No Time

This is a very familiar theme in our blogging circle these days. TIME - as in, not enough of it! Riding my bike outside or sitting on the patio in the sunshine or simply dipping my toesies in the lake just doesn't mix well with a laptop screen.  So, the choice becomes: stay inside, or screw it and go outside and just ignore my cyber friends?!?


Well I prefer to create a win/win scenario so for now I'm going to reduce my computer usage by posting one day and reading my friend's posts the next instead of trying to do both everyday. We'll see how that goes. Today my friend Sluggy suggested people post clips of their fave songs to let our readers see how weird interesting our musical tastes are.

The Guess Who song above is a song from my childhood. Innocent days of walking around the school yard arm in arm with a group of girlfriends singing Guess Who songs at the tops of our collective lungs! (We also walked around with linked arms chanting "we won't move! we won't move!!" and mowing down the smaller children in our way but this post is about music not bullying so moving on.......)

I have a lot of favourite kinds of music: pre-punk, punk and post-punk rank right up there at the top, followed by Motown, British Invasion, psychedelic, new wave, some country, some heavy metal, blues, folk, funk, beat, alternative rock - just to name a few. What I don't like: jazz that just rambles on and on with no tune, not really into anything classical, new age, swing, death metal, gangsta, hip hop, ballads, electronic, rap and so on.

I think I'll go by decade because I've been around a long time and my tastes have evolved over the years. I'm digging deep into my memory files here - I was born in l956 and have four older brothers and sisters so I was influenced by what they played on their little portable record players and transistor radios. Oh, and I had a brother who tried to play the guitar down in the basement and even though he played the chords to "House of the Rising Sun"  1,000 x a day it's still one of my all-time favourite songs!! So, thinking back to my earliest days here are some of my favourites:

"Boys" by the Beatles - my list begins and ends with the Beatles. I will love no band even a fraction of the amount that I love the Beatles and no band will ever again be so innovative.


Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were big around my house and we had every 45 they ever made - it was hard to choose just one but here it is - check this one out as I love how people were dancing back in l963!!

Gee - wasn't anything in COLOUR back in the olden days???  Well, these guys are VERY colourful!! And boy could they dance!!! (and sweat!) From my wee little bedroom in Norwich, Ontario if I stood on my head and put my radio on the window ledge at just the precise angle I could get CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario which played all the latest Motown music out of Detroit and that is how my love affair with Jackie Wilson, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, The Supremes etc began, now THAT was MUSIC!! Here's one of my favourite duos Sam and Dave!  Mmmm Mmmm Mmmmmmmm!!

Another influence from the first 10 years of my life - surfer music from Cal I Forn I A(thanks to my brother Gord - he played the song "Surf City USA" by Jan and Dean over and over several hours a day):  (in later years when I was 18 and 19 I travelled to the CNE in Toronto to see The Beach Boys twice - they didn't disappoint! I LOVE bands that have great harmony! Here is one of their better "B" sides.

I had a few ways to see bands "live" on a couple of TV shows: The Ed Sullivan Show where I saw the Beatles for the first time when I was 8 in l964 and The Red Skelton show where this clip originates from, also in l964. The other show I used to watch every Saturday was American Bandstand. Not that any of them sang "live" in those days but we got to see them in the flesh at least! This song was the first original song written by Jagger and Richards. I worshiped the Stones because I thought they wrote "Lady Jane" for me! Yes, I was mighty naive as a child.

Tune in again (hahaha) next week for Jane's Music: The Second Decade!! Now Sluggy - do you see what you've started?