Songs That Are Like Old Friends

I try to avoid participating in Facebook memes and games. I know they’re primarily promotional, and designed to drive up site traffic as well as to divine each user’s tastes and interests so that bots can market stuff to them more accurately. I’ve never played Farmville or Candy Crush or Bubble Witch or Jackpot Party Casino Slots. Fortunately, nobody hit me up for the ice bucket challenge last year so I’d have to publicly demur, not least because I don’t have a smartphone to be able to shoot a photo or video and post it. But last week a friend tagged me for a five-day song challenge:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post five cool songs in as many days. Each day, I'm tagging three friends, in the hopes they'll do the same. Expanding horizons, facilitating the tapping of toes, providing distractions from the looming void, etc."

I liked being tapped, especially alongside two other Facebook friends of mine named David. I don’t see them or my Facebook challenger in person very often, though I’ve worked with each in staged readings or on video jobs in the past. And I really liked reminiscing about the music that has enriched my life in the past -- thinking about which five songs might be most interesting to choose; not necessarily my absolute favorites, not necessarily the coolest, but a little off the beaten path as well as personally illuminating with regard to my musical journey through life.

So you here you go, Elizabeth: not on Facebook, not extending the challenge to anyone else, probably not in five days, and with much more commentary than would be appropriate for Facebook. . . .

Song No. 1: In New Orleans

I was seven or eight years old when I bought the first two music albums of my own with my own (allowance) money: More of the Monkees and We’re the Banana Splits. (I reproduce the album covers here under the fair-use doctrine.) I’m not sure which was first, but I distinctly remember picking up the Banana Splits LP out of the bins at Hiron’s Drug Store at 18th Avenue and Pearl Street, about four blocks’ walk from home.

Right away I want to dispel the notion that I was a pop culture-obsessed kid. My father had obtained his master’s in music about five years before, taught music in local schools, and played piano early evenings at Pietro’s Pizza and very late at the vets’ club. I’m told that as an infant I was often laid on a blanket under the grand piano while he practiced Chopin nocturnes and etudes, and Beethoven sonatas, which might account for my peculiar sensitivity to music everywhere, as a listener if not a consistent or skilled practitioner. Dad also had a steady stream of piano students through the house, to take lessons and to show off their work in informal recitals for their colleagues and families, which he called “piano parties.” I was also a student of his for a time.

In addition, Don Loftus had an extensive record collection of at least two or three hundred mostly classical and jazz LPs. I probably didn’t get into the Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel, Oscar Peterson, and the Modern Jazz Quartet albums until my teens but I know I heard Fats Waller as a child, and enjoyed listening to Sgt. Pepper. My Dad caught an uncharacteristic yen for an album by Vanilla Fudge called Renaissance.

This bombastically atmospheric acid-rock band’s eerie and plaintive cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” caught his ear on FM, so he bought the album, which was unlike anything else in his collection. I liked it a lot. If you’re not put off by overly dramatic lyrics, vocals, and instrumental backing, there’s not a bad cut on the album, but my favorite is the epic opener, “The Sky Cried/When I Was a Boy,” which goes over the top on all counts, including thunder, pounding drums and cymbals, and searing lead guitar. This dates from 1968, when Deep Purple and Led Zep were just forming, and heavy metal and Yes were barely a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

I had an RCA Victor radio-record player in my bedroom. It included the logo of the terrier listening to the morning-glory horn, consisted of a large black box with a lid that opened and shut, and stood on two-foot-tall wooden dowel legs. The record player might have been busted, because I don’t remember using it much. Instead, I liked twisting the knob and watching the needle move up and down the glowing radio dial on the side of the box, and often went to sleep listening to local AM pop stations. I remember Motown being on heavy rotation then: songs like The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

My folks had given me some music appreciation surveys of opera, symphonic classics, and other music as well as Shakespeare that I listened to fitfully on my own record player along with Danny Kaye’s Tubby the Tuba, Little Toot, and other great children’s records. I may also have purchased a couple of LPs that contained cheesy dramatizations of the adventures of Batman and Green Hornet before the Monkees and Banana Splits disks.

These selections intimate a hunger to fit in, now that I was in school, because my parents expressly did NOT have a television. I caught glimpses of Batman, Green Hornet, and the Splits on the screens at other people’s homes, but I never got to watch whole episodes of any of these shows. A yearning to belong may also have been betrayed, at that time, by my purchase and labor on die-cast plastic models of the Monkeemobile, the starship Enterprise from “Star Trek,” a flying saucer from “The Invaders,” and the U.S.S. Seaview and flying sub from “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”

I’m sure I played the Monkees album many more times than the Banana Splits. It had two genuine classics, “I’m a Believer” and “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” and several other decent songs like “She,” Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow),” and Mike Nesmith’s “Mary, Mary.” The Banana Splits disk was a little too bubble-gummy, though I retain a rueful fondness for the theme song, “The Tra La La Song” (I know all the lyrics).

But there was one cut that stood out from the rest. It’s a Delta blues tune -- or maybe “Delta blues lite” -- that featured tasty acoustic guitar work. Nothing earth-shattering -- the lyrics and vocals are pretty run-of-the-mill -- but still, it rang a firmly contrasting note from the froth of all the rest of the album. Probably the first blues tune I really discovered for myself before moving on to enjoy much more interesting and authentic blues later, it’s called “In New Orleans.”

I got a kick out of running it past my high school prog-rock music buddy in a blindfold music test years later.