Part III: Put the needle on the record.

Being of preschool age, all I had were those Disney storybook records with the follow along books. Or albums my uncle would buy me at Christmas, full of spoken words and bad acting that taught you not to donate your broken toys to those kids less fortunate. I might have been only 4 or 5, but I certainly knew enough to shun this moral propaganda when I was getting ready to rock. Preachy pseudo-political records. I can't stand when they mix.

So, most of this time, I just took what I was given. Dad played the same country tapes in his Cutlass Supreme to where I knew to tell him to “play the blue one.” Or, “not the orange one again.” The radio was salvation, and once I had memorized some basic song lyrics of the day, it only made me hunger for more. If I didn't hear something to bop along to like Frank Mill's "Music Box Dancer” or Van McCoy's "Hustle" on the way to nursery school, I could sing along with Paul Simon and his 50 ways to leave. And in time, Dad finally let me "borrow" some of his records, with close supervision. If I could keep them on , I could listen with those big foam headphones that almost covered my whole head.

But by kindergarten, I needed some horizon broadening. I'd have to go across the street to my friend's house, and stack some records on this suitcase of a record player with fold out speakers. It was a monster, but we played that thing like a work horse. And by the late 70's, we had christened the "Theme From S.W.A.T" as greatest-instrumental-with-police-sirens ever, and had carefully memorized the soundtracks to "Grease" (the film of which I had seen twice) and "Saturday Night Fever" (which I wasn't allowed to see, but I pretty much thought I had the whole movie figured out by the pictures in the inside sleeve ). And thanks to his mom being coolest on the block, this was also the start of my pop music back-history education of the late 60's, which we played like they were current top ten hits.

It was the mid to late 70's, and early 80's. So much artistic experimentation was birthing a lot of today’s musical direction, which we now take for granted as always being around. For that period's time capsule to be defined by today's CD compilations solely by Fleetwood Mac, The Bee Gees, or even Michael Jackson, it just doesn't do the period justice. In those days, the charts held a plethora of music styles, and to my young ears, anything "new", I just had to hear. I would scan the Sunday paper's reprints of the Billboard Top 40, just to find one song I didn't know. And then sit by the radio for the Casey Kasem countdown, in hopes of finding out just what that song might mean to me. It was like finding religion sometimes.