When we had to wait
While taking a walk the other day in a suburban area, I passed a yard with a tire swing tied to a large tree branch.
Into my head popped a song lyric that goes like this:
Life was just a tire swing
‘Jambalaya’ was the only song I could sing…
That was it. Just a fragment. What was it from? I remembered that I’d first heard the song on the car radio, back when the car radio was all I had to entertain myself while driving (and before that, I’d had no car radio at all for quite a few years).
No iPod. No CDs. Not even audiotapes. Just that little ole car radio and me. I was in the habit of listening to one particular radio station that played nonstop non-pop songs—some country music, some folk songs, and a lot of singer-songwriters.
That was the first place where I’d ever heard any song by Richard Thompson: it was “From Galway to Graceland,” if I’m not mistaken. Thompson’s unique voice wasn’t the prettiest in the world, but there was something so arresting about it that I had a 3-day-long earworm for the song and had to find out who sang it. I’d missed the moment when they’d announced that on the radio. No internet, no Google; I couldn’t think of any other way to find out the singer than to listen intently to the station and wait for them to play it again and announce it again.
And play it again they finally did, some weeks later. They said it was “Richard Thompson.” I made a mental note, and Richard Thompson made a lifelong fan.
Same for Don McLean and “American Pie.” It had a great hook: “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye/Singing ‘this’ll be the day when I die’…” I waited for the next time the station played that song, and discovered the name and artist.
That’s the way we used to do it. It was like a treasure hunt. I suppose I could have gone to a record store (remember them?) and asked. But I didn’t think of it.
But now, of course, the answer to the “life was just a tire swing” question is at my fingertips. I’d never Googled it before this, but voila! The answer is Jimmy Buffet, with these words—and here it is, as though by magic. I don’t have to wait for any radio station to get around to playing it (which would be a mighty long wait these days):
And here, just for the heck of it, is Richard Thompson with “From Galway to Graceland”:
The phenomenon wasn’t just limited to music, either. Every week when I was a kid I’d eagerly await the arrival of the TV Guide and open it. What was I looking for? The movies that were scheduled that week. I had three or four that were always on my radar screen, although their identity changed over time as I grew from child to teenager. At this point I don’t even remember what they were, but I do remember my extreme excitement on the rare occasions when one of them appeared on the TV Guide list.
And then, of course, I had to be home at that exact time to see it. No going out and setting the VCR to record it, no tevoing. And if there was a conflicting show at the same time, tough. You had to make your decision—had to say yes to one, and let the other one ride:
Loved the post!
Thanks for posting!
Wow. You’re old. Me, too. I’d still listen to the radio, if any thing good would still come out of it.
The odd thing — now — is that you just accepted it for what it was and that was cool. Sometimes there wasn’t anything worth it on the radio or tv and that was okay. I learned that I didn’t NEED to be entertained ALL the time. Nowadays, you share an event with people under 35 and if their iPhone DIES, it’s PANIC TIME. Me? I just shrug it off and think. It’s easy to entertain yourself that way.
And Mail Order! You actually had to mail your order to the company from whom you wished to purchase something. And then wait weeks for Railway Express to deliver.
Back in the ‘80s, I used to listen to a small town country music station (WFEN). I liked the station because they mixed “new” songs from, sometimes, unknown artists in with the usuall top 40 fare. The very thing that drew me to the station was also the most frustrating because I would hear a song that I would take a liking to and never hear the title of the song or the artist’s name; and in most of those cases I would never hear the song again.
KRB
Ah, yes. I remember circling the things I wanted to watch in TV Guide, and hoping dad wouldn’t be home and wanting to watch his wrestling.
Letters. No texting. No email. You wrote out what you wanted to say, put it in an envelope with a stamp, and hoped to hear back from that person in a week or so. If they even got it.
I guess it’s better being able to pull up virtually any song, movie, tv show or info immediately but the loss of the sense of excitement when that song you really liked came on the radio is kind of sad.
Patience is a lost virtue for the younger generation I fear.
As for TV Guide it was always so exciting when my mom would come home with it from the grocery store.
RT! A lifetime treasure and a nice corollary to your point.
I remember S & H Green Stamps with great nostalgia… in having to save and wait, anticipation built. Today, instant satisfaction is the priority and self-discipline atrophies.
But what I miss most is living in an America where children grew up believing in America’s essential goodness.
I watch movies on Netflix or whatever with my iPad on my lap and IMDB (Movie/TV database) at the ready. See that minor character? It’s easy to find out why that face is familiar and very satisfying.
There are also many sites on the web where you can find lyrics to help that earworm survive.
Is it a good thing that we have all this virtually instantaneous information at our fingertips?
Well, as a Librarian–even if a fairly long retired one–you’d think that I’d think this was an unqualified boon to us all but, somehow, I don’t think it is.
