The Strong Influence of Music in my Life

...The strong influence of music in my life...is probably worth sharing...because it strands across 4 decades...My earliest musical memories go back to the 60's when my sister Kathy worked at Lowe's Record Shop in the Evergreen Plaza...She would come home with some of the hottest sounds that were so rampantly popular at that time...The Beach Boys, The Supremes, The Doors and on and on and on...She had this funky little record player that would unfold two big speakers...which was ultra-modern at the time...For some reason...I always remember her being the one stuck with mopping the basement floor with MopN'Glo and cranking up her music player while she sped around mopping as fast as she could...Later on...I can remember my sister Karen owning one of the first cassette recorders...I remember she had a Simon & Garfunkel cassette and either a Carole King or Carly Simon cassette tape also...Then, there was my brother Joe...who came home from college at Notre Dame with a huge album collection...He really had a wild assortment of heavy duty rock n' roll including Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, Mountain and Elf....This is around 1971-72...I'm guessing...Then I also can remember taking my brother Danny's...Bob Segar Live album...to a party at my buddy Slim's house and never bringing it back...I hope he doesn't remember that...Of course...then there was my initial album collection which was something like Styx, UFO, ELO and George Thoroughgood and The Destroyers...Eventually, I basically had a gigantic collection of cassettes also which I recorded from my friends albums or live tracks they would play on FM radio...Looking...Way back, of course, AM radio reigned supreme as Top 40 radio was at its peak...There was WLS, WCFL, WIND mostly but all those musical AM stations would fade from our culture as FM stations became the craze...WXRT and WLUP were huge then and still even remain going strong today...

...There are so many songs...that instantly take me back in time...to those golden moments...in my early youth...I can actually remember listening to the last Beatles album at my friend, Eddy Bar's house...and just thought it was sad...that they had decide to break up...As I got to college at DePaul...I can remember coming back to my dorm room after an intensive accounting exam and just cranking up The Who at full blast...I could basically go on and on...and I'm sure as the pages roll on throughout my memoirs...I'll be sharing other musical moments that are just frozen solid, opening a lost passage in time...taking both me and you backwards to a time long ago...when these songs were such an important part of our lives...