The Year, the Car, the Song, the Singers

Response to Prompt #30  Get Your Groove On

When I first read this prompt, I felt like I had already said so much about my life in music.  But then as I thought about it, many creative ideas popped up. The first one I sketched out was a collection of songs that remind me of teaching -- songs I used to teach, or that my students loved and wanted me to play over and over again.  I had over twenty songs written down, then worked to narrow down the list.  But somehow, it still felt all over the place, some songs carrying more weight, and some only distant memories.

Then I came up on the idea of songs I recall singing along to in the car.  This felt like a fresh idea, not as immediate in my life, and definitely had connections to various life events.  So with that, I give you my list of songs that never fail to take me back to exact time, place, and company.  These are powerhouse songs to me, even as I don't really care for a few of them. They carry a memory, and that is good enough.

It’s late autumn in 1964, a warm winter day between the holidays.  I’m in our station wagon with members of my family, as well as a couple of my dad’s cousins, Carol and Bobby.  We are listening to the AM radio, and a song by Shirley Ellis comes on.  It’s called “The Name Game,” and Carol and Bobby immediately took charge of teaching us how to sing it.  As we drove the Lorain County roads, we sang everyone's name, one by one, together.  This is my first clear memory of singing along with others in the car.

It’s a year later, the fall of 1965, driving in that same Chevy station wagon along Center Ridge Road out to my grandmother’s house.  The Four Seasons were always being played on the radio, and our favorite to sing along to is “Let’s Hang On.”  It became a tradition to sing any Four Seasons song that came on: my dad, my brothers, and me.

It’s the summer of 1971, and we are in a rental station wagon making our first trip to visit our cousins in Alexandria, Virginia.  We are in mountainous areas, most likely along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The AM radio is giving us plenty of opportunities to sing along to John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” as a family.  All of us knew the words. It is a clear and distinct travel memory, a trip that was very special, and the last year before our world fell apart when my brother got ill.

It’s autumn, 1971, and my friends and I are 16-years-old.  My friend Laura has been dating a 19-year-old man named Chuck behind her parents back.  Because of that, Chuck sometimes drives all of us to school: Laura, Kate, Mary Kay, and me, crammed into his Chevy Camaro.  The big hit that fall was a song by Cher, about a sixteen-year-old girl and an older man.  I recently read that Cher hates the song, but for us “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” gave us a sing-a-long opportunity those school day mornings. 

And, as we were wont to do, we liked to change the words.  Cher would sing:

And every night all the men would come around

And lay their money down.

But we liked to sing it this way:

And every night all the men would come around

And lay my body down.

The subtilties of the song were not lost on us.  And Chuck never failed to act shocked at our brashness, we in our blue and green plaid Catholic schoolgirl uniforms participating in a clandestine activity.  Nothing subtle about that!

It is the summer of 1973.  We might be in the blue 1972 Chevy Nova, which lacked power steering and belonged to a woman I worked with who didn’t drive, inherited from her ex-husband who took his own life in it (running the car in the closed garage, not a gun!)  Or we might be in Becky’s dad’s green Pontiac Grand Prix.  Or we might be in Marc’s yellow 1964 Ford Mustang (not as glamorous as you might imagine.)  Becky, Debbie, Cheryl, and (maybe)Marc, and I are singing one of three songs at the top of our lungs: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” “Loves Me Like a Rock,” and as we got into fall, “Monster Mash.”  I cannot even begin to describe how hearing any of those three songs take me back to that summer I had just graduated from high school, and the whole world was waiting for me.

My 1973 singing partners -- Cheryl, Becky, and Debbie-- seated on the back of the Grand Prix

It took a while, but I finally met the world when I got my first “grown-up” job as a computer operator, right before Christmas in 1975.  I had inherited the red Volkswagen Beetle from my brother, whom had purchased his own car, and that is what I used to get to work a few cities away.  As I was getting used to a full time schedule working for an exceedingly weird family (their middle school son was training me), I would drive home on snowy evenings unable not to sing along to “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” playing repeatedly on AM radio: just me and Paul.  I was by myself, but the song made me feel uplifted. I was uncertain about the workplace, but needed the job, and I was coming up to the first Christmas after the loss of my brother. I needed to participate in Paul's humor in order to keep moving forward.

It’s the summer of 1983.  I’ve been divorced for nearly a year, and I’m driving my new gunmetal blue Buick Skyhawk – my first brand new car with payments! Every day I put on my power suit and head into Cleveland for my job.  Without fail, while I'm getting on Interstate 71, I hear one of two songs that make me want to drive very fast:  Stevie Nick’s “Stand Back” or “P.Y.T.” by Michael Jackson. I would hit the gas and sing along, feeling happy and free in my new life designed just for me, and working at a job where I felt appreciated.

Summer is definitely a theme here, right?  Now it is the summer of 1985, the year I turned 30.  I often go out to lunch with my friend Ginny – so we are either in my two-tone blue Buick Somerset, or her red Pontiac Grand Am.  Sometime while driving to or from the restaurant, we would hope and pray we’d hear “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen, our favorite lines being the last verse, which Ginny and I sang the loudest:

Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight
and I'm going to drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it
but I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days

We swore this would never happen to us!

Bouncing ahead now to the winter of 1994.  Our area was experiencing a horrible cold snap – three days of temperatures below zero.  I’m a business owner, tooling around in my green Infiniti G3 with the tan leather interior (my favorite car ever until I got my current Tucson), and I realize I am completely over the regular radio stations I’ve been listening to.  I decide to turn on the country station –WGAR– just to hear something different.

And this is when I fell in love with 1990’s country music. 

The song I recall the best, because it was the first one that I learned the words to and could sing along, was “John Deere Green” by Joe Diffie.  At first I was a little befuddled by the words, not quite understanding what it was all about.  But eventually the meaning came through:

In John Deere green
On a hot summer night
He wrote "Billy Bob loves Charlene"
In letters three-foot high
And the whole town said the boy should have used red
But it looked good to Charlene
In John Deere green

I felt rejuvenated by the music after years of all varieties of rock and pop. I listened to country for the next couple years, until the stations decided to reduce the number of songs they had on their playlist, and it all began to be too repetitive.  But for a while, Joe and I had a blast singing his song

With the ability to listen to CDs and tapes in my car, I didn’t listen to the radio that much as the years went by.  But there is one more song that stands out in my mind, a song that I would sing along to every chance I got.  It was popular during the time I was preparing to move to Florida, and I remember hearing it many times on the drive down in my gunmetal blue Toyota Camry.  It was a solo sing-a-long since the only person with me was my sister-in-law Gail, and I don’t think she knew that song.  But I would sing along with Rob Thomas to the Santana song “Smooth.”  It still stands as the song that reflects the year 2000 to me in all its manifestations, probably because it played on the radio for a very long time.  But it is one I never get tired of, and I still dig singing:

And if you said this life ain't good enough
I would give my world to lift you up
I could change my life to better suit your mood
'Cause you're so smooth

I don’t know. There is just something there that confirmed my journey, and brought me smoothly to where I am today.