I happen to think that anticipation was a good thing, and a slower pace of life as well; you only had a certain amount of time, so, you had to chose carefully, because you didn’t want to waste it on crap.
Time to carefully consider, and to make choices, when you don’t–as today–have virtually an infinite number of choices, and can end up wasting a lot of time wading through a lot of meretricious crap before you find something worthwhile.
I note, as well, the recent reports that the people who developed Facebook had commissioned and were aware of research that showed that Facebook was addictive–in fact it was designed to be so, and aimed especially at the young.
Each person’s registering approval of you delivering a literal hit of dopamine to your brain, and creating an addiction just as real as if you were shooting up with some kind of dope.
I remember the show ‘Your Hit Parade’ on Saturday nights during the 1950’s, we would wait to see the seven, I think it was, top songs each week sung by the cast of the show. Gisele MacKenzie is the only name I remember but as kids we we eager to watch, listen and learn to sing those great hit songs like, Sixteen Tons, and the silly Davy Crocket.
I read nearly a book per week. I download them on a Kindle, which is surely faster than going to a bookstore. But I have been reading at the same speed forever. It’s very grounding to take the time to read books. I’d much rather read a book about, say, the building of the Panama Canal than whizzing through a Wikipedia post.
“And if there was a conflicting show at the same time, tough.” A major boost to the adoption of the Betamax was when Kojak got moved to the same time as Columbo (in fact, the whole Sony v Universal Studios case started when Sony asked Universal (which owned both shows) for clearance to use the names of the shows in an ad pointing this out to consumers).
That’s why I never got to watch Miami Vice, it was on Friday night right during my high school football games. Had to wait months for the reruns. The good old days.
Perhaps because we didn’t get a TV until I was 8, I never watched it as often as most. I recall a TV show about William Tell when we first got the TV, Boomtown out of Boston and those Saturday morning 1930s cartoons. A college friend of mine was on Big Brother Bob Emery’s show when he was a kid.
A neighbor had a New Jersey cousin who had been in the crowd on Bandstand.
Before I was 6, I had access to a small portable record player. By virtue of playing them over and over and over, I now recall Hank William’s Kawliga and Sleeping Beauty. In later years we got Folk Song and Minstrelsy, a 4 album set. I memorized nearly all the songs. And Tom Lehrer.
In junior high I finally connected with pop music, and listened to the radio. I still have an affinity with the Doo-Wop of that era. I could also get country and western music from WCKY in Cincinnati, over 800 miles away.
I never knew that tire swing song.
In this country, mass commercial culture dates from the advent of broadcast radio in 1920. Thirty years later, about 1950, Cold War and episodic regional trauma aside, First World peace-and-prosperity coincided with 3-channel television originally pegged to a culturally uniform audience of good bourgeois.
A lifetime later, for any number of deleterious reasons here and overseas, that socio-cultural consensus is dead as nail-in-door. What we see happening is not fragmentation but “filtered stratification”: As in most historical polities from Magna Graecia and Republican Rome a population’s self-perpetuating upper quintile –call them patricians (nobles) and equestrians (gentry)– “settles upward” like rocks in a New England meadow. At the apex roosts a ruling Senatorial elite; below landed courtiers, clergy, warriors, lie urban merchant/traders and proprietors plus artisans, craftsmen, tradesmen (plebians), directing proletarian laborers, workers, slaves.
However static, these classes are not by any means immutable… but various “sorting mechanisms” perpetuate certain mores that render status gain or loss unlikely over generations.
On this basis, we sense that media, educational and vocational if not generational or political/economic fault-lines, are subsuming U.S. ethnic, racial, sectarian religious strictures to the point where –of a sudden– something’s snapped. As cellular biologists well know all organisms require, first, differentiated functions assembled seriatim from gestation; and second, an impermeable epidermal layer (“skin”), curbing contagion by walling off each individual from every other.
Just so with Nation States: Socio-political agglomerations’ diverse strengths paradoxically render each one vulnerable to contamination. (Think 5th Century Rome, reliant for defense on the very barbarians who threatened ruin.)
In later phases, as societal fault-lines weaken national cohesion, wisdom lies not in reconciling the irreconcilable but in balancing inert social structures with distractions: Celebrity entertainment, sports; entrepreneurial and Wall Street wizards; calls-to-arms by inspirational reformers. If history is any guide, this all goes just so far… beyond a certain point, the bubble bursts. Ensuing anarchy enables New Beginnings, filling a void left by four-to-six in ten of previous populations dead.
Lovin’ spoonful! if their sound could be put in a bottle, it would be a controlled substance! Thanks!
