Monday, February 02, 2015

Pop Music

When I was young pop music was a huge part of my life, just as it is for most people of a certain age. Not long after I got married and had to buckle down to earn a living and make a home I stopped paying attention to pop music. It was as if there was absolutely no time at all to listen to it. I quite actually did not have the leisure moments to hear what my old favorites were producing, nor to discover new music. I cast it aside and I was left behind in the wake of the industry.

What time that I did have for myself since those days I have almost always used to spend with my wife and son, or to create stories and novels, or to travel to see places that I fear may not survive the coming years (National Parks and wilderness areas). To put it bluntly, music didn't just take a back seat in the current of my life, it was all but dead to me.

I will admit that I was able to catch the tail-end of the great days of Napster and was able to glom onto thousands of old tunes I recalled and to discover a few artists who had appeared on the scene since I'd stopped listening to pop. But the industry soon put a stop to that and I went back to completely ignoring popular music.

These days, from time to time I will look up a group or an artist whose work I quite enjoyed as a young man. And every now and again I will recall that for a few years I made money selling vinyl records and got a huge kick out of discovering acts I'd never heard of, or musicians whose work I had just never sampled. This made dealing retail music a lot of fun and I looked forward to finding a jewel in the midst of what generally did not appeal to me. And those memories will sometimes spur me to look back at the sounds that made me smile when I was a younger man.

One of the groups that I found in my days as a retailer was The Motors. They were, apparently, a short-lived act who appeared, cut a few records, and then vanished. They had a nice sound, good keyboards with strings and nice vocals (both in chorus and as belted-out blues style solos). I recall them with some good feelings and occasionally pull up one of their old tunes to listen while I write. Here are a couple that I played when I was a youngster in my 20s:




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