Memories from Songs…
Music and Memories Fifty Years Ago!
For some reason I started listening as background music to a streaming show that was playing hits from the summers of the 1970s. Now I understand completely how songs can be time travel machines. I did an entire series of stories over the decades called my Jukebox stories, where a song on a jukebox actually takes the listener back to a memory for the length of the song.
But tonight, after a few concentrated hours of this while I worked on Vellum files and got books into Bookfunnel, I started noticing a few things, a few patterns. Some songs I instantly knew where I was in the 1970s and what I was doing when the song first came out. Other songs had no memory attached at all.
Here is what I was doing in the summers of the 1970s.
- — Summer 1971… Working on a golf course in Boise. Traveling to Nixon/Agnew protests. Managed to stay out of Vietnam thanks to high lottery number.
- — Summer 1972… Played a bunch of golf tournaments before becoming homeless and living in my car looking for job as a golf professional. (Eagles… “Take it Easy” was a major song for me that summer.
- — Summer of 1973… Head professional of my own golf course in Palm Springs, California. (There is a very long story in that one year from being homeless to a head professional PGA golfer.)
- — Summer of 1974… Played some PGA tour stops, quit my professional job in Palm Springs and headed back to college in Idaho. (Long story there as well.)
- — Summer of 1975… Summer school in Architecture. Met Lyn my first wife.
- — Summer of 1976… Summer school in Architecture. Married,
- — Summer of 1977… Finished my masters thesis in Architecture. Law school started late summer.
- — Summer of 1978… Worked my bookstore and tended bar.
- — Summer of 1979… Divorced. Designed and built an entertainment center in 16,000 square feet inside an old department store. Sold my interest in it after a few months.
Some of those summers have zero memories attached with music. Just nothing. And other songs take me right back to a moment or memory in those summers. Most of the memories attach to the first four summers. I was young, single, driving a Porsche, drinking far too much, and playing a lot of golf.
From the fall of 1974, I was working on writing as well. No song memories so far attach to any of that except for a Dr. Hook song “Sharing the Night Together” that summer of 1978 while working tending bar that started my jukebox series.
I was working at my architecture degree every semester and through the summer for the middle years so mostly I was just too tired to remember much from that period.
But sure has been interesting to spend some hours listening to these summer of the 1970s songs in the background. Every so often I would be jerked back through time 50 or so years. Kind of fun.
And now you know more about my past than you ever needed to know. I blame the music. (grin)