Songs of your life meme

(still) UNFINISHED MEME (Faster and Shorter 2nd edit): UPDATE: links added:

I got tagged by Borepatch with the Songs of your life meme - it's taken a while to gather the data.

The rules for what I'm calling The Asterisk Awards are for me deceptively simple:

1. For each year you've been alive, post a song title (with performer name) that was released that year. There's some flexibility here - singles, albums, and Billboard Top Songs Chart will all be within a year of each other, but tend not to overlap. You have a song and a date, you're good to go.

Here's where it gets hard.

2. You have to post songs that you own, or have owned in the past, or your parents owned when you were a child.
If there's a year where you just don't have a song, then pick any old song from that year, but mark that year with an asterisk (*).

3. Ladies do not have to list more than the most recent 29 songs. A Gentleman never asks a Lady her age. If you want, though, list 'em all.

4. Once you've posted, tag 4 other bloggers.

To assist in the task there's a Billboard Top-40 website that you can backtrack songs.

I'm musically naive, pedestrian, and developmentally arrested - much is simply layered-on. There are huge voids in my popular music consciousness, from travel and other externally isolating conditions. The saying where we lived overseas was that any style or trend would take at least five years to arrive from abroad - and what was locally popular was more than five years old. There existed the kind of time-lag you get from living on what might as well be Mars.

Also I mis-hear lyrics: I hear Mondegreens to the point of unintelligibility.

My sequence of musical recognition and adoption is like falling through a series of black holes and hitting different years randomly in relation to the actual musical events as they occurred.

I don't recall my parents actually having any records that anybody ever listened to until much later in life. In the hallway was a Hi-Fi that was a wedding gift to my parents and that saw little use.
I probably burned or broke the most needles of all, playing one record over and over, my first "record" ever that came in the mail from sending away box-tops when I was six. It was "Hey There Yogi Bear."

So let's start with The Asterisks!

1958* - Johnny B Goode - I have to give it to Chuck Berry since he recorded this in January which is my birth month. One other song stands out on the list, The Purple People Eater because I actually remember hearing it while I was young.

1959* - Quiet Village - I only discovered this about eight years ago. I DO recognize the psychotic Chipmunk Song...

1960* - Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini - I was early-on very intrigued by girls and their underwear... I also recognize the fabulously insipid and freakish Mule Skinner Blues.

1961* - Take Five - The seminal jazz sound/song that stands head and shoulders apart from the rest of the musical ephemera this year with a nod to Jorgen Ingman's surf-classic Apache, split asunder only by the twisted and bizarre camp-song, Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor.

1962* - Surfin' Safari - Followed by #54 Green Onions. I remember once going to a Beach Boys movie - was there really such a thing? It may have been the year we began swimming-lessons...

1963* - Ring of Fire - This year #81 stands out.

1964 - Hey There Yogi Bear - My first purchase.

1965* - Help! We saw the movie as a family and I kept falling asleep, but we could all do British accents with the Indian mix and soon we might be living it. The James Bond thriller Goldfinger left an indelible imprint.

1966* - Summer in the City - has the most strong memorable impact. Also the mysteriously unfathomable mis-heard lyrics of Sunshine Superman; "Any Triggin' A Boogin' A Baby, on Your Velvet Stone".

1967* - Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron - On our way overseas in Hong Kong my dad bought a reel-to-reel and had a bunch of LP's taped. I never knew what or who they were and it was an adult machine. Actually heard this two years later in Boarding School when it finally arrived.

1968* - Harper Valley PTA - ? A hook I just grokked on out of the blue, but also Those Were the Days.

1969* - Hawaii Five-O - I had not seen any TV in three years. We returned to the U.S. and TV came back - the tropics remained large in my consciousness.

1970* - All Right Now - The theme-song of the notorious, ill-behaved and inappropriate University Band heard at football games.

(OK TAKE A BREAK....)

1971* - Won't Get Fooled Again - I didn't get this song until a couple years later.

1972* - Horse With No Name - A song that clicked and lyrics I could recognize - and I wanted to get out of the house and go far away. My big sister was going nuts and playing Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow White Rabbit obsessive-compulsively the way I had treated Yogi Bear, except in her case it was LSD-driven, not youthful exuberance. Later she ran away from home and was re-captured a week later. It was all bad.

