Musical Memories – With Pictures!

This is what pretty much every day has looked like for the past several weeks -- clear skies, sunshine, and dry, dry weather. The streetside hanging baskets in St. John's Wood are clearly loving it, with their copious blossoms, but then, the council keeps them watered.

The weather app on my phone says there's a 50/50 chance of rain today, tomorrow, and each day through next Monday. If the odds are right, we should get some precipitation soon. This is so far our driest month of the entire year, with just 1.8 mm of rain -- I would be thrilled to get almost anything. We need a couple of days of slow soaking.

Given our discussion of ABBA and pop music a couple of days ago, I've been thinking about early musical memories. I remember hearing ABBA's "Dancing Queen" on the radio quite a bit as a child -- for some unaccountable reason, my nine-year-old ears heard the lyrics as "the air is clean" -- but of course I'd remember music at that age. What about earlier?

Here I am in what used to be called "nursery school," now known as pre-school, in 1970-71. I'm standing next to the teacher, Mrs. Dahm, holding her hand. Apparently I was big on holding hands back then. The mother of one of the girls in my class -- Kim, on the far right -- told me years later that I'd always hold Kim's hand on the way into school. Seems a bit clingy.

At this point I went to a private Presbyterian school in Tampa, close to where my mom worked at the university. I wasn't quite four years old when I started there, because I had a November birthday, which meant I was younger than most of my classmates for my entire school career.

In 1970, my mom was driving a dark green Ford Mustang with a black interior, and this is where I remember hearing some of my earliest pop music -- riding to and from school in her car. I associate several songs with that Mustang -- Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "Let it Be."

I also remember going to my friend's house -- he's in the photo above, standing two kids away from me, with the red-striped shirt -- and his mother serving us grilled cheese sandwiches. I don't even remember his name now -- Gregory? Gary? Geoffrey? -- but his mother was very pretty and looked like Anita Bryant. I distinctly remember hearing Don McLean's "American Pie" while at his house, and probably not for the first time, given that it was a huge hit that year.

Just for good measure, here's my kindergarten class, from 1971-72. I love how someone made me wear a clip-on tie but didn't bother to tell me to tuck in my shirt. At least I didn't have to wear a bow-tie or a double-breasted suit. My teacher was Mrs. Fisher. Of course the musical memories I'm describing could have come from this year as well, because we were still tooling around in Mom's Mustang.

When I switched to the elementary school in my suburban hometown, north of Tampa, for first grade, I began taking the school bus, and my exposure to pop music on the car radio diminished. In my house, we rarely listened to the radio when I was little, and my mom's idea of a good record was Brahms or the music from "Victory at Sea." I don't think she even owned a pop or rock album, unless you count the cassette of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" that a friend made for her. (She rarely if ever played it. I swiped it years later.) My dad was more tuned in, but strangely I don't remember being exposed to much of his music until after he and my mom divorced in 1974 and he'd take my brother and me to his apartment every weekend. We'd listen to 8-track tapes in his Volkswagen -- Bread, the Fifth Dimension, Simon & Garfunkel, Donovan, Melanie.

I heard music at the house of some friends down the street, the Betzes -- songs like "The Lord's Prayer," which I've already written about, and "Billy, Don't Be a Hero," and "Seasons in the Sun," which I found weird and scary. (Why was he singing about dying?!)

Eventually our school buses had radios installed, and we listened to Q-105 on the way to and from school. That's when my musical memories really begin to flesh out with more variety. At first it was "Oh What a Night" by The Four Seasons, and "Let 'Em In" by Paul McCartney and Wings. As I got older we eventually moved into the years of the Bee Gees and "Saturday Night Fever."

Anyway, that's what I was hearing as a kid. What about you? What are your earliest musical memories?