30 Day Song Challenge Day 6: Song That Reminds You of Somewhere

A little tricky, as it has to be a song you still hear every once in a while to trigger a memory. I can think of many, many tunes that conjure very concrete memories of place, but it's stuff I'll never hear again. Pretty much anything by Test Dept. or Einstürzende Neubauten pounds me back onto the wretched sofa in the living room of Bobo & Zim's shared hovel on George Street. One of the neighbors was a fan of hair metal and when he got to sassy with the volume Bobo would retaliate by pointing his speakers out the open windows and spraying the neighborhood with aural napalm.

But it's not exactly the sort of music you chance across in your daily life, so the memories lie dormant.

I'll roll with this one from The Carpenters, who have a much higher cultural Q Factor than those Industrial pioneers.



Childhood visits to mom's parents meant spending plenty of time with grandma.
Grandad was a troubleshooter for an oil company and spent a fair amount of his career living on site at various remote locations. Sometimes I'd tag along to a rig out in the Santa Barbara Channel, or up in the hills between Ventura and Santa Barbara, but mostly he was just gone.

Granny spent tremendous amounts of time doing errands. Seemingly every day we'd head out and make the rounds, and often I'd end up waiting in the car, parked on sprawling acres of asphalt outside the Esplanade, or the Wagon Wheel, or some other department store or shopping center.

The first car I remember her having was a brown Ford Pinto hatchback, the ones that exploded when rear-ended. Entertainment was provided by a huge AM radio with a row of analog buttons for the station presets. It was a glorious day for parking lot idlers when she upgraded to a cream colored Mazda station wagon with a cassette tape deck.

She had three tapes in the glove box.
The Carpenters Greatest Hits, something from Tommy Dorsey (Stardust was 'their song') and some pap from the Perry Como school of crooning that even my child self realized was psychic poison. So I listened the ass out of the other two tapes.

Hearing the Carpenters whips me back directly to the hot, airless center of a blacktop parking lot in Ventura, lying back in a leatherette passenger seat fully reclined, sweating, waiting for Grandma to return from one of her innumerable 'ladies only' activities.