The Next Song You Hear Is Mine.

In the years of 1973-1974 before the black hide a bed, I slept in a conventional bed with conventional headboard. How boring! The head board was painted black, orange and yellow so it did match my other furniture.

Throughout my years in the orange room, my main stereo/record player was a Zenith that I had gotten for eighth grade graduation. It was ok and certainly a few steps above the close and play record player I had before but there was no /fm/am reciever. This void was filled by the white RCA AM Radio that I had been using since 1971. It rested just behind my head in the headboard of my bed. It was magic.

That RCA AM radio debuted hundreds of classic pop and rock tunes to me over the years. Baby Blue, Tumbling Dice, All The Young Dudes, Mind Games, Levon, and many more.

Since I was learning how to play guitar and dreamt of writing songs of my own some day, I used to play a game with myself at night. As I tried to fall asleep, I would pretend that the next five songs played on the RCA AM radiwere written by me and would make up the first side of my new album. Lol.

Something like, You’re No Good would come on and I would begin to analyze the song structure and marvel at how intricate my song sounded on the radio.

Pure fantasy. However, I believe that by listening to a song like Listen To The Music, I would be absorbing the arrangmeant or noticing the modulation in the third verse or the way a chorus would repeat again.

By pretending that I wrote say, Levon, I took notice of how the song was put together. Just a theory But it made me concentrate.... and eventually fall asleep in the Orange Room.

If you look to the right of my cousin in one of these pictures, you will notice the white RCA radio that debuted so many classic tunes over the years