My car is where I do most of my musing and reminiscing. I suppose driving is one of the few times that I am not doing three things at once, as I usually am at work and at home. As I settled into my beloved new 2024 Honda Accord Sport Hybrid on a recent morning to make the trek from the office in Huntersville to a printing press parts supplier in Mooresville, I tapped a button on the console and asked Alexa to shuffle songs by James Taylor for me. A mile into the drive, as I listened to a crystal clear rendition of Fire and Rain, I began to think about how the song sounded on vinyl, back when I first snuck into my brother’s room and “borrowed” the album in the early 1970s.
That thought reminded me of the little blue and green suitcase-style portable record player I got for Christmas when I was about six or seven years old. Along with the record player, I received several albums of Uncle Remus Stories voiced by Sterling Holloway. That gift nurtured my love of the spoken word on vinyl. I LOVED listening to Holloway’s quirky, raspy voice and I nearly wore those albums out listening to them over and over. Sterling Holloway was just a soothing voice reading those tales I loved until one day, to my surprise, I heard that voice coming out of the television as I watched The Andy Griffith Show. Holloway was on The Merchant of Mayberry episode where he played Bert Miller, a traveling salesman who store owner Ben Weaver wanted Sheriff Andy to run out of town. Who knew Holloway was an actor? (As an adult I came to learn that he was also the voice of Winnie the Pooh and many beloved Disney animated characters.)
When I was in elementary school, Huntersville was still in the sticks. If we wanted to shop for anything beyond a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas at Puckett Brothers store, we had to go into Charlotte. In the 1970s that meant Belk or Ivey’s in downtown Charlotte for anything upscale and Kmart on Freedom Drive for the types of goods you would purchase at Walmart today. Every single trip to Kmart included a detour to the record section. I used my allowance to buy .98¢ 45s, “singles”, of artists like John Denver (Sunshine On My Shoulders), Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods (Billy, Don’t Be a Hero), Three Dog Night (Shambala), and The Carpenters (Sing). I carried those 45s to sleepovers in a cute little square case that matched my portable record player.
I was in sixth grade before I remember buying my own albums. One of the first was Flowing Rivers by a guy named “Andy Gibb”. Andy became my first love when I saw him performing, I Just Want to Be Your Everything on American Bandstand. He was my everything for years to come. At one point I think I had thirteen posters of the Aussie singing sensation on my closet doors and bedroom walls. (Thanks, Tiger Beat magazine.) I also loved the soundtrack from Grease and anything by Andy’s brothers, The Bee Gees. When my brother, older by five years, was out of the house or feeling generous, I borrowed Cher’s album Half-Breed, Chicago’s Chicago X (which we called “The Chocolate Album” for its iconic cover featuring a block of chocolate with the band’s name embossed on it) and Steely Dan’s Aja.
Middle school mean girl drama turned me into even more of a recluse than I was naturally. I spent hours on end in my room, alone. Music, those scratchy vinyl albums I couldn’t buy enough of, became my solace. I am not even joking when I say that I probably listened to Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty album a couple dozen times a week and Billy Joel’s The Stranger even more.
I’ll never forget riding with my brother and his high school girlfriend, Sharon Brown, in his newly acquired hand-me-down-from-Mom 1965 Ford Falcon Futura, singing along to his eight track player spouting out If You Leave Me Now by Chicago. On that summer day, we were not supposed to leave the house for some reason by order of Mom. Curtis asked if I would tell on him if he went and picked up Sharon and took her to North Park Mall in Charlotte. I said, “Not as long as you take me, too.” I admired Sharon and wanted to spend some rare time with her. To this day that afternoon, singing together in the car, is one of the most vivid memories I have of my eleven-year-old self spending time with my sixteen-year-old brother. It was one of pure joy and any of the songs from that Chicago album can evoke the memory of that feeling today.
