Time-Life is advertising Ultimate Rock Ballads of the 1970's & 1980's...they've finally hit a musical sweet spot. Boston, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Elton John, Peter Frampton, Styx, Foreigner, Cheap Trick, The Doobie Brothers, The Pretenders, Phil Collins, Rod Stewart, Toto, Queen, Eddie Money, Air Supply, Heart, Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Bonnie Tyler, Starship, Mr. Mister, Fleetwood Mac,Genesis, The Cars, Survivor...these are the life blood of radio during my youth.
The music that accompanied my transition from childhood to adolescence. The age when I first started noticing girls and owned my first radio. It's fairly universal as I was in the Philippines, in an all-boys Catholic School and yet I was listening to the same music anyone in Everytown, America was hearing at the same time.
My grandfather had given me an unexpected gift of a portable radio/dual-cassette player the first year I spent in boarding school and I was a bit retrograde musically, Frank Sinatra was still in rotation on the airwaves and my taste pretty much ran along those lines. Sinatra, The Ray Conniff & His Orchestra, Nat King Cole, ABBA, The Carpenters...these were the 78's lying aroundthe house during my holidays in Zamboanga City. My Grandpa's and Nimpha's (his young wife) music.
MTV still played music and in the Philippines it was a daily two-hour block of television as cable was a distant rumor of America's bounty. Life was pregnant with future promise...I took it for granted that I would one day take over my father's many businesses and there would be all that romance and heartache that Hollywood and popular media bombarded me with on an hourly basis.
I wish I'd known how empty this promise would end up being in my own isolated case.
In any case, my point is that I am now Time-Life's target demographic and therefore youth had passed me by. I only wished I had lived it other than vicariously.
Posted by email from Dismemberment and Mechanization are the Answer (posterous)
Crazy small world. I had a very similar experience growing up, right down to the old records lying around the house and a cheap 60s record player to play them on with a stylus like a clenched fist. I pre-date MTV though but the radio was mostly American and UK tracks, interrupted every so often by a clattering Irish folk group. Happy days? Maybe, happier.
ReplyDeleteOh, how'd I end up here? Apparently we both like Half Past Human. Anyhoo, just passing through...
T.J. Bass really knew how to write a story that would stick in your noggin for twenty odd years on a single reading.
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