Transistor Radio Summer #3

"...elbisrever si cisum ehT" ~ Electric Light Orchestra

Back to the basement with this one, on a lazy summer's day, it was time for a "laser light show" with the brother closest in age to me.  The song we always played?  Fire on High by ELO.  It was right around the mid-70's.

 The first part of this song is rather jarring then and now.  It is eerily reminiscent of a series of experiences I had much later.  The entire song in retrospect mirrors the aspects of a spiritual emergence.  When you journey through your darkest fears, on the other side is Light.

This piece carries reminders of "the backward masking" craze.  If you weren't an evangelical, you might have missed all the excitement - the PTL Christian cable network in particular warning evangelical children and teens not to listen to songs with backwards messages from Satan.  And of course we all immediately started destroying our records and stereos that way.  The song Stairway to Heaven will need to wait for another day...

Around this time I experienced real lasers at the museum and thought going to a laser light show in the planetarium was even better than astronomy (which I already liked quite a bit).  We were blessed to have an old-fashioned planetarium - now they are all digital and not nearly as effective.  But back in the cool confines of our basement around 1976, we created the best "laser light shows" of all - with music, flashlights and creativity, plus the volume turned up high.

P.S.  I almost never hear this song anymore, and it came on just the other day.  I was thinking about blogging about it tonight, and there it was again...

Transistor Radio Summer #1

"For we can fly!" ~ The 5th Dimension

I will find it if I look.  My red transistor radio from radio summers long ago.  There were many radios growing up - this was only one of mine, amid the household record players.  

Music was much different then, it seems, the 70's.  It could fill a home to overflowing, or drift in through the windows from the house across the street.

I have a special memory, from a very special Source.  It was my first synchronicity, the first I can recall.  I didn't have a label for it.  But I never did forget it.

It was some time near the end of June, and I was in the basement listening to the radio in my oldest sister's room.  The basement rooms were best of all in summer - upstairs all we had were fans.  

"Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon...."  It was surely 1970, this song a few years old, and I was 6 years old.

Someone shouted from upstairs and then came running down. "Balloon!  S-----u-----e  Balloon!"  It  was my oldest brother, and he was already running up again.

I quickly made it up the stairs, leapt out the door to the garage, then out another door, and raced across the lawn of our backyard, to where he pointed with a smile.  He loved to show me wonders in the sky, a weatherman in training.  

And there it was - in rainbow colors, rising, silhouetted by the Colorado mountains, our partially constructed chain link fence below, reflecting in the sun.  The fence to me was almost every bit as interesting as the balloon. It was about to hold a puppy.

I marveled that the summer skies had listened to the song, and for many years I wondered.  I didn't have a label for it.  It was The 5th Dimension.