Groovy Pop Music

Sometimes I worry maybe I get a little too didactic in my blogs. I guess I see a lot of bad in the world counteracted by a lot of good, and I hope the good will win. So in an effort to avoid preachiness, here’s a fun story from my youth.

As I walked home from school in the fourth grade with my friend Darin, he sang a song I hadn't heard.

“We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun…”

To his utter amazement, I asked what it was.

“You’ve never heard Seasons in the Sun? It’s only the most groovy tune in the world!”

See, I was raised by parents that didn’t pay much attention to pop music. My dad listened to jazz, classical, and the world renowned Mitch Miller’s Sing Along Band. If you’ve never heard Mitch Miller, you need to look him up on YouTube. I guarantee you full minutes of entertainment. Here’s a sample.


With that background, of course I hadn’t heard of Seasons in the Sun. So after school, I went to Darin's house and we waited at least eight minutes before it played on AM 1320 KCPX. And yes, it was groovy.

Now I had to be groovy, so I went immediately home and told my older sister about it. Wendy was in sixth grade and of course had already heard the song. She and her friend Debby immediately started singing it.

I’d finally joined the groovy crowd! I could walk around the house, our street, the school playground—anywhere—and not be ashamed I didn’t know the latest hit. Our dad even bought the 45 vinyl record for us.

In reality, it’s a pretty lame song with maybe only three chords. It’s about a guy who’s dying of some terrible disease and wants to say goodbye to everyone. But the flip side of the 45 was even worse—Put the Bone In. Before you comment on that title, it’s about a dog that died and they want to bury him with a bone from the butcher shop. Both songs are about on par with most songs The Partridge Family ever put out.


A couple weeks later, Wendy and Debby hung out in our living room talking about groovy stuff when Seasons in the Sun came on KCPX. Trying to maintain my grooviness, I ran in and told them to be quiet because their favorite song was on. They looked at me like I was a stink bug.

“That song is so old,” Wendy said. “We don’t like that anymore. Now we like Run Joey Run.”

Devastation! I’d instantly lost my hipness—I liked an old, outdated song from two weeks earlier. To make it worse, Run Joey Run told about a girl named Julie whose dad is upset because she and Joey got a little too friendly. The doctor told them they were in love and better get married quickly. Julie’s dad pulls out a gun and…well, I won’t spoil it. You can watch the tragic events unfold in this official video.

Anyway, as result of all that, I stopped liking pop music for many years. Decades, really. My music tastes now vary from Tuvan throat music, to prog rock, to Indonesian Gamelan, Irish punk, jazz, classical, and, on occasion, a good pop tune like this.

A Song of Hope

I was recently in the gym talking, coincidentally, to a guy named Jim, and the Styx song Come Sail Away played on the radio. Thinking about that song, it certainly hasn’t been a great, influential part of my life that inspired or comforted me, or even has great sentimental value. But as I told my friend Jim, it’s interesting how my mode of listening to that song has changed over the years.

I first heard Come Sail Away in elementary school on the little AM transistor radio I used to hang on my wrist. I liked the song because it mentioned starships, and I was really into anything that had anything to do with space. I was so cool because I knew lyrics to a pop song.

But that was just the beginning.

Not long after that, I recall going to a friend’s house and listening to Come Sail Away on his dad’s old 8-track tape player. Actually it wasn’t old at the time, and it was really awesome how some songs would suddenly fade out half-way through the music, then fade back in when it switched tracks. It was state of the art.

Or so I thought.

When I reached junior high school age, another friend had the song on a 45 record, which we listened to often. The good thing about records was how they’d get damaged, then skip and keep playing the same part of the song over and over. Few kids were as hip as us.

But things got even hipper.

In high school, I attended an outing with a youth group where we took a bus to another city. Someone on the bus had the whole Styx Grand Illusion album on a cassette tape and played it repeatedly on his boom box while we all sang along. We had to wait after each playing as he rewound the tape, which was a good thing because it allowed us to catch our breath.

Then I took a breather from the song for a while.

Come Sail Away sort of faded out of my life for about ten years until I bought it on CD as a Christmas present for my oldest daughter. I was happy that she liked a song that I liked when I was young. We’d listen to it together and we’d finally reached the epitome of the digital age.

But I was wrong.

Several more years passed and my two older kids, who’d grown into teenagers themselves by then, joined a youth group outing just like the one I’d done so many years earlier. This time I was the driver in our 8-passenger Land Cruiser. My son pulled out his iPod Shuffle and we plugged it into the stereo via the cassette tape adapter. And once again, all eight passengers—two generations—sang along to the same old song. Come Sail Away had sailed full circle.

But there was still wind in its sails.

As I sit here and write this, Come Sail Away is playing on the same stereo that we used to listen to the CD when my daughter was younger. But this time, my phone is streaming the song from Spotify and it’s connected to the stereo via wi-fi. And my kids—the older and the younger ones— are singing along.

So where do we sail from here?

I’m hoping we can stream music directly into our brain from a satellite. Then we can just think of a song and it’ll play.

Perhaps this “song of hope” does have great sentimental value after all, as I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had.

Come Sail Away on iTunes