Boy, am I old.
I realized this last night when I participated in a "listening session" for a market research group. Though not officially stated, this session was clearly held at the behest of the local "oldies" station. When I think of the term "oldies", I think of the music that has always been considered from another time, music from the fifties and early sixties, from before I was born.
But much of the music we heard was from the seventies. The late seventies. My youth.
When did that happen? When did my life become part of the distant past?
We were asked to rate the music on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 meaning we hated a song, five meaning we loved it. There are obvious rules here, at least for me: Any Beatles or Marvin Gaye song is an automatic 5, any Bob Seger a 1.
Unfortunately, I found myself entering a gray zone of nostalgia. Songs I hate, at least by any rational standard, like Precious And Few by Climax, received middle-of-the-road evaluations from me. England Dan & John Ford Coley? Robert John? This is crap, and I should have rated it as crap. Except so much of it evoked powerful, random memories from me.
For instance, Paul McCartney's With A Little Luck. This song is the essence of suck, and yet, hearing a brief snippet of it last night, I flashed back to a time when it was always playing on the AM radio in my brother's Chevette, specifically to an overcast day in the spring of '78, when it was playing as we sat in the car eating McDonald's burgers, killing time before the second show of The Incredible Melting Man. Why do I remember that? How do I remember that? How can I condemn a song evoking such a specific time and place?
So I gave it a 3. I'm only human.