As soon as I turned sixteen and had my own wheels (so what if it was a 1976 Ford Granada also handed down from Mom?), I used some of my summer job money to purchase a really nice car cassette player and began lugging around a HUGE case that held sixty (yes 6-0) cassettes. Every slot in the case was full, too. AC/DC’s Back in Black was my jam as I cruised up Interstate 77 to my best friend Terri’s house in the “Meck Neck” (a peninsula jutting into Lake Norman that required you to go into Iredell County and then come back south into Mecklenburg County to visit.) We would blast Styx, Foreigner, Heart, Journey, and Loverboy as loud as possible, windows down, feeling free at last as we headed to football games at North Mecklenburg High School, Godfather’s Pizza, Putt Putt or Eastland Mall to hang out on Friday and Saturday nights.
Music was the backdrop to everything I did. Naturally, listening to those cassettes over and over made me frantic to score tickets to every concert at the Charlotte Coliseum and the Carowinds Paladium. If they had a hit in the early 1980s, I saw them in concert, with few exceptions. Many of those concerts are some of my best memories: Andy Gibb at Carowinds Paladium in 1978 and, later, Billy Joel at the Charlotte Coliseum on November 5th, 1979, both with Scott Bradford; Molly Hatchet at the Carowinds Paladium with my brother and his friends … a rare invitation for the tagalong little sister to share time with them; Styx’s Mr. Roboto tour and Foreigner’s 4 tour (Jukebox Hero) with Darryl, my high school sweetheart (and, now, husband) were nothing short of a spectacle! We left those shows with stuck on smiles and muffled hearing (and, sometimes, contact highs from all the passed joints circulating all around us). I don’t remember many things that made me happier in my teenage years than being absorbed in the music of our times at those shows. During a concert all cares were forgotten as we stood in aisles at the alien-spaceship-shaped Charlotte Coliseum (later “Independence Arena”, then “Bojangles Arena”) and on benches at Charlotte’s first outdoor concert arena, the Carowinds Paladium. Among my happiest moments in life are those when I was singing along live with my idols, Jackson Browne and James Taylor, with a friend, a boyfriend, or a sibling loving life right beside me.
I lugged that 60 capacity cassette case around until 1990, when I got a Toyota Celica GT with a built in CD player. Then I started carrying at least 60 CDs with me everywhere I went. That car was replaced in 2000 with a Nissan Xterra with a CD player that would hold five (yes, five!) CDs at a time. I’m pretty sure that was one of the selling points that made me choose the vehicle. By then, I could download and burn music onto CDs myself and I was the queen of the “mixed tape”, making my own eclectic playlists.
In 2005 Apple released the iPod shuffle and I had to have one! The size of a pack of Wrigley’s gum, the tiny device on a lanyard could hold 200 songs! I was blown away that all of that music could be held on such a small device. I could carry roughly twenty albums with me wherever I went and the total weight was something like .78 ounces!! I think that old 60 cassette case outweighed it by about twenty pounds, at least. Two years later, there were iPod Touch models that held 1000 songs. Guess who lined up to buy one of those? Several generations of the iPod Touch later, I now own a 256 gb special Red Edition that will hold something like 73,000 songs. I currently have somewhere between 5000 and 6000 songs on mine and I still use it, though not as much since I can now ask one of my four Amazon Alexa devices spread from my bedroom to my living room to my office at work and my travel bag to play anything I want to hear on the Sirius/XM or Amazon music apps to which I subscribe.
I thought of all of this as I cruised up I-77 from Huntersville to Mooresville and back. Thinking about all of the advancements I’ve seen and enjoyed in how I listen to music. Music is a tool I use to enhance, express or change my feelings, my mood. The love and want of it forced me to “borrow” my brother’s well worn vinyl records in the 1970s, to lug around cumbersome cases of cassettes in the 1980s and CDs in the 1990s. To spend hundreds of dollars on each iteration of Apple’s iPod. The price tag of my new Honda Accord seems worth it each time I say, “Hey, Alexa, play …” and, in just a few seconds, she does.
Robin's Eggs 