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Maybe I was busy raising my kids in the 80s, but that's no excuse. I go see an 80s cover band every week, and last night for the first time, they played The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now". What a great song!!! I can't believe I had never heard it before.
It's a difficult thing to hear all the good music of the day when one is just an average listener, and I guess that's what I am. Radio and your friends can only introduce you to so much. You have to seek out the other stuff that slips through the cracks, or maybe you'll just trip over it when it's least expected. How Soon Is Now (Smiths) and Blister In The Sun (Violent Femmes) were introduced to me through teenaged girls that worked for me long ago at a movie theatre.
I rented a house once and the owner left his records in the basement. I just had to check some of them out and discovered a young Bonnie Raitt who sounded nothing like the commercialized version that everyone got to know in the 80s & 90s. There were also Blue Cheer and Moby Grape - bands that I'd totally missed in the 60s and Hot Tuna - a Jefferson Airplane spin-off that didn't get much airplay.
I used to live in a town that had a terrific library and can remember taking out records that I had never heard of based pretty much on the album covers alone. This is how I came to find Prince and R.E.M. early on.
This is sort of tangential to the original topic but I feel like sharing nonetheless.
A few years ago, I was walking with a friend from out of town showing her around DC. We passed some sort of building that had speakers outside playing music....
Friend: This song sounds so familiar to me.
Me: It should....
Friend: Oh! Oh my God, I LOVE that movie!
Me: Huh????
Friend: Titanic!
Me: ..............
Friend: What?
Me: This is the National Anthem.
Friend: *hangs head in shame*
Yes, she confused "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion with the Star-Spangled Banner. I rib her about it to this day. Sorry to go sort of off-topic.
Since arriving at this forum, I've come across more songs than I ever expected to be unfamiliar with. I've listened to a lot of music throughout my life, starting in the Fifties, yet there are some that never came to my notice. One time, it was a song that seemed to have been very popular in at least a region close to here, but I swear I had never heard it or even of it. A friend and I were in Headstone Friends in Terre Haute, going through old vinyl because we were working on a writing project set in 1969 and were refreshing memories and filling in our collections, as both of us still had every album and 45 we'd ever bought or been given. This is a 45 I came across that puzzled me but was familiar to her, a native of Wisconsin:
Very recently, a fellow member posted this one, knowing of my love of felines. Again, how did I miss it?! My younger sister and I have always been cat crazy, and we certainly would have loved this one!
The Ames Brothers - ***** Cat (1958) - YouTube
It's adorable=} I'll bet my sister and I would have been dancing all over the house to this one! I truly can picture us at that age~about 4 and 6, respectively~having the time of our lives. We always had the radio on in the basement, which was sort of a playroom for us. We heard so much music, and we also heard news that made us cry, specifically the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Eric Fleming (best-known as Gil Favor on "Rawhide").
I loved a lot of obscure music in the Sixties, but I never read about or heard anything by this group: H.P. Lovecraft, named for an author I "discovered" in the late Sixties. By the Seventies, I had collected many paperbacks of his short stories. In all that time, I somehow missed this group:
Stumbled across this one after hearing it in a coffee shop recently. Pretty, in a sad sort of way. Always like mid to late 60s pop with the strings and great harmonies.
^^^That's a good one and isn't often heard. When I found it on YouTube, it was the first time I'd encountered it since the Sixties.
Other songs I belatedly heard include a sequel to "Big Bad John" and "The Cajun Queen". "Little Bitty Big John" deserved not to be a hit; it doesn't even work as a sequel unless Big Bad John had a romance besides the Cajun Queen. It's so poor, I won't even post it.
The Royal Guardsmen's "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" yielded a sort-of sequel I didn't know about till fairly recently. I was aware of "The Return of the Red Baron" and "Snoopy's Christmas", but I didn't know about "The Smallest Astronaut", in which the Red Baron has, as I recall, one line. I also did not know about "Snoopy for President"~in which the Red Baron makes yet another appearance! Yes, the group did other songs besides ones about our favorite cartoon beagle=}
"Snoopy for President" - The Royal Guardsmen 1968 - YouTube
I admit that the list of astronauts at the end is touching, particularly (Gus) Grissom, (Edward) White and (Roger) Chaffee. the men who died in a cabin fire during countdown practice on the launch pad.
In the early Nineties, I still was watching MTV fairly regularly. So, how did I miss this one?!
I'd also never once heard the the song "Today" by Jefferson Airplane until last year. I love it. I mean really love it! Makes me envious of my older sister moving to San Francisco during the Summer of Love.
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