Okay, I freely admit that these were not my teen years. But I still lived in a house with a stereo system, and music was played all around me from radios, so while my mother was humming along to Roberta Flack while making my lunch, I was digging Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” My parents played Paul and Linda McCartney’s album Ram throughout my early childhood (as did our upstairs neighbors in an old Victorian in Concord, Mass., one summer, as wisps of marijuana smoke stole down the stairs). NBC co-opted Orleans’s song “Still the One” in the late 1970s, around the time they adopted the peacock motif. And if Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” wasn’t funny enough when played on the radio, it got even loopier when John appeared as guest star on the Muppet Show and sang the duet with Frank Oz/Miss Piggy, who was all over the poor teabag.
And it’s also true that many of these songs, while I may remember them from the time they were released, also resurfaced in later decades. “Apeman” by the Kinks was on the Club Paradise soundtrack (a huge Robin Williams flop, though the music was good). A high school friend had a show on the school radio station and gave everyone a good dose of Jimmy Buffett when he was behind the mike. “Hotel California” is a classic any way you slice it (though I once had a native German in a class at UCLA who complained bitterly that California wasn’t at all like he’d pictured it from the song). Doris Day’s “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps” was the music for the leads’ beautiful rumba in the campy Australian film Strictly Ballroom. And Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” was the background music for one of the more memorable scenes in Mike Myers’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
Here’s my list as it stands now:
Elton John: Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart
Fleetwood Mac: You Make Loving Fun, Go Your Own Way The summer after the Cap’n and I got married, I bought a greatest hits album by this band. I remember their stuff from the late 1970s and loved rediscovering them.
Mamas and Papas: California Dreamin’
Ray Charles: Hit the Road Jack Anytime is a good time to play this song.
Kinks: Lola, Apeman
Orleans: Still the One
Paul McCartney: Silly Love Songs My parents took us on a red-eye to visit relatives in New Jersey one summer. Listening to this on the in-flight music service was one of the only things I’ve chosen to remember about that miserable trip.
Jimmy Buffett: Margaritaville
Rupert Holmes: Escape I love the theme of reviving a flagging relationship in this song.
Eagles: Hotel California
David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust
Doris Day: Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps
James Brown: I Feel Good
The Zombies: Time of the Season From the sound of this music, I can’t imagine a better-named band. I can just see the overgrown, unwashed, bleary-eyed band–and yet this song is so unique.
Beach Boys: I Get Around
Rolling Stones: You Can’t Always Get What You Want, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction One of my high school friends used to claim that the Stones were better than the Beatles. I always preferred the latter, but I’ve since gained an appreciation for Mick and Co.
Animals: House of the Rising Sun
Nancy Sinatra: These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
Eric Clapton: I Shot the Sheriff
Steppenwolf: Born to be Wild I bought a Cher Fitness step aerobics tape in the early 1990s and there was a cover for this on it. (Cher may be sartorially challenged, but I’ll say this for her–she knows how to pick music to move to.) I like the original better.
Jefferson Starship: Jane
Aretha Franklin: Think, Respect
Grateful Dead: Good Lovin’
Byrds: Turn Turn Turn The pop version of Kohelet
Cat Stevens: Hard Headed Woman, Morning Has Broken Stevens may have fallen off the derech when he became Yusuf Islam and joined in the bleating for Salman Rushdie’s head. But these are still two great–and kid-friendly–songs.
Wild Cherry: Play that Funky Music
Dr John: Right Place Wrong Time
Carly Simon: You’re So Vain This was a favorite of my sister’s and mine. We used to sing it to our brother.
Harry Chapin: Cat’s in the Cradle
Three Dog Night: Joy to the World Another one I always liked that the kids will probably like too
Jim Croce: Bad Bad Leroy Brown Some of the best lyrics I remember from this decade–“badder than old King Kong, meaner than a junkyard dog”
There is a notable absence of the Beatles on this list. That’s because I have all of their albums except Rubber Soul. (I only really cared for George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” from that album). And there’s no ABBA because while we love Anna and Agnetha’s voices, we recently got the soundtrack from the movie Mamma Mia and prefer the arrangements and variety of singers on that album. (I’m especially nutty over Christine Baranski’s “Does Your Mother Know?”) And while I love Jimi Hendrix, I don’t think he’s someone to introduce my children to at this tender age.
Every few days I remember another song. Tell me your favorites and jog my memory.
Shimshonit 
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