I started out as a child.

A fortunate one in many ways, not least of which was that I had 3 older siblings. So there were always records to listen to. Not just Bill Cosby comedy albums – though there were plenty of those – but everything Beatles (we had one of those black-label “Please Please Me” 45s on Vee-Jay records, along with all the Capitol singles), plenty of Monkees, and all the usual one, two, or three-hit wonders.

I can still remember buying my first 45, which was Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane…1967, of course, so I would have been 8. My oldest brother took me down the street to the newspaper store to get it…a great memory (and a great record).

I was a dedicated Top-40 radio listener from the start. Somewhere along the line, my folks bought me a stereo – we weren’t one of those Hi-Fi families, so it was your basic cheesy all-in-one deal. I do remember the bright red “stereo” light in the middle – very exciting. I was probably 13 or so. I had entered the wacky world of Frequency Modulation.

I continued my hit radio ways for a while, listing to an odd, DJ-less Albany, NY station around 100FM in the early 70′s – “Rock 100″ or something like that. I remember “Dreamweaver” by Gary Wright and “Miracles” by the Jefferson Starship were in (very) regular rotation, and by god did they sound cool in Stereophonic Sound. But I was experimenting here and there with other FM signals.

There were two stations available that would probably be described as “Progressive Rock.” One was WQBK-FM, at 103.9, a commercial station, and the other was WRPI, a college station at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was of course left-of-the-dial.

One night, sitting in that tiny 2nd-floor bedroom with the red shag rug, I was checking out the somewhat dicey WRPI signal when this song came on and changed everything.

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Now, we all know about ELO: fruity, bombastic, over-produced, annoying. That’s what they became, but for a couple of albums they were a somewhat interesting prog-rock group that was actually taken seriously. This cut has a lot to do with that – it’s a seriously awesome slice of prog-meets-rock that they never equaled. The production is tremendous, it just leaps out at you…the guitar playing is righteous, and the arrangement of Chuck Berry’s masterpiece is mindbending.

I can’t tell you how incredible this song sounded that night, leaping out from that barely-tuned-in station over my crappy $100 stereo. If this was what these other, weirder FM stations were playing, I needed to hear more of it.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with WRPI – they were block-programmed, like most college stations, so you never knew if you were going to tune in to a rock program or an hour of Tuvan throat-singing. My loyalties shifted to WQBK-FM – Albany, which would capture my imagination for the next few years, my musical landscape forever altered.

Summer is a bringer of nostalgia. I was amazed and, for a time, slightly paralyzed by nostalgia as I moved into my 30s, and it took me a while to figure out what it was and how to get around it.

Of course, I still lapse into the usual reminiscent reveries from time to time. Last night, as I walked the dog at 1am (summer also demands one stay up as late as possible…yawn…) I drifted back, back, back…

The summer of 1978 came after my first year of college. I returned home and quickly snagged a summer job at The Swiss Hut. I’m sorry, Hutte. Ye Olde Swisse Hutte. It was a sort of resort deal, and my job involved purely manual labor – the worst kind. One task that sticks in my mind involved shoveling muck out of the pond into a wheelbarrow, and hauling it across a field and parking lot to be dumped behind a shed. 8 hours of this in 90 degree weather. It’s a good thing I was 19, it would kill me today.

On the plus side, at lunch you could go to the kitchen and make anything you wanted. I remember they had some really amazing ham. Also, after your shift, you could jump in the pool; after grunting and sweating through a summer day, that was a treat. I remember having the Grateful Dead’s Skeletons From the Closet on 8-track for the ride to and from. Anyway, it was an enjoyable enough shitty job for a dopey kid.

It didn’t last long…my friend Tony was spending the summer working at Charter Supply, a plastic-bottle factory. The money was better, and it was much easier if slightly mind-numbing: take the bottles as they came down the conveyor belt, put ‘em in a box. Seal up the box. Do it again. 8 hours of this in a hideous, dusty, noisy factory, surrounded by folks who had been doing it for 20 years, and were going to do it for another 20.

After our 2nd shift gig ended, Tony and I would head to his place, where frosty beverages and the 11:30 showing of a Star Trek re-run awaited. Good times. I’d then head home and stay up until 3 or 4am listening to WQBK, the local progressive rock station, and playing my guitar.

