I was a seventies kid who liked to play in the dirt.

When I was eight years old, I was at a pool with tons of other kids during the summer while I was on vacation. The age range of kids frolicking was anywhere from mine to 16 or so. Some of the teenagers had a boombox playing some music that I didn’t recognize. You know, because my well-established, fresh-off-the-training-wheels mind was privy to the latest musical trends.

Allow me to share how completely off base I was.

Yeah, I said it, boombox. It’s like an iPhone, only different, with a handle and sh*t. Keep up.

Back to my story…

For no other reason other than me apparently needing to speak rather than just keep my mouth shut, I suggested they play something else. As if I knew anything about music. To this day I still can’t tell the difference between David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust or Lady Gaga and…Lady Gaga.

One of the guys replied with, “Like what?” Me, in all of my pre-pubescent wisdom replied, “I don’t know, something good.”

He asked if I liked Van Halen. Having absolutely no idea who he was talking about, I said, “Sure, he’s pretty good.”

What a fucking moron. I instantly felt half of my body sink into quicksand and was praying for a lifeline. Instead, I got an anchor. I wasn’t about to sink further, but I sure as fuck wasn’t getting out of this without him milking it for all of the embarrassment I was about to endure.

That prompted his follow-up question, “What’s your favorite song?”

He was referring to my new favorite band as of 15 seconds ago. See, me saying any band was pretty good with the wealth of musical knowledge that my 99.5% unused brain contained at the time was just as good as calling them my favorite. The amount of clues that I had at the time equaled the dollar amount I had in my makeshift cut-off jean swim trunks- zero.

“Anything, I like them all.” As if he didn’t already know that I was completely full of sh*t a minute ago.

The look on his face seemed to acknowledge that he could either bury me while I was surrounded by his friends and possibly even bring them into the Colosseum to throw a few stones themselves, or step out of the way and allow me to tuck my tail and go back with my Puff-the-Magic-Dragoning friends that were my own age.

He chose mercy. I was grateful. It was me and Jackie Paper for the rest of the afternoon. Which leads me to another question, what was that song actually about? I’m not sure myself, but at the time, I know my Dad and his girlfriend sure liked it.

Turns out, the joke’s on him and his pool-hustling pals. When I got older, I learned that Van Halen actually was good. Sure, I had no idea it wasn’t a “he” back then, but let’s face it, Eddie Van Halen himself turned out to be pretty great.

Stick that up your boombox, pool boy.

(Somewhere deep inside, the single-digit me is secretly hoping that boombox-pool-boy didn’t just hear any of that.)

I grew up with 4 older sisters and a younger brother. The three oldest sisters pretty much controlled what was on the radio. We had a stack of records that ran the gamut from Singing Along with Mitch to that Beatles album that had the song with everyone singing underwater on a boat eating a yellow sandwich or some sh*t. You know, the one with the album cover that has those four guys playing hopscotch while making sure they don’t get nabbed for jaywalking and that dude at the back of the line is blocking my view so that I can’t see if that VW bug has a busted tail lite or not?

I wish we’d had another one of The Beatles’ records. Maybe that one with the white cover. It had the cover version of that Eric Clapton song about his guitar crying and the song about the guy with two black eyes, or a mask or something. I can never remember the name of the album. It was white. You think they could have come up with something simple so it would have been easier to ask around about or borrow from a friend. Maybe it would have helped sell a few more copies and people might still be talking about it today. Their rip-off cover of that Charles Manson song probably didn’t help their case in the record stores, either.

Don’t punch me in the face, but I never really liked many Beatles songs. Were they rock? Were they country? Were they blues? I had no clue. Sure, I can appreciate what they did for music as a whole, but Jesus, Paul, George, and for fuck’s sake, Ringo- can I get a decent drum fill somewhere? Anywhere? Can we please come together on this one?

I just thought of something, I never actually did Sing Along with Mitch. Too young, I guess. I do remember blasting out a 45 of Chuck Berry’s My Ding-A-Ling, though. Yeah, that’ll leave a mark on a young boy’s life. Who the actual fuck didn’t pre-screen that before letting it loose in the house?

Because of my older sisters, the first decade of my musical life was riddled with everything from Olivia Newton-John to Stevie Wonder, to some guy singing about how some girl named Brandy was a fine girl. She must have been, he said it like a million times in that fucking song. I also remember a song about some dog named Shannon who’s gonna hurt while he drifts out to sea. How the? It’s a dog. Drifting? For fuck’s sake. C’mon now. I swear my sisters were trying to brainwash me.

My next-door neighbor had my back, though. As we’d all wait outside in the morning for the school bus to pick us up, he’d point a speaker out of his second-story bedroom window blasting The Cars or Electric Light Orchestra albums. Good stuff. I knew even back then that The Cars had the potential to eventually release a masterpiece like Tonight She Comes.

There was a song that used to come on the radio that to this day brings me right back to the nostalgia of my childhood whenever I hear it. The haunting sound of every bit of it reminds me of sitting in front of our Telefunken stereo console as a kid at night. The song was called I’m Not In Love. It was apparently released in 1975, which meant that even at my ripe young age, I was very “current” with the musical times when this came over the airwaves. So there I’d sit, completely mesmerized by a song sung by a band called 10cc, which was named after the amount of semen in an average male ejaculation.

Punch me in the face, AGAIN.

Apparently, snopes.com refutes this claim, but let’s face it, wherever the name actually came from can’t hold a candle to that story. Don’t even get me started with Michael Jackson’s song Beat It.

So that’s it. I’m not sure how anyone comes back from all of that and has a successful music career, but it happened. Not to me specifically, but I’ve done okay with performing and releasing a few records of my own.

“And…I’d like to thank…”