like ten.  Maybe fifteen.  But twenty-five?  One third of an average lifespan?  A quarter of a century?  It seems as impossible as a thing can be.

I swear just the other day I was dusting off an old Charley Pride LP, placing it on the turntable, back cueing it to the start of "Kiss An Angel Good Mornin," and flipping the switch from 45 to 33 1/3...

Geez, that must have been some switch.

"If we had an hourglass to watch each one go by, or a bell to mark each one to pass, we'd see just how they fly..."

How I Roll: Ride, Sally, Ride

Excerpt from a recent conversation:

"I never knew you had a Mustang. When was this?"
"Early nineties."
"Why haven't you done a blog entry about it?"
"Well, that was when my cars stopped being so crappy, so it's harder to make them entertaining... although the roof did leak."
"Was it a convertible?"
"No."

And thus we have the return of the How I Roll series.

I don't remember if we sold the gold Cavalier or not. Some cars are like old underwear. They just sort of eventually disappear. But I do remember the day my parents asked, "Would you want a Mustang?"

The only other time I remember anything close to this happening in my life was when I was nine years old. I had been outside playing in the neighborhood. When I came home, my parents were standing beside the carport talking. They asked me, "Would you want an Atari?"

Of course I wanted an Atari! There wasn't even a question. That was like asking would you want to quit school, or would you want to visit the set of the Neighborhood Of Make Believe.

Likewise, there was no question I would want a Mustang. Especially considering my previous three cars had been a 1980 Monte Carlo, a baby blue Escort with louvers, and a gold four-door Cavalier.

Mind you, my parents asking would I want a Mustang did not equate to them buying me a Mustang. I made the payments. They just found it.

And so it came to pass that my fourth vehicle was a maroonish 1989 Ford Mustang. It was not a convertible. And it was not a 5.0. I was reminded of this when I got into a race with a Toyota Corolla one Friday night and only outran it by half a car-length. ("Oh yeah! Eat some of that 2.3 liter dust!")

However, the Mustang was my first car equipped with power windows. At last, I didn't have to feign power windows by inconspicuously cranking down the window without ever moving my shoulder.

More importantly, it was my first car with both fast forward and rewind buttons for the cassette player. Did it get any better in 1992? Not for me, it didn't.

Then there was the day when Dana Scarborough turned to me in Fundamentals Of Public Speaking and said, "I thought you might like to see these." Her perfect lips, dark sensuous eyes, long spiral-permed brown hair. It took me a few seconds to see the Mustang-related magazines in her hand. It was the first time I had ever been noticed for my car, in a positive light anyway.

I drove it for about two and a half years. Rumor had it that at the three-year mark, you were required to get a mullet, and I didn't want any part of that. Besides, by that time, I had started craving a Jeep Wrangler.

I don't remember a whole lot else about the Mustang. I remember the AC went out at some point. The handle on the glove compartment broke. Oh, and I ran over something coming home from work one night which dented up the plastic underneath the bumper pretty good. And of course, the roof leaked.

But only on the passenger side.

And only when it rained.

"I got a fuel injected engine sittin' under my hood. Shut it off, shut it off, buddy, now I shut you down..."