Superstars of the 70's

 

 

August 23, 2021

 

Greetings from the response,

 There is an interesting connection, a fit, the way things live together in our minds.  I don’t have any say about this connection, it existed before I could name these kinds of things.  Thoughts, emotions, images, experiences, all nested together in some mysterious magic in our minds.

 When I hear the song ‘Tumblin’ Dice’ by the Stones, I naturally expect that next Otis Redding will sing ‘The Dock of the Bay’.  James Taylor will finish ‘Fire and Rain’ and, of course, The Dead will start ‘Truckin’.   This is now a part of me, as natural as breathing.

 In the house where I grew up, there was the ‘breakfast room’, a space just off the kitchen, lined with windows looking out into a miniscule back yard.  In one corner was nested the small built-in desk that held the sewing machine where my mother made clothes to humiliate us in school.  Diagonal from that was where the hi-fi was kept. 

 A few of you would recognize this monstrosity; it was a turntable with a built in am/fm radio, all of it housed in a piece of furniture large enough to rival a decent sized coffin. We kids, those who had the means to buy records, were not encouraged to use the hi-fi.  Perhaps the word ‘forbidden’ was used.  Semantics.

 I was a teenager in the 70’s, and somehow in the early part of that tumultuous decade I became the owner of Warner Brothers’ four album set called ‘Superstars of the 70’s’. 

 Those four discs played on that record player a lot, along with a few 45’s of my sisters, and the rest of our modest collection of vinyl.  Forty-eight songs, locked in place on each of the discs, played hundreds of times, only in the order that Warner Brothers deemed.  So, even today, when I hear ‘One Way Out’ by the Allman Brothers, there is a little vibration of expectation in my brain that says, “Aretha is now going to sing ‘Natural Woman’.”

 These notes and lyrics are wound together in ways that Pavlov may have had some understanding, but the connections are more than just conditioning.  Each of those songs, while not all my favorite, made space in mind with its neighbor, and with other images and memories and with the emotions that bind them together.

 The hi-fi was eventually moved to a location closer to the living room, and to its rightful status in life.  There the romping Highland Fling and other favorite Scottish bagpipe music could be played with more appropriate decorum than the breakfast room. 

 In its place in the corner of the breakfast room was our first record player, placed regally on a folding TV tray, and scattered around that the albums and singles we accumulated.  Somehow, my four siblings and I shared that space and the turntable and managed to listen to music, probably while we were supposed to be doing something else.

 The mix of images and the feelings that come with them are complicated and beautiful.  I see my family as they were, younger and less worldly, each of us, including our parents, trying to figure out how to make our lives what they could be.  It’s more than the breakfast room or the music, or the sewing machine or standing in front of the oven to get warm in the morning.  It’s all of that, and with it, this thing that winds between it all.

 I had a live album from Carlos Santana and Buddy Miles, recorded in 1972.  I played it loud and often, as it was meant to be.  My younger sister Leslie, whose musical taste was perhaps tilted in other ways, for some reason showed an interest.  I played the cut ‘Free Form Funkafide Filth’, a twenty-five-minute-long jam session.  I remember her sitting with me listening, and we talked about how the musicians wove in and out, took the lead, stepped back, how the song had different segments and themes.  I have no expertise in music, it was just a conversation between a brother and sister, one that didn’t include bickering or teasing.

 Years later, when both of us had children and other collections of music and living that eclipsed those earlier days, we were in her kitchen talking about something else and she said: “I remember sitting in the breakfast room, and you taught me how to listen to music.”  Giving me way too much credit in that sentence, she held the image and emotion of us there with Carlos Santana, all spun together with a bond that somehow survived decades.

 My choice of music has evolved since then, somewhat.  But nothing will dilute the feeling I have when I hear a song from the ‘Superstars’ albums and feel the expectation of the next one in the lineup.  Stephen Stills cannot sing ‘Love the One You’re With’ unless right after Yes plays ‘Roundabout’.

 This vignette demonstrates the beautiful construct of us.  It shows how we become who we are, and how the memories, a blend of emotions and images and all our senses, contribute to how we react to life.  There is something that is woven between all these which seems to be our essence, the most fundamental part of our existence.  It is more than synapses and psychology.

 This morning as I wrote I have been playing ‘Free Form Funkafide Filth’, which holds many memories of beaches and parties and dancing and fun, but chief among those, the first thought as the music began, was the image of my sister Leslie sitting with me in the breakfast room.  That song cannot play unless we are in it.

 

Hope this finds you forever expecting what’s next,

 

David

 

 Copyright © 2021 David Smith