There’s a song about exactly this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ7osdJ4H_8
Liz Says:
April 28th, 2018 at 7:05 pm
I read nearly a book per week. I download them on a Kindle, which is surely faster than going to a bookstore. But I have been reading at the same speed forever. It’s very grounding to take the time to read books. I’d much rather read a book about, say, the building of the Panama Canal than whizzing through a Wikipedia post.
* * *
My reading has dropped from an average of 200 books per year to around 50 — and it’s all Barack Obama’s fault: there was something outstanding and new every day — and it hasn’t stopped with Trump vs the Deep State.
Reading blogs occupies all and more of the time I used to spend reading books, so I am likening Neo and PowerLine et al. to parallel serial magazines, like Dickens and Melville, only with a lot of fact mixed in with the fiction, as if, say, Gibbons or Durant were posting their tomes on-line.
The
“And if there was a conflicting show at the same time, tough.”
One of my toughest lessons as a young tyke was when they (the ubiquitous, all-malevolent “they”) put Mighty Mouse opposite Ruff ‘N’ Ready on Saturday morning.
Welcome, young M J R, to the world of hard choices and disappointments!
OldTexan, 7:02 pm — “Gisele MacKenzie is the only name I remember . . . .”
Snooky Lanson.
Ah, that takes me back- listening to the radio hoping to hear the new and old songs I really liked rather than just bringing them up on YouTube the way I do it today. Around the age of 14 or so (1980-81), I finally got a radio with a built in cassette recorder, so I could just record the songs I had been waiting to hear at night or during the day, and I considered that an amazing technological advance!
Of course, in those days, if a song was a current hit, you could always be sure to hear it on American Top 40 with Kasey Kasem- a show I began listening to in early 1979. I recently came across a radio station here in TN that replays old broadcasts of that show from the 1970s- very nostalgic for me, especially given that Kasem died a couple of years back.
If you like a variety of 40s through current music, listen online Saturday evening.
http://www.mainstreamnetwork.com/listen/player.asp?station=waam-am&listen=Listen+Live
http://000i8pf.myregisteredwp.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5267/2017/08/music-modified-2.jpg
Middle 60’s now. Grew up in the 60’s. Seems somewhat surreal.
Anyone else have a ‘penpal’?
Online C&W radio from KCLW in Hamilton, TX.
http://www.kclwradio.com/
Well, I still remember the name “Lovin Spoonful”, ’cause they performed at Woodstock. But when I check what they did later, it seems that with “Summer in the City” they were a typical One Hit Wonder band.
Some famous writer from long ago said that if technology ever reached a point where anyone could listen to Bach or Mozart on command, then human civilization would necessarily be uplifted to some dramatically higher level. I do recall a couple people from my high school wind ensemble who’s performances were literally breath taking for me. Not quite the same thing, but in the ball park perhaps.
But ubiquity = cheapness. And that’s not just a dollars and cents issue. Snow on Pine says the something similar above.
A friend told me a story several years ago (probably from the New Yorker) that when audio engineers mix songs in a high quality recording studio nowadays they sometimes degrade the quality to mimic the lossy digital compression and lower earbud quality that millennials are used to. Otherwise it sounds “funny” to them.
I remember spending a whole long endless summer day with my two younger brothers, trying to occupy ourselves on the playground at the school across the street while we waited and waited and waited for that evening, when “The Wizard of Oz” would come on for its once-a-year airing on network TV. We watched it each year and then had to wait throughout the year until it came around again – as did “Peter Pan,” though we didn’t care as much about that. No Netflix, no DVDs, no videotape even – we just had to wait. We hated the waiting then, but I can’t help feeling it was better to learn how to wait than to learn, as kids do today, that you should be able to click click click and summon up anything, anywhere, anytime, as a matter of right.
Tuvea:
I had a penpal in Australia. That lasted about 6 months.
Yes, we waited. For someone to finally leave the phone booth at the back of the drug store. For the packet of 500 stamps “from around the world” that we had ordered from that little ad in the back of a comic book. For next week’s episode of The Great Gildersleeve. And, somehow, it was good. By the way, for those Lucky Strike Hit Parade fans, Giselle McKenzie came a little late to the show. Before, it was Dorothy Collins singing with Snooky Lanson.
Studies about happiness seem to be showing that Antci (say it*) pation is a big part of lots of good feelings.
I remember going to my grandparents to see Wizard of Oz … in color! In the years when we just had B&W (2, 4, 7 – CBS, NBC, ABC; plus minors).
I suspect that there is a lot less happiness today because of the inability to wait gracefully — but that’s also related to a lack of being grateful.
Here in Slovakia, we don’t see the Jimmy Buffet song.
My mother loved comedian Stan Freberg, so I grew up listening to his piercing version of Day-O (… I don’t dig spiders…) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-9h1pjTP74
Also was in the movie Beetlejuice.
I loved the Lovin’ Spoonful; on my Best of Album, after the great Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind, came their bigger hit … Do You Believe In Magic.
