More music

When I left for college I left behind almost all of the music on records. They were mostly single .45's. I took exactly one .33 lp album. Iron Butterfly's Ina godda davida. Mom was never so happy to get peace and quiet. The seventies were the death of vinyl records with 8track and cassettes tapes being more verstile for travel. Bruce had a stereo where the speakers folded on top to make a brief case. It had turntable, radio and cassette. Best of all you could dub from the turntable onto the cassette. In the summers when I was home from college I did a lot of dubbing. I also joined two record clubs where you got so many free albums then paid through the nose for the ones you were obligated to buy. They built up, still have most of them gathering dust for many years. There was one group Bruce bought records of that I dubbed and listened to for hours. Bill Chase. The ultimate trumpet player. He could go into the rafters like no other artist before or since. He only made two albums and died in an airplane crash. He is rather obscure. Bruce has the albums, the tapes are long since dead and they have never been released on cd. His most popular song was Get it on. I liked Boys and Girls Together the most.

Then there are show tunes.

The one that has a special place in my heart is Lerner and Lowes' Paint Your Wagon. I gew up listening to They Call the Wind Mariah, There's a coach commin in, I still see Elisa, I talk to the trees.
My senior year in high school is when the movie came out. We went to see it at the Sunshine Theater on Christmas day. It starred Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Harve Presnell as Rotten Luck Louie, who sang Mariah. I still see his name come up on credits on T.V. from time to time, though he's not singing. He did do a wonderful job on Mariah, the only song in the entire movie worth listening too. Lee Marvin's fog horn of a voice on Wondering Star was like hearing tires screeching. One radio station played the song and had twenty calls in ten minutes demanding they never play it again. The movie does have a special place in my memories and I enjoy watching it from time to time.

Then there is Cats. It gave me my theme song: Memories -- I love Barbra Streisand's version of that song. We have the video of the stage play and watch it about every three or four months. I even showed it to my Social Psychology students, when I was teaching the class. I then had them do field research in the school's halls recording all the students they could classify as Gumby cats, Rum Tug Tuggers, Bustopher Jones, etc.
Whenever you get one of those songs in your head that drive you crazy and you want it out, you know the feeling. I just start humming Memories and the brain can't hold two thoughts like that at the same time. I call it my killer tune. I could hum or sing Memories for hours and never get tired of it.
If I do get tired of Memories my fall back tune is Song of angry men from Les Miserables. Aunty Pesty would roll her eyes and fuss, but I loved pulling out the video of the ten year concert performance or listening to the cd while driving.

Then there is Phantom of the Opera.

Nuff said.