Love Stinks (The J. Geils Band). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1980

Growing up in Casper, Wyoming, there was only one FM rock radio station. I used to listen to it when I came home for lunch from the school down the street. One day, they had a quiz: “Can you name the movie that featured this song?”. I immediately recognized the opening piano riff from Hey Bulldog by the Beatles, which I knew came from Yellow Submarine (I’d just gotten the record for Christmas).

I begged my Mom to call the radio station. She looked up the number in the phone book, while I jumped up and down worrying that I was going to miss my chance. When we got through, I got to talk to the actual DJ, who told me that I had the right answer. I was caller number two—thankfully the first caller got it wrong. He asked me if I came up with the answer by myself (me: “of course!”) and how old I was. I can still hear his amused reply: “Seven??!! All right!”.

When I returned to school, I told everyone about the best lunch ever. And after school my mom drove me down to the station where I got to meet the radio station staff (both of them) and retrieve my prize: a radio-station copy of the just-released album Love Stinks by The J. Geils Band. I then drove my parents crazy by listening to this record nearly every day for months.

The Rainbow Connection (The Muppets). 40 songs for 40 years, 1979

It’s hard to believe that this iconic song from The Muppet Movie didn’t win the Oscar for Best Song (which went to the less enduring It Goes Like It Goes from the movie Norma Rae). I would have been indignant if I’d known this at age seven. Even today, I can sing pretty much the entire Muppet Show and Muppet Movie records top to bottom from memory.

Looking back, I’m particularly impressed with the levels of humor at work in the Muppets. Take Fozzy Bear (please!—rimshot). To a young kid who laughs at knock-knock jokes, he’s a riot. For grown-ups, the overwhelming corniness of the jokes themselves is the funny part. It’s hard enough to make something funny for one audience; making something that is funny to two different audiences in totally different ways illustrates the kind of ambition that has made The Muppets such a classic.

Of course, this song isn’t funny at all. It’s as poignant as My Funny Valentine, even if it is sung by a frog.

Waterloo (Abba). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1978

My grandma was extremely proud of her Scandinavian heritage, and no matter the topic, she found some way to relate it to Scandinavian culture. Each time I visited, we found our way to Ballard (Seattle’s Scandinavian neighborhood) and the Nordic Heritage Museum, ideally during Viking Days, the museum’s annual celebration. I always had a blast there, especially because Grandma let me run free, figuring that I couldn’t get into much trouble surrounded by so many wholesome Scandinavians (about half of whom apparently knew Grandma and kept an eye on me). Grandma loved a good party, and she really loved dancing, and Viking Days provided both. Grandma could polka and schottische with the best of them, and she usually commandeered me for a reluctant (on my part) tour or two around the dance floor.

In other words, Grandma was a sucker for Scandinavian dance music, so when she heard about a Swedish group that had become an international dance music sensation, she knew just what to get me for Christmas. And that’s how I ended up with a couple of Abba albums. When my parents asked her why she’d sent me these records—which explored some themes that strained my parents’ ability for euphemistic explanation—she said that Abba were “nice Swedish kids” and told my parents to get over it.

Star Wars - Main Theme (John Williams). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1977

By the time I was five, it was clear to pretty much everyone that I had developed an unusually ardent interest in music; I was six when I got my first drumset and started taking lessons. It would take another decade before I started to have coherent musical taste of my own. At this point, I just absorbed whatever music happened to be around.

This is what I listened to when I needed to take the edge off a hard day of learning my letters and coloring.

The release of Star Wars was the first big pop culture event that I remember caring about; my friends and I spent hours with our Star Wars action figures, replaying key scenes from the movie and inventing our own stories (which had more primitive special effects but superior dialog). They also had just the right musical background, provided by the official soundtrack double LP, which I listened to obsessively.

Lots of movies aspire to being epic, but very few have the audacity to open with an actual fanfare (followed by a triumphant march, no less). John Williams’ score sets the perfect tone: bold, heroic, and memorable in a way that seems to have largely fallen out of favor. When’s the last time you heard someone hum the theme from a movie’s orchestral score?

On the Border (Al Stewart). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1976

Not to be confused with the song of the same name by the Eagles (which I also love, even though there’s almost nothing less cool than liking the Eagles—but more about that in a later installment).

I’m pretty sure that Dad got this record as a gift from my aunt, and as I remember, it wasn’t really to his taste. For my part, I thought the album cover was awesome, and in what was my first instance of pop music geekery, I was delighted to discover that it was designed by Hipgnosis, the same guy who designed the iconic cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

I even liked the interior cover, which had photos of the band members in the studio. I thought that Stuart Elliott (the drummer) looked especially cool (maybe it was the studio headphones), and for whatever reason, I kept picturing him playing drums on this song, probably because of the hi-hat build in the intro. It’s one of a hundred random things that made me want to be a drummer. Weird how that works, huh?