MUSICAL MUSINGS
August 24, 2004
THE FIVE-YEAR CYCLE
A few years ago, I started collecting music from the early '80s in an effort to fill some gaps in my memory. I was pretty young in the early '80s; I associate much of the music of that era with various babysitters--teenage girls who were nuts about Eurythmics, Styx, and even Joey Scarbury. So I sort of remembered this music, and of course I knew the classics that have never gone away. But I knew if I could get my ears on all these songs, there'd be some memories buried in there somewhere. I made a point to collect every Top 40 hit back to 1980.
I did this, and at first, I thought I'd stop there. But I do remember "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" being popular, and "You Light Up My Life." And some of those hits from 1978 and 1979 also fall into the "babysitter era." After awhile, curiosity got the best of me, and I started collecting every Top 40 hit since I was born. I've now finished that collection.
As this obsession was going on, I started crafting a series of mp3 playlists--.m3u files, as they're called. I now have one for each week of my life, and they simply count down the hits from #40 to #1. Each week when I look up the new Billboard chart, I make a new playlist and listen to it. But I also listen to the Top 40 from 30 years ago, 25 years ago, and so on in five-year increments. If I don't finish them all in a given week, that's OK, because I don't need reminding of what the '90s sounded like, but it's nice to get to those if I can.
One of the first weeks I did this, my 30-year-old list for the week included the song "Cook with Honey" by Judy Collins. I'd never heard it before. As the first verse began, my wife Christy burst into the room with an "Oh my God!" and fell into a sort of trance. It seems her mother was really into Judy Collins once upon a time, and Christy hadn't heard this song since she was a little girl.
The power of that moment made me fall in love with this cheesy little flute-tinged song. And the experience reminded me of the thing I love most about music: it occupies a place in all our brains and touches us deeply, and when those places are accessed after a long hiatus, amazing things happen.
Well, now I knew I couldn't stop there. Yes, it would be nigh impossible to track down all the Top 40 hits much before 1972, so I limited myself to the Top 10 and kept going back further--this time to 1955, the dawn of the rock era. I've since built playlists for 1954, so I can understand why we needed Elvis so badly. ("The Happy Wanderer," anyone?) And I've had the honor of listening each week in early 1964 as the Beatles slowly but surely took over the entire top five. Now I'm experiencing the British Invasion almost first-hand.
Obviously, this collecting has to stop somewhere, and my sudden unemployment has curbed my ability to keep going for now. My '50s and '60s collection is incomplete, so I may focus on the '70s more specifically for awhile. But as I continue through my five-year cycle, I'm starting to get an amazing feel for eras that previously I knew little about.
Sometimes it's painful, such as my weekly hearings of "Playground in My Mind" during its chart run. But I keep unearthing so many gems! "Convention '72" by the Delegates is a history lesson in itself. "Clair" by Gilbert O'Sullivan is so sweet and innocent, though I hear it was controversial at the time. "Little Willy" by Sweet simply rocks, as does "Hocus Pocus" by Focus. Paul Nicholas's "Heaven on the 7th Floor" was a new one to me; I understand why nobody plays it anymore, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it. On my 1979 list this week, I grooved to "Heaven Must Have Sent You" by Bonnie Pointer, "Different Worlds" by Maureen McGovern, and "Hold On" by Triumph, none of which I'd heard before this experiment.
It's funny to think that I'm getting nostalgic for these eras, even the ones I didn't live through. The whole thing reminds me of a History of Western Music class I took in college, where the homework included immersing myself in music from other centuries. The 12-CD set that came with the curriculum started with scholars' best guess at Ancient Greek music. It continued through Gregorian chant into early attempts at harmony and guided us through choral masses, motets, operas, symphonies, and concertos. By the end of the year, we zoomed through Stravinsky and Schoenberg and on into atonal music and looped tape experiments that seem impossible to appreciate. But in the context of the class, I got an uncanny feeling for the arc of it all. Now I'm doing that same thing with the past 50 years of popular music in America.
I'd love to hear stories from any of you about old music you've rediscovered, or gems you never knew existed until recently, or songs you distinctly remember from childhood but have never again found. I love chatting about this kind of thing! And if any of you would like to try something similar to my five-year cycle, I'll be happy to share my playlists.
One footnote: I am still missing good recordings of a few songs. If any of you have copies of these rare finds, please let me know. Thanks!
Cross Country - In the Midnight Hour
Travis Wammack - (Shu-Doo-Pa-Poo-Poop) Love Being Your Fool
Carole King - Hard Rock Cafe
Pink Lady - Kiss in the Dark
Richie Furay - I Still Have Dreams
Del Shannon - Sea of Love [1982 version]