February 5 Memoir

The sounds of warm transistors crackling and buzzing with far away sounds is always best at night.  During the summer months I would sleep out in my treehouse many nights with my transistor radio close at hand tuning in WABC, CKYW, WFIL and others from exotic locations that might just as well have been a million miles away. 

The DJ voices were really one with the music, the roll and flow of the voices talking up the record, hitting the post.

Motown, The Beatles, Dylan, Iron Butterfly and Johnny Cash.

Songs like “Soulful Strut” by The Young Holt Unlimited or “Sleepwalk” by Santo and Johnny seem to belong somewhere in the warm darkness. 

These voices held secrets, they knew things I couldn’t imagine.  When I heard Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Leon Russell singing “Just Like A Woman” on the Concert for Bangla Desh album I knew they were singing about something important. While I didn’t have a clue myself what it meant to “make love just like a woman” I knew they knew, and I knew it was something that was hidden, secret and mysterious and perhaps dangerous.

I grew up in a land of possibility.  My first strong memory was of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a powerful moment of beginning and possibility.  The space program was beginning the small steps that would take us to the moon.  Possibility was the language I heard every day.