In my day-to-day life, my birth mother doesn't come up very often. I stopped living with her when I was a teenager and, since I moved in with my best friend's family, there are some people who don't even realize that she's still around. She is, although we don't have anything resembling a close relationship... which admittedly, has more to do with me than with her.
What I was reminded of today, though, is the influence that the woman had on me from a musical perspective.
As I was driving home, and was flipping through radio stations, I happened upon Sheena Easton's "9 to 5 (Morning Train)," one of the biggest hits of 1981, which just goes to show that the '80s were the '80s right from the jump.
When the song was popular, my nieces -- who are 9 and 11 years younger than me -- were toddlers and would frequently be watched by my mother. The woman decided that the little girls loved that song and began playing it when they were at her house. Over and over and over again.
See, when it came to music the woman was basically a toddler herself. Playing music over and over again is annoying even if it's good music, but my mother had the taste of... well, to be honest, I don't even know how to categorize it.
She had a Slim Whitman album, the one that they sold on TV commercials, and it wasn't just an ironic conversation piece. Perhaps I should be glad that I know the lyrics to "Vaya Con Dios," but I'm just not. Nor do I choose to look at it as her trying to develop an appreciation for yodeling in me.
If I go to hell, I'm 99-percent sure that I will be made to listen to Side 4 of Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits for all eternity. That was my own special kind of torment as a youngster. I'm not a musical snob; I don't have anything against the guy who wrote the "You Deserve a Break Today" jingle for McDonalds and played bath houses with Bette Midler. It's just that she would only play Side 2.
You might have thought at one time in your life, "How many times would I have to hear 'Copacabana' before I went insane?" Well, I can only tell you that I snapped somewhere around the 15,000 mark.
What was always more infuriating is that it's a double-record set. The Manilow song that I always liked best -- "Weekend in New England" -- was on Side 3. I didn't mind "Ready to Take a Chance Again," from the Chevy Chase-Goldie Hawn classic, Foul Play, but I never got to hear it because it was on Side 1. Nope, just "Copacabana," "I Write the Songs," and "This One's For You" on repeat, before there really even was such a thing.
There was Engelbert Humperdink. She couldn't be infatuated with Tom Jones, so that I could listen to "It's Not Unusual" and "Delilah"... no, it had to be Engelbert. "Release Me"? I tried to, frequently. No matter where I hid that damn album, she would still find it. To this day, I blame the fact that I'm not big on cuddling on Humperdink because "After the Lovin'," I just wanted him to get the hell out.
Then, there were the acts like Easton that didn't rate an entire album of listening, but instead were granted just a single song. Before the rest of the world got sick of Lionel Richie around 1988, I had been done with him for almost a decade for writing "Three Times a Lady," which I heard a minimum of 20 times a day during one period of my youth.
As a gift one year she was given one of those compilation albums of hits from the '50s. Not Elvis and the other early rock-and-roll icons, but stuff like "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," or "Mocking Bird Hill," or Rosemary Clooney's "Come On-A My House." At least, I thought, it's got variety and it's the songs of her younger years... it had to be a winner. She barely listened to it because she never found a side that she liked enough to keep playing repeatedly.
While it's true that hearing songs on heavy radio rotation can make me blanch, the real lesson that I learned was that I could take just about anything after listening to Kenny Rogers' "Lady" 856 times during December, 1980.
There are almost no types of music that I won't listen to for brief periods. I'll listen to anything, just so long as I don't have to hear the same thing over and over again.
I guess I should be appreciative of the mental toughness that I developed during that time of my life, and, to an extent, I am. Even so, I'm now all set with hearing about Sheena Easton's baby taking the morning train for another 10 years or so.
No comments:
Post a Comment