Debbie Does Drivel

GOOD TIMES

Have I admitted my fondness for AM soft rock?
It's more of an obsession really, I love nearly any slow song from the '70s.
The '80s and '90s completely screwed with the genre I think (Thanks a lot, Peabo Bryson), but the '70s flavor remains pure and chaste.

Depending on the company I'm keeping, I either proudly proclaim my soft rock thing or I hide my Carpenters and Anne Murray CDs. (I'd never do that to Barry though. Barry stays out regardless of who is coming to dinner.)

I've often pondered why I love '70s soft rock so ferociously, how I still know every word to every song, what exactly this might all mean... And what I've come up with is this: it reminds me of high points in my childhood.

My mom played music in the house a lot. Marie Osmond's Paper Roses or Helen Reddy's You and Me Against the World blared often from our stereo system (a behemoth wood and red velvet speakered monstrousity). I loved this music so much that at age 8, I asked my mom how I could become a singer, so that I might write and perform these loopy ballads myself. "Just sing all the time!" she told me. "It will become a part of you."

Become a part of me it did in woeful spite of the tone deafness and off key soprano voice I'd adopted. But it didn't matter. I still sang along with every song I'd come to love and I still do.

Each time (rare though it is) I hear Barry Manilow, I think of babysitting Sarah Linn, hanging out in her living room, performing a spazzy interpretive dance to Daybreak. Or, Donna Bartelt bringing the Somewhere Down the Road single over, so that we may pay homage to her recent break-up.

But the real thrill came thanks to the 8-track player in our Buick Estate Wagon. Childhood road trips always made me so happy. My pillow, my book, my chips and Diana Ross' Touch Me in the Morning or Donna Fargo's Happiest Girl in the Whole USA. I still know what that car smelled like and how the seats looked. I still hear my mom telling my dad to shut up after a particularly rowdy game of Dirty Poetry (a game he loved to play with us kids who knew we would always get him to rhyme with our "luck" stanza).

Songs spark memories for me like no other medium. I amaze and mystify Kev with my "I remember the very first time I heard this song" stories often. A few examples: I recall listening to Captain and Tenille's Love Will Keep Us Together in 1976, standing about mid-sidewalk on our street in Foster City, California. I was alone, looking at our neighbor's rock garden. It was foggy.

Styx's Lady seemed too sexy for me when I first heard it. I remember being embarrassed when my friend's sister brought the album home and played it for us on the turntable one evening in 1980.

Then there was Air Supply. I was mid-nap, tired after going to see UHF's Svengali at a 24-hour telethon in a Chicago suburb. Making Love Out of Nothing At All pulsed softly from the stereo as I lay on my friend's sectional trying to sleep, knowing that the reason I couldn't relax was the Coke I'd recently consumed from the plastic white mug that sat before me on the coffee table.

These songs remind me of a secure childhood, when I knew I'd come home from school and my mom would be there, playing her Carpenter's album; when I could count on going to Janesville, Wisc. with my family to see my aunt and uncle for Thanksgiving, listening to Bread or James Taylor the whole way. And I hope I can give my daughter that same sense of security. I'm not so sure anyone can do that for their children anymore, but these songs remind me that every kid deserves to look back at their childhood and have something to sing about.

This is for my mom, in honor of her birthday, and the songs she played for me.