1971 - don't ya just love it?

[mellicious]

So in 1971 was when I suddenly discovered radio. I don't know where I had been getting the music that I liked before that - TV, to a great degree, I guess, and my friends.

I just realized something, and I'm not going to try to go back and fix it in the past entries, but I got mixed up somewhere back a couple of days ago about what grade was what year. I started off right, but by yesterday I had it wrong.

1969 grades 4/5

1970 grades 5/6

1971 grades 6/7

That's partly why I was mixed up about when we moved that last time, for one thing. I was thinking that spring of 1968 would have been fourth grade, but it was third. So we definitely didn't move until '69, then. In the 1970 entry I was still talking about fourth grade, but actually I was in 5th grade at the beginning of 1970 - I remember that because it seemed so amazing that it was not the Sixties any more - it seemed like the future.

(In my own defense, I've been going back and forth between Twitter, for Music Advent, and Livejournal and the Holidailies portal, for these entries, and posting different things at different times, and it's really no wonder I got confused.)

So by the time I discovered the radio in the spring of 1971 I was in sixth grade, which sounds about right. I remember that it was spring because I spent the whole of our Easter break holed up in my parents' bedroom where the stereo was. (It was a big console stereo with a turntable, it would seem like an antique now.) I became obsessed with the music on the radio - it was AM radio, I'm pretty sure it was 610AM (which nowadays is a sports station). It was "top 40" rather than "album rock" - which was what the group a little older than me would have been listening to - but it wasn't the stuff the adults were listening to, either. It was a mix, I think, of sort of the softer end of rock, and some R&B and some novelty stuff. I can look at the Billboard charts for 1971 and pick out some of the stuff they played. Some of the songs from this page of one hit wonders were there. I remember being especially fond of "Chick-a-Boom" which I guess would count as a novelty song, but which my mother seemed to think was kind of radical at the time. (Some of the other songs that we later sang in choir, I have trouble remembering what I liked when. But Chick-a-Boom was not anything we ever sang in choir, for sure!)

(My mother, incidentally, kept waiting for the day when we would start listening to "grown-up" music and forget that rock stuff. Along about 2000 - which was the year I turned 40! - I remember her finally saying that she guessed that wasn't going to happen.)

So here's one of the songs I loved. I didn't even realize it was the #1 song of the year, but that's what Wikipedia says.