I often feel vaguely disappointed when I hear a fine song which, when it ends, reminds me of the next song on the album … which I then don’t hear.
Unless I go to YouTube and look it up. Funny how all the songs are on YouTube, but there’s not such a good music only on demand site, no video.
Thanks again, Neo, for fine 4am memories.
*Rocky Horror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwnbcxBuzI
Michael, 1:23 pm — “Well, I still remember the name ‘Lovin Spoonful’, ’cause they performed at Woodstock. But when I check what they did later, it seems that with ‘Summer in the City’ they were a typical One Hit Wonder band.”
If we take USA Top Ten as a criterion, they were a seven-hit wonder (and there were hits that fell short of USA Top Ten):
1965 peaked at #9 “Do You Believe In Magic”
1965 peaked at #10 “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”
1966 peaked at #2 “Daydream”
1966 peaked at #2 “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”
1966 peaked at #1 “Summer in the City”
1966 peaked at #10 “Rain on the Roof”
1966 peaked at #8 “Nashville Cats”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lovin%27_Spoonful#Singles
1) No, Lovin’ Spoonful was no one hit wonder. They weren’t a major band but they definitely had some hits. “Do you believe in magic” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYNuD4CwlI)was probably their best, but “You didn’t have to be so nice” was another great “bubblegum rock” hit. As was
“Daydream” Not deep, not poignant, just nice, pleasant songs.
2) Peeps fail to realize — unless they’re geezers like Neo and myself — how freaking RICH we are. It’s all right there, if we want it. And even we forget. Yes, as Neo notes, you lose the “fun” of waiting… but I’ll take the riches and run with it.
Want to hear a Song by The Stones? BAM! Want to hear one by Edison Lighthouse? BAM!
In fact, I can recall a whole array of old songs just by pulling up YouTube and looking at the selection of “next up?” off at the side. Songs you’d either never heard, forgotten, or just fondly remember, right there at your fingertips.
3) I happen to think that anticipation was a good thing, and a slower pace of life as well; you only had a certain amount of time, so, you had to chose carefully, because you didn’t want to waste it on crap.
Rather obviously, I disagree. And if you want that back, it’s not hard to get. Just get rid of your internet. Turn off your data plan, turn off your cell phone. Get a Pandora appliance, you can have “just random music” all you want.
No one does this, because they really don’t WANT it.
This is “missing the good old days” — which is just an example of pining for things that used to be. It’s called Getting Old… 😉
I have the best of both worlds, in that I can actually APPRECIATE just how great this is.
No, do not return us to the 60s or the 70s. Not even partly. The world was not a better place, it sucked as much then as now, and we had to worry about getting wiped out in a nuclear war.
Thanks, I’ll stick with what we have, as far as technology goes.
On a parallel note, “When We Had to Wait” also applied to our sex lives. Talk about anticipation!
I can remember when being able to buy a truck with a radio in it was a sign of a pretty successful farm.
In a parallel idea, I periodically find wonderful little movies on the TV. Produced by independent studios, most are obviously low budget, but often with well known actors, well written scripts, and excellent acting, they are gems. I recently found one named “Diminished Capacity” with Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda that was very entertaining
@OBloodyHell – actually I more often go for random.
38 years ago I began listening to “alternative”, from college radio (KFJC in Silicon Valley), and they so often had songs I liked but seldom heard again, I started taping them. I had hundreds of radio tapes — and listened to them in the car, skipping the (many) lousy ones.
Today it’s Somafm.com (Bagel Radio; PopTron; Secret Agent). Sometimes Jango.com
For my youthful body, I’d happily return to those good (young bod) days of old; but you’re right about the world being much better. Now I’m in an ex-Commie country whose kids are almost as spoiled as other EU OECD kids, including mine (despite my efforts).
But I’m listening right now to a 50+ YouTube selection of Lovin’ Spoonful.
And smilin’.
Ralph Kinney Bennett–I , too, remember, as a child, anxiously awaiting that packet of stamps from far away places to show up in the mail.
Oddly enough, that same company, Littleton Stamp company, is still in business today.
This whole thing puts me in mind of back in ’92 when I kept hearing this really cool song on KLIF in Albuquerque. One day, I came in from getting the mail, and it was on.
I raced back to the bedroom — scaring the cat out of 3 or 4 of his lives — and grabbed the phone and the phone book. As quickly as I could, I called the radio station and said “Would you *please* tell me the title and artist of that song before I go berserk?”
The guy on the other end laughed and said “Give me just a minute”. When he came back, he said “That was ‘Orinoco Flow’ — subtitled ‘Sail Away’ — by Enya”
The cat avoided me for the next few days. Probably thought Daddy had gone off his nut.
To this day, that’s still one of my faves.