Classic rock is often on the playlist at Casa Jaquandor, for many reasons. This is the popular music I grew up with, the “soundtrack of my youth” as it were, though in my case, not as strongly as for others (because the main part of the soundtrack of my youth was John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and their comrades). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help hearing a great deal of classic rock as it was new, in restaurants and on car stereos and in bars and camps and generally all over the place. I tend to associate a lot of this music with the road, since the car radio was often the way much of this stuff was consumed, and between moving and road trips a-plenty, we spent a lot of time in the car when I was a kid. (In and out of it…I don’t want to convey an idea of endless automobile-related experiences as a kid, but my parents were of a general mindset that if you live within a few hours of something neat, why on Earth wouldn’t you drive there and check it out? More than once, if it turned out to be really cool? I have adopted much the same mindset later in life.)
Oddly, though I’ve heard a great deal of classic rock and many of the songs are familiar or even well-known to me, I am often not very good at all at knowing which band did what song, or even what each song is! The age of Google, with the ability to search for song lyrics and then mobile devices whose search engines are equipped with song identifiers, has been a boon for people like me. Here’s one song that shows up a lot on the Pandora classic rock station The Wife plays or on the Sirius XM classic rock station I enjoy sometimes. For years I’ve known neither the name of the song nor which band it is, but I enjoy its lyrics about failure to commit to a relationship and yet wanting the relationship to endure, and I love the song’s opening guitar hooks and the general beat of the song. This isn’t just the soundtrack of my youth; in a lot of ways songs like this are the soundtrack of the road trips of my youth.
And to think, I didn’t know the name of this song, or who played it, until yesterday. Go figure. Here is “Sister Golden Hair”, by America.
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America came to New Paltz in early 1972. It would have cost fifty cents. I didn't go because I never heard of the group. Weeks later, A Horse With No Name was all over the radio.