I still have an original iPod. There’s one in the Museum of Modern Art. It the first thing I have that they have also, a thing I remember buying that’s now officially history, which makes me feel like I should be in the display, holding it. The idea of carrying a jukebox in your pocket is still amazing to me, but I hold vinyl albums in high respect. Playing a few of them, all the way through, is a summer tradition, going back to grade school vacations where I actually had time to do such a thing.
Even then, it was the rare hot afternoon I could spend on the couch, staring at the ceiling, listening and singing along with the hi-fi emanations from the gigantic piece of furniture we called “a record player”. There weren’t any cassettes yet, so only here did I have the power to hear music I wanted to hear any time I wanted to hear it; outside the house was just radio. Even at restaurants with jukeboxes you had to take turns.
I humbly present an “album” of a few of those summer records, the ones I end up listening to every year.
Just imagine this is all written in ten point type on a flimsy paper folder about a foot square.
Track One: Kenny Loggins Alive (1980)
Live albums were big in the summer (there are many on this list); I don’t know how I decided to buy this one, but in 1980 I walked out of a Musicland with it in a bright plastic sack made of absolutely non-degradable material and played it religiously. A few weeks ago I was walking through Whole Foods, this testament to blue-eyed soul blasting in my AirPods, when I realized the very tall employee with the locked hair wrapped in kente cloth who’s never liked me since that incident near the sparkling water last winter (which was totally not my fault) had been listening to me singing along with the “Cinderella Kid” break from “I’m Alright” (y’know, the theme song to “Caddyshack”) and was giving me a look that could only be interpreted as “Martin Luther King is crying right now.”
Track Two: The Commodores LIVE! (1977)
Here’s what I knew about Lionel Richie; there had been a lot of changes in his life; he’d been up real high where he didn’t think he needed anybody, and then again he’d been down real low…so he no longer valued material things and thought he should settle down with someone who was apparently too far away. Love songs are weird when you’re 10. I mean, you get the intensity but not quite the point. Anyway, this album has a song called “ZOOM” on it, which should have made Lionel a kachillion more dollars during lockdown, but somehow didn’t catch on.
Track Three: Barry Manilow LIVE (1977)
You can easily spot the difference between this and the Commodores album if you note that there’s no exclamation point after the word LIVE in Barry’s title. Also, everything. My mother loved Barry Manilow for his key modulation, heightening the emotion at the end of his songs, so we bought this and played it on a loop for a year. I remember imagining someday getting a job as one of his backup singers. Again, 10 years old. Also, I didn’t know who Frank Zappa was yet.
Track Four: Return of the Son of Shut Up and Play Your Guitar (1981) and Track Five: Tinseltown Rebellion (1981) both by Frank Zappa
Are you lucky enough to have a rough idea of where You started? That first time or so you felt like the You that you recognize? Welcome to my You. The Kansas City rock station played a syndicated novelty radio show on Sunday nights from a DJ named Dr. Demento: that show alone could have been responsible for a majority of my personality, but its true power was introducing me to Frank, a Keystone Influence. My mother was very dubious until she saw him conducting his band with a baton, live on an MTV Halloween concert, and that was the detail that got him through. And, y’know, most of the lyrics went by really, really fast. That also helped.
Track Six: Matching Tie and Handkerchief (1973) by Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Of course I didn’t buy this record in 1973, but I had it by 1981, because I’d memorized it and was performing it in the backyard. Much like Frank Zappa, Monty Python was allowed because of a detail: it was a show on PBS. My mother did and does not suffer fools, but the fact that I was laughing at sketches about the Norman Conquest (which, ok, I admit I looked up our World Book Encyclopedias) did not escape her. As a high school sophomore I staged the Cheese Shop and Word Association sketches for a befuddled crowd of midwestern parents and grandparents, including my own.
Track Seven: Let’s Get Small (1979) by Steve Martin.
This album was a problem because my mother thought that Steve Martin was celebrating ignorance – which at our house could get you excommunicated. My explanation that his onstage character was an ironic commentary on the classic cheesy nightclub performer didn’t help my case much, because she’d never actually seen a nightclub performer. I invoked Jerry Lewis’ “The Nutty Professor” villain Buddy Guy (because we’d both seen that movie) as a template for the discussion and yes, I did talk like that when I was a kid.
Track Eight: Rhapsody In Blue / An American In Paris - Leonard Bernstein, The New York Philharmonic and the Columbia Symphony (1959) by George Gershwin
Another Keystone, and my favorite recording of this work. I guess the fact that I was listening from a couch twelve hundred miles (and what ended up being ten years) away from Manhattan made it kind of a soundtrack to a fairytale. I try to remember that feeling every time I’m stuck on a crowded subway.
Track Nine: Tubby The Tuba (1963) narrated by Annette Funicello by George Kleinsinger
Before children see images of political leaders on high balconies acknowledging thousands of admirers they see videos of musicians on impossibly wide stages seemingly controlling hundreds of thousands of people, their influence both awesome and entirely undeniable.
So. Annette Funicello.
There is no frame of reference under which she’d be identified as a rock star, yet of all the sound recordings I have ever come across it is this one that I have found to be the most powerful, a simple message of talent over bigotry. A tuba is mercilessly mocked by his orchestra and not allowed to carry a melody, but after an interaction with a singing bullfrog gives him a little self-confidence, the tuba’s subsequent impromptu solo performance is celebrated by a famous conductor, then instantly imitated by all the instruments that previously made his life a living hell.
A tale stronger than the irony of the times it was created in, this record has always inspired me to believe in the validity of my own musical composition. Of all Ms. Funicello’s works, including her specifically beach based entertainments, this work is the summer staple that I most look forward to enjoying every year. I would love to say that I would be as generous as Tubby in that situation, but shortly after that performance I probably would have joined up with Duke Ellington. I mean, damn.
Our New Album.