The idea was that I was going to save my money for my 2nd year away at college. Screw that. I went out and bought that guitar as soon as I could; first, a Fender Jaguar that was a total piece of crap. I took it back, explained that it was a total piece of crap – the dude at Drome Sound agreed – and traded it for an Ibanez Telecaster copy. A very, very sweet axe that, of course, ended up being stolen within a couple of years.

Other 8-tracks bouncing around the car that summer included Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, the Rolling Stones Some Girls, Bruce Springsteens Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight.  Walter Egan’s great single “Magnet and Steel” was on the radio, and I saw Patti Smith on her Easter tour at the Palace in Albany.

Looking back, it was really my last free-ish kid-like summer – the next year, I would stay in my depressing college town and work. That’s a whole ‘nother story, as they say. But those few months of 1978 were my great peak of being young and irresponsible, and I can’t help but look back in wonder and pleasure at how good i was at it.

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Voices heard in fields of green
Their joy their calm and luxury
Are lost within the wanderings of my mind

Im cutting branches from the trees
Shaped by years of memories
To exorcise their ghosts from inside of me

The sound of waves in a pool of water
Im drowning in my nostalgia

- David Sylvian, “Nostalgia”

Here’s a picture of the upstate New York town I grew up in, courtesy of Wikipedia (thanks, guys!):

The small town – population around 1500 – is built on a series of very large hills. We lived on the far east side of town, near the top of those hills, about a half-mile straight up that road. As a kid, in the summertime, I would ride my bike down them in the cool morning air, to a community softball field. We’d play ball for a few hours, and then – around noon – I’d head back home, back up ‘em, struggling to pedal in the stifling summer heat.

Standing where this picture was taken, to the left and not in the shot, was Palen’s, a little restaurant with a soda fountain that also sold newspapers and magazines and other odd crap. It was about 1/3 of the way home from the ballfield, and thus very handy for getting a coke and a pack or two of baseball cards. And maybe some Snow Caps. Possibly a Mad magazine or, later, a National Lampoon. But know this about Palen’s: you were not to “hang out” on their steps, because that is where the ner-do-wells sat and smoked.

Philmont had but two bad-asses as I was growing up, names that were always accompanied by a disapproving frown from adults and wide-eyed amazement (and occasionally terror) from your fellow chil’rens. One of these, a perpetual habitue of Palen’s steps, was known only as Skip.

Skip was a young adult with dirty blond mop and the average reprobate’s approximation of facial hair. I knew nothing about him other than that he was bad news. He sat on those steps and smoked and looked dangerous. What became of him, I’ll never know. I think he might have glared at me once or twice, but our paths never really crossed.

The other bad-ass was a kid named Matt. He was a year or two behind me in school and in fact was just an average kid who got into above-average trouble. As I got older I got to know him and liked him a lot. But when I was younger he was the stuff of legend: for instance, he ran away from home one time, and camped in the woods near the railroad trestle, and started a fire that required the response of the fire department. The next day, of course, a few of us made a pilgrimage to the site to see the damage – half a tent, clothes scattered around, maybe a cooking utensil or too, and a few yards of scarred forest floor; the smell of day-old burnt stuff. It was cool and maybe a little creepy. Which is to say, awesome.

Another time, he fell of that same railroad bridge onto the cement below – probably a good 40 feet – and broke various bones. Didn’t slow him down much, but it certainly added to the legend.

As I got into my late teens, instead of playing baseball on summer mornings, I’d ride my bike down the hills and hang out at Matt’s house, since both his parents worked. He turned out to be a great guy, and we had lots of laughs doing the usual adolescent stuff, much of it perfectly legal. Later, when we got to driving age, he once explained to me that driving drunk was OK as long as you obeyed the speed limits.

This turned out not to be so; he died not too long after he graduated high school. Wrecked his car. I was away at college, and got the news over the phone from my parents, and I could see that same disapproving scowl over the long-distance lines.

Generally speaking, that was as much drama as I experienced in my younger days, in my little town. On those rare occasions when someone asks me about how I grew up, my short explanation is that I grew up in Mayberry, and Aunt Bea was my mom. Not a precise description, but pretty damn close.

That song “Sooner or Later” by the Grass Roots? When I was a kid, I thought the lyrics were “Soon, Rod Laver, love is gonna get ya…”

Rod Laver was a famous tennis player of the time.

And “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash? I thought it went, “I can see all icicles in my way”.