The Soundtrack of my Life

Being smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boomer Generation made for some fantastic music. My whole life seems to be accompanied by a sound track, for music has been a major part of my life since I can remember.

As a grammar school student on the front porch of a two room school house waiting for the buses to arrive to whisk us away home, we use to imitate and pretend to be the Beatles, the Monkeys, Herman's Hermits. "Mrs Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter", Brenda Kay sang the lead with Missy and me doing the harmony.

In High School our class theme song was "Brown Sugar". It was necessary to enter the smoking lounge, (aka the girls bathroom) singing, "Yea! Yea! Yea! Wooooo!!!" We laid around the swimming pool during our summer breaks with our transistor radios pumping out Blood Sweat and Tears and CCR. We rode around town with the radios blaring at full blast flooding the town with the lyrics to "Sugar, Sugar".

We laid around in dark rooms listening to the Beatles White Album. We played Spin the Bottle with Led Zeppelin in the background.

Things got a little more serious in College. We had 8 Track tapes then and were able to carry our music with us in our cars. I recall fondly Z Z Topp's Tres Hombres album being played over and over as we drove to Land Between the Lakes in Terry's lime green Pinto, with the windows rolled up smoking the longest biggest fattest joints we could roll. When we opened the car doors the smoke bellowed out.

We danced and gyrated to the Dobbie Brothers, on chairs and table tops, "I'd like to hear some funky Dixie Land Pretty Mama come and take me by the hand, by the hand, take me by the hand............" in a complex called the Winchester Apartments, which actually were 10 two room bungalows. Everyone wanted to live there and the waiting list was .... well, very long.

We partied there every night.

No wonder I flunked out.

We went over the state line into Tennessee, (the legal drinking age at that time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, was 18)to The Cotton Club and crammed ourselves into the cinder block building. We drank cheap bottle beer while a band called Clap hands Here Comes Charlie belted out the songs by Chicago. We danced like lunatics doing crazy dances like The Funky Chicken and the Penguin.

There was a BlueGrass Period thrown in there at one time. I can appreciate a good banjo. Has anyone ever seen Bela Fleck? That guy is hot. Tony Rice and Keith Whitley are a couple of people I got to meet and be part of that scene for awhile.

From there I graduated to The Stones and stayed there for a long time, until Prince came along and blew me away.

Aerosmith became the background noise to my life about the same time I purchased my first walkman. I began running and jogging at that time. To this day when ever I hear Chip Away The Stone I want to jump out of my car and run around it at break neck speed a few times.

Music was so important to me for the longest time! Even when I succumbed to disco in the late 1970's, it was okay because along with that comes a mental image of the only time in my life I got to hang with a posse of women! It was a period in our lives when we all landed back in our home town. We haunted the Disco's of Lexington at the time, Greensleeves, Stingles, the Library, Johnnie Angels. We'd get out on the dance floor with each other and get down!

Somehow it began to fade out, not so important anymore I suppose because I finally became an adult and responsibility was pressed on me. Yet, in the background there always was the hint of the sound track, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

This past summer just because of a few moments and a fragment of a conversation I ventured out and looked for a Bob Dylan CD. I found Bob Dylan 1975 and when I popped it in my the car Cd player, it did not come out for a week.

There was the most beautiful angelic woman singing with him. I kept listening over and over to "I WILL BE RELEASED" wondering if this knock out talent was still singing. Imagine my shock at how stupid I can be when I realized it was Joan Baez.

I have been picking up all the Bobby CD's I can find since then.

While traveling home for Thanksgiving I heard the nicest piece of music and I thought to myself, that sounds a little like Dylan.

It was. I pulled into the first Walmart and bought the his latest release, Modern TIMES. It has not come out of my vehicle CD player since.

It is mellow. Oh so mellow. And perfect. A masterpiece of brilliant lyrics and soothing music, a little jazzy at times, and then surprising country like. Old country. Willie Country.

I guess with age comes the permission to mellow out.

If its good enough for Bob, then it's good enough for me.