Suzanne's Soundtrack Sunday

Do you hear a song, and it takes you back to your past? A vivid picture of what you were doing when you heard the song? I've got hundreds, no, THOUSANDS of 'song pictures'. That might be why I felt so driven to be a disc jockey.

In that vein, I'm thinking of trying something new on the blog. Soundtrack Sundays, where it'll tell a story about the songs from my POV. Okay, it's self indulgent crap, but it's my blog. You don't like it, you can skip reading today!

To start off:

Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond(1969) and Cecelia, Simon and Garfunkel(1970). These are the first two songs I remember hearing, really hearing. I remember snippets of songs from before then, but these two stick out.

I can remember walking around the corner from my house in Rockville Centre onto Lakeview Avenue and it was a warm, sunny day and the neighbor was in their yard (though I couldn't see them through the 6 foot tall hedges) with a transistor radio blaring "Sweet Caroline". It was warm, the sky was a brilliant blue and the clouds looked like cotton candy.

Cecelia takes me back to the first friend I had, Narissa Grant. Her family lived in the other half of the big duplex we were renting. We were inseparable until my family bought the house in Merrick. She had a younger sister, Alison, the same age as Giggles-and we spent many hours back and forth between the two sides of that duplex. Her older sister had the Simon and Garfunkel 45 and we played the thing over and over and over and over...

Some songs take me back to being in the car with a sibling or three. Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" reminds me of driving back home from Long Beach in the pouring rain, the windshield wipers kept time with the song as we drove up Long Beach Avenue into Oceanside. "Hello, It's Me" by Todd Rundgren reminds me of being with Legacy and dropping my sister Chrissy off at LaGuardia to go back to Ohio.

Road trips and songs go together, too. The first real vacation my dad planned involved taking me, Giggles, Socrates and another sibling to Connecticut and upstate NY. We left very early in the morning to beat the rush hour traffic the week before school started. It was 1976, We traveled up Rt 7 in Connecticut and visited Kent Falls. I remember my dad stopping to take pictures of the "Town of Gaylordsville" sign and Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" was playing on the radio early that morning. Later that morning, we visited the Goshen fair.

That trip was great, but it was only 24 hours long. We were supposed to stay at a Ramada Inn, but Ramada snafued the reservation-putting us in Charlottesville Virginia, not NY. It was 4am, we were traveling on the NY Thruway to get back home and Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" is the song I remember. Dad had the radio cranked (Harry Harrison, WABC) and the window halfway down to keep himself awake. We'd struck out at every hotel or motel we stopped at to find a room for the night. (The following year's trip fared much better-no Ramada reservations!)

There's the trip down memory lane for today! Now, how many of you want to go track down those songs? Anyone who doesn't recognize any of them?