I don’t remember. Did I explain why I call this period the Scratchy 45 Days? It should be self explanatory. Mom had a bunch of 45s. Since they were vinyl records, they would carry that hiss and pop. To make matters worse, we weren’t very good at taking care of them. It still makes me cringe to this day to think of all those great records sitting inside a 1970’s end table cabinet without protective sleeves and rummaged and stacked by 7 and unders.
Let’s start this stack of 7 with The Beach Boys – In My Room. Somehow, while I was at prep school, The Beach Boys would enter my collection and I listened to them quite a bit. We’ll see them again in 1982.
I’ve always liked Mary Hopkins’ and the “old world” feel of Those Were The Days
I don’t remember which came first, listening to Sugar, Sugar or watching The Archie Cartoons on Saturday morning. Mom was a big fan of Archie comic books at some point. She used to have quite a few of them that I remember reading. I’ll have to look Archie up. It seems to me that her comics were pretty old by the time I got to reading them. I just saw this documentary about The Monkees. I mention it here because Sugar, Sugar was originally going to be a Monkees song. Before the Monkees could record it, they had a falling out with Don Kirshner. Don didn’t care for the disrepect and rebellion he was getting from some of the Monkees so he decided that his next pop group would be animated. Cartoons don’t talk back. So he created the Archies and sugar, Sugar became their song. I wonder what it would have sounded like as performed by the Monkees.
The Archies – Sugar Sugar
This Scratchy 45 didn’t have a label on it and it had a crack all the way through. We called it the doo-doo-doo song after the sound of the intro. It would be years later that I would discover that this nameless song was in fact Cruel Sea by The Ventures. It sounds a bit different without the extra beat that the crack added.
Another instrumental piece that also sounds like it could be the soundtrack for an early 1980’s video game. My media library has quite a lot of instrumental music. I don’t know, I just really like long musical pieces that are not muddied with words. Hot Butter – Popcorn
Never been too much into Neil Young but this one reaches me. I’m sure that some music experts will be disappointed but I just can’t get into Neil Young and I think Bob Dylan is horrible. Neil Young – Heart Of Gold
Edward Bear’s Last Song is another one of those sad sounding songs that I was really drawn to. I’m sure that I didn’t fully comprehend the emotion behind the words. I was in first grade and had never been dumped. I did recognize that it was about loss. I remember writing the lyrics out in school. My teacher saw the paper on my desk and thought it was some kind of love lettter.
Incidentally, it turns out that Edward is no relation to Smokey. So there you go. I hope you liked this stack. Of course you can use the comment section below to share your thoughts.