A 'Trip' down memory lane, musically

I don’t usually listen to commercial radio anymore – oh sure there are times, like when my son’s in the car and he wants to hear ‘X-treme’ radio or hard rock and roll –but for the most part I listen to NPR or college radio.

This past week or so WNCX here in Cleveland has been running 'The 12 greatest years of Rock' – today they will be playing the #1 greatest year as voted on by their listeners the year being 1969. (As side here I’d like to tell WNCX that what would have been really cool to do on their web-site would have been to have a ‘play list’; I realize that’s pretty work intensive – but it would have been very cool)…

I was pleasantly surprised, hearing songs that I had nearly forgotten from my early teens. I was 13 years old in 1973 and the times were just as turbulent as they were during the early 60s – but somehow had managed to take on a more sinister edge with all the Richard Nixon bullshit and Watergate – proof positive that the old adage you can’t trust the government wasn’t just our drug-induced imaginings.

The year before, when I was 12, I protested the Vietnam conflict, had bitter fights at the dinner table with my father, desperately trying to explain to the ‘old’ man that it’s not suppose to be ‘My country right or wrong’. I watched young men getting eaten alive on TV night after night and coming home in those God-awful body bags. The only difference today is that the ‘conflict’ is not being televised – well it is but it’s relatively bloodless. I suppose it’s not in good form anymore to have Dan Rather on those front lines while they are shooting up our boys in the Middle-East – simply not good TV-to-watch-dinner-by….

The music help shaped my life, my fantasies, my imagination, my reason for ‘lighting up’, ‘turning on’, and ‘tuning out’ – I had a lot of fun, I had a lot of close calls. I lost some friends and I gained a lot of writing material for my memoirs.

I lost my mother, I found myself, I left my father’s house all in the span of just a few years. I started off on a journey of self-discovery that I hope and pray never ends.

I still listen to some of that ‘old time rock and roll’ – I’d like to think my taste in music has grown up a bit and it has…but there is nothing like hearing those songs again and having a sip of the bitter-sweet wine that flows like a river through my mind.