.
Here's a playlist I'm having a lot of fun grooving on. Almost 200 songs, all from my teenage years:

Greatest Hits of the 70's - Youtube playlist


Holy shit, this takes me back. High school. My first girlfriends, Tina and Pam. (Well, only girlfriends. I never had any other women lovers after them.) My first concert - Queen, Night at the Opera tour, the Los Angeles Forum. Pam and I dressed in matching black satin. Damn, was she beautiful. Tall, broad-shouldered, these unreadable eyes. (I'm always terrible at describing skin tone, but I'd say hers was hazelnut...yeah.) And my first boyfriend, Ted. He was beautiful too. Imagine a male Elisabeth Shue but with fuller lips. A real English rose. We used to park his mail jeep in front of my parents' house and go at it before I went back in. (Yes, a mail jeep. We were both pretzels. Ah, youth.) Laserium at the Griffith Park Observatory. Smoking out by the Hollywood sign, back when you could still climb up there. Goddamn.

* ssssst *

.

.

Gacked from Crooks & Liars:

Hey Hey (We're the Monkees) - The Monkees


Yes, The Monkees. First of all, if you're of my generation, I dare you not to sing along. Secondly, if you're a parent of a 6-11 year old girl who is addicted to Big Time Rush or Jonas, you have a duty to show them the original artificially manufactured tee vee shenanigan sitcom product band (yeah Jonas are brothers in real life but still).

Post your own guilty pleasures or nostalgic music lessons below.

*grin*

.

Another stroll down Memory Lane:

Low Rider - War

Low Rider knows every street, yeah
Low Rider is the one to meet, yeah
Low Rider don't use no gas now
Low Rider don't drive too fast...


Last night I posted about the group of girls I sang with sometimes in high school. I mentioned that we sang War's classic Low Rider, beloved of chicanos and Cheech and Chong fans everywhere. That song's always been one of my favorites; very, VERY few songs evoke Los Angeles - not Hollywood, but the real L.A. - the way this one does. It was the first of a different sort of driving song, at least the first to become widely popular: not the 50s rock-and-bop drive-through-diner hotrod song, nor the sunny sweet Beach Boys celebratory driving song. No, this was a proud, laid-back, pass-the-joint, don't-mess-with-me cruising music, unhurried but still a little watchful. With its short, endlessly repeated motif, its agile, enthusiastic bass line (for my money, one of the top three ever written), its nodding, nearly mumbled lyrics that evoke the deep contemplation of the mundane that is the province of the utterly stoned, the song brings affectionate smiles to the faces of everyone I've ever seen hearing it. It's...summer.

You may wonder how a group of high school girls could sing a song this simple and have fun with it? Easy. We sang the entire thing. Each of us would choose a part - bass, guitar, cymbal, cowbell, horn, or voice - and we'd just start and keep going as long as we could keep it up. It's not as easy as it sounds; while the vocal was easy, the bass is very hard to keep repeating over and over. But when we got into a groove, it could be hypnotic!

Ah, memories...

.
Okay everybody! LEFT TURN!!

The Rifleman

Theme song / Credit Sequence


Came across this on YT the other day. Isn't it amazing how a piece of music will reside in your head without you even knowing it's there until you hear it again? And you instantly know the rest of it, as if you'd heard it just the other day.

This was one of the shows my family watched regularly when I was a kid (in re-runs in the mid-60's), not the least because my grandmother had a massive crush on Chuck Connors. She would sit and sigh over him, despite the fact that she didn't understand a word of English. I can't say much myself, because I remember almost nothing about the show. But that pow of hearing the theme song was so pronounced, I thought I'd put it up here and see if anyone else remembers this tune.