Songs to Play at my Funeral

I have always been a borderline audiophile.  Now by definition, an audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction.  So, in that sense, I don’t fit the description as I am less interested in the Hi-Fi sound than I am the general sound, essence and overall emotion of music period.  I was a B student (sometimes C’s) in high school, so mostly average in terms of intelligence, but when it comes to music I have this ability to retain loads of useless knowledge of who sings what songs, who the drummer or guitarist is for any particular band and even in some cases can recognize patterns in writing or production styles and am able to correctly name the individual. 

To give an example of my obsession of music in general, when I was 11 years old in 1980, I had this curiosity of whether or not there was any pattern to the hits being played on the radio at that time.  For example, Rod Stewart had a hit song called Passion and I loved it.  Something about the slow build of the verses and the (pardon the pun) passion in which he sang the chorus and bridge, that I just loved.  So, I wanted to see if they played that song at the same time every hour or every two hours, etc.  I just needed to know how the whole system worked.  So I took my notebook and turned on the radio station at the time (the name escapes me. Oh God, I am getting old) and waited for the next song to come on. By the way this is what my radio (clock radio to be specific) looked like at the time:

Call Me by Blondie comes on at 8:12 AM, so I notate that in my new radio “log”:

Start Time	Stop Time	Artist	Song
8:12 AM		Blondie	Call Me

3 minutes and 32 seconds later that song ends and the next song comes on.  It’s Magic by Olivia Newton John.  Next log entry:

Start Time	Stop Time	Artist	Song
8:12 AM	8:15 AM	Blondie	Call Me
8:15 AM		Olivia Newton John	Magic

And this continued for hours so that I could obtain a sample size large enough to give me some idea of whether there was a pattern to the programming.  Now, you might be asking yourself, why not just call the radio station and ask if they had some sort of pattern but, I am not taking any questions right now and this is my story so let me finish.  I would like to say that I cracked the code and found that yes, there was some sinister plot or pattern and that the whole system was just on auto pilot.  The fact is, I never saw (or at least recognized) a pattern. This was before spreadsheets, so it’s not like I could have sorted the data and done any real analysis.  Anyway, I am diverging from my point.  Point is…. I LOVE MUSIC!  Always have.  However, if I am being honest, I have always resented the fact that my parents never took notice of how much I enjoyed music.  They never offered to take me to any concerts.  They never took me to get lessons for any instruments and the only 2 memories I have of talking about music with my parents at all were two discussions with my father:

One, was the song Stone in Love by Journey playing on the radio in 1982 and my dad took notice of the lyric “In the heat with a blue jean girl, burning love comes once in a lifetime” and he was appalled at how tawdry that lyric was and told me turn it off.

The other was a song later that same year, White Wedding by Billy Idol was playing, and he commented at how catchy the song was and how much he enjoyed it.  I was confused how he could like a rock song like that from a (pardon the pun again.  Only some will get it.) “Rebel” like Billy freaking Idol and only a year ago told me to turn off such a safe (in the best possible way) band like Journey.

To be fair my parents did take notice on Christmas Day of 1982.  I was 13 and a big fan of Billy Squier.  Billy already had a massive hit with his album Don’t Say no in 1981, but as a new teenager, he was now speaking directly to me with his new album Emotions in Motion. I loved the title track and the big hit at the time was Everybody Wants You. Well, I wanted that cassette tape badly and being 13 and unemployed, I had to rely on my parents/Santa to get it for me.  Christmas morning comes and as I peer under the tree, I see that Santa (I knew it was my parents at this point BTW) not only got me the cassette, but a Walkman to play it on.  To say I was happy is an understatement.  I couldn’t have ripped the plastic off that cassette quick enough and put that tape in the new player and hit play.  It was Dolby sound, which going back to that whole audiophile definition, I could care less about, but there is something about the audible sound of the beginning of that tape that still sits with me today.  It was a sound that went from left to right in my new headphones and demonstrated the Dolby experience.  Nothing to do with Billy or his music that was about to play (which by the way was the sound of a motorcycle revving up.  How cool is that?), but again that sound to me is like the bell is to Pavlov’s dog, I react the same way every time, pure unadulterated joy.

Here is the album by the way.  Fun Fact:  Cover was done by Andy Warhol.