I'll try to just speed things up.

1973* - Frankenstein - I bought a $68 Sanyo stereo cassette radio, my first musical device, from doing lawn-jobs - and I had this and Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll taped on the short 3-minute tape that came with the device. I listened to it in the morning before rolling a joint and walking to school, in an effort to drown out the pain.

1974* - Radar Love. Wishing I had some - I was a loser in H.S.

1975* - Mehbooba - Overseas again for a year I had left the socially suffocating confines of the Bay Area and would graduate far-far away from my former classmates. This song is from the epic Indian film of that year Sholay, and I actually had a girlfriend. This was a romantically bittersweet youthful reminder that upon graduation I'd leave and we'd probably never see each other again...and we didn't.

1976* - Rhiannon - College music! and mass confusion. A bunch of NEW music in college, introduced by a new dorm-friend who had the most gigantic stereo I had ever seen. In fact everybody there had all the BEST music, and it was all BETTER than anybody else's. I met my first music-snobs with thousand-dollar stereos - where did these people come from, and with ALL that money?
Also George Benson, Stanley Clarke, and Frank Zappa emerged.

1977* - Walk This Way. More Arowsmith influence from dorm-buddy - but from another direction came Backwater.

1978* - Mongoloid - Devo. In college I was still a loser, but New Wave was taking over.

1979 - Planet Claire - Studying overseas again, this time in Europe, I first heard this when I came back in the Fall and it seared into my brain as I set about attempting an animated sequence to this for an art-class assignment - I bought the album.
In other news Nina Hagen and Jeff Beck were big in Vienna, and I saw The Who, Cheap Trick, AC/DC along with and a bunch of other bands at the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremburg. About the last concert I went to.

1980 - "Gates of Steel" - and Private Idaho Really drifting away from the top-100, I was living in a house by Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp with a bunch of other students - who had sophisticated music-machines and a tape deck, so I bought an album to record. There were relationships - one was a girl who was the girlfriend of a D.J. who was best-friends with Jello Biafra. What a fucking jerk asshole self-absorbed dickhead. But finally I knew people who knew People and got onstage during a show - it was Santa Cruz, not much of a Holiday in Cambodia.

1981 - Echo Beach - Graduation and off to an Archaeology dig - and a summer of relentless daily exposure to Phil Collins, I drove back east and wound up in DC. After doing day-labor and gardening jobs was "stripping" at Harbinger Photographic Services.

1982* - Only the Lonely - Summer stock Theater work in central CA and I dated an actress who had the album - a relationship that ironically turned into somethign like Never Say Never , by Romeo void...

1983* - She Blinded Me with Science.

1984* - 99 Luftballons - The German side is strong with him-= he remembers a lot - but Bananarama's Cruel Summer - well, it was along and cruel summer.

(TIME OUT)

1985 - Smooth Operator killed and I bought the album.

Bangles, Bananarama, Nena, Sade, Lene Lovich - Blue Hotel - are you catching a trend here? But what happened to Roxy Music, Brian Eno, and others? It was the Age of MTV and videos - and I didn't have cable-tv either, I missed it all...

1986* - Sledgehammer.

1987* - Walk Like an Egyptian* - a seriously guilty pleasure and I was starting to feel too old for it.

1988* - Hazy Shade of Winter and a better version than The Pretentuious Turtlenecks of Smedley and Farglebargle.

1989* - She Drives Me Crazy - whatever happened to the Fine Young Cannibals? We bought the house condo.

1990* - Roam caught me back again with that voice. A decade lost and gone since Graduation and all that crap that happened back then - where was it all going? Unemployed after another round of layoffs.

1991* - Wicked Game - my God, the man still has all that hair...

1992* - Nothing there: Achy Breaky Mariah Carey George Michael & Elton John Celine Dion Nirvana. Bah.

ENOUGH! I think this is the year I stopped listening and lost track completely. I was not any part of the target audience of anything anymore. I was 34 and totally out of it. Unemployed again after another round of layoffs I had to make another directional change and try to begin a fifth career.

1993*
1994*
1995*
1996*
1997*
1998*
1999*
2000*
2001*
2002*
2003*
2004*
2005*
2006*
2007*
2008*