WHEN THE OLD GIRL'S AWAY

...... I play my '70's music. That's what she calls it but to be fair a lot is from the '60's and '80's as well.
Tonight, as she is in auckland setting up the new townhouse flat we have rented and I am up North, I can indulge.
Playing select tracks from music that was important to me in my youth can be both fun and sad. It is certainly nostalgic and takes me back to places I have been and people I have known. When listening to some tonight I realised that I really like it. This is not to say that it is any better (my selections) than other music that was around at the time or music of the following generations (see MOE's excellent essays on the music that influenced him in the '80's and '90's) but it has meaning. To me.

Listening to Trafiic's 'Low Spark of High Heeled Boys'  took me back to Vogeltown and the period between school and universty - a time of change and liberation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2OIlJXbuVo&feature=related

And Roger Chapman's quavering voice on Family's 'The Weaver's Answer' sent shivers up my spine and seemed ethereal when echoing around Aro Valley late at night:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uzl_HIeE3Y++

 Small Faces was a group I liked when I was at school and I had all the albums. 'Afterglow of Your Love', 'Tin Soldier', 'Autumn Stone' etc. were all favourites but I particularly liked "The Universal' because it was mad and subversive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-lhhHojV_o


Arthur Brown, Cream, Spencer Davis Group, Them, Animals, Chicken Shack, The Kinks, The Yardbird's and others represented another world to me and one I love. after forty years its interesting to know that the music is still as fresh and alive to me now as it was then.
Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9mQkFpkShg