My kids are getting older and while they aren’t exactly staying out all hours of the night or anything they can do a lot of things for themselves. One of the things my son in particular likes to do is play music. He frequently pops in a ‘Little People’ CD and cranks it. Which after one too many renditions of ‘Wheels on the Bus’ got me to thinking he needed some new material. Enter the cassette tape.
Considering the fact that my son is 5 he isn’t exactly the most responsible person on the planet. At the end of almost every day when I am singing songs and putting kids to bed I tidy the stack of CDs that has accumulated on his dresser. They were getting wrecked and I wanted to give him more music and so I had a brilliant thought. I hit my local thrift stores and scoured them looking for old musicals & books on tape. I found a lot of Christmas music and not a lot else. New plan.
I hit up garage sales, they are starting to happen now you know, and turned my attention to classic rock. Some of my earliest and clearest musical memories are in my room playing Learning to Crawl (The Pretenders) record at full blast, pretty sure I had Thriller too. Yes I had a record player. No I am not that old (28). My uncle worked for a department outlet store and my sister and I got record players for Christmas one year. My second favorite album was a Sesame Street record where Ernie went on safari and played a sounds game with a blind folded Bert. To this day when I hear a ping pong ball bounce across the floor or some other random sound inside my head I say “that was the sound of _________”.
I digress. A week later my son has listened to Tom Petty, Eagles, Who, The Rolling Stones, Robert Plant and his favorite thus far, Nazareth. My son’s brief education in 70-80s rock cost me $2 and I am learning too. I’ll clean up one night at rock trivia yet, just you wait.
