Child of the 70s

I, Mona Buonanotte, am hereby outing myself as an old person.

It’s taken me a while to realize this, but no matter how much alt/college music I listen to, and love, there’s a part of me that is stuck in the 70s.

With all those bands you think you hate.

Bands like:

Styx
Chicago
Boston
Bachman-Turner Overdrive
ELO
KC and the Sunshine Band
Sly & the Family Stone
Peter Frampton
America
Steve Miller Band
Three Dog Night
Doobie Brothers
War
Parliament
Foreigner
REO Speedwagon

I love ‘em, man. Love ‘em all.

When I was a kid, in the country, before the advent of cable television, we listened to the radio a LOT. Summers were filled with sounds of baseball from Tiger Stadium, the familiar drone of Ernie Harwell narrating the play-by-play. The rest of the time, it was CKLW from Windsor (although my mom was partial to WJR from Detroit). Music, man, it was music, always music. My parents were pretty flexible with what they’d let us listen to, and it was always current stuff (except Sunday mornings when they’d insist on classical…I had a strange knack then of knowing who the composer was by hearing the first few notes…my mom thought I was a genius, although I have since lost that ‘gift’).

I remember lying in the backyard one hot summer day, on an old scratchy Air Force blanket, bathing suited, covered in baby oil to get a ‘really good tan’, with the radio outside on the end of a long extension cord, and hearing Gerry Rafferty sing ‘Baker Street’, and thinking to myself, “This song will always remind me how THIS feels, summer, nothing to do, on the lawn.” I remember winter nights holed up in my room listening to my wee transistor radio, Steely Dan singing to me about a girl named “Peg”.

Every time “The Cover of Rolling Stone’ comes on the Oldies station (by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, BTW), I stop whatever I’m doing and yell the lyrics in a manic frenzy.

C’mon. You know you do this too.

If you have the means, please buy this cd set. It will send you down memory lane with a bottle of Faygo and a halter top.

“Clowns to the left of me,
jokers to the right,
here I am
stuck in the middle with you….”