Chase All the Clouds from the Sky

I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t been tuned into music, beginning with Bing Crosby. The first thing I ever bought with money I earned myself was Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” in 1956. And for the next two years the majority of the money I spent from my paper route was for music, everything from Harry Belafonte to Mahalia Jackson.

I managed to purchase music pretty steadily right up to 1970. I’ve been noticing recently that I have very little music from that era, and most of what I do have was bought after CD’s became popular. Of course, the fact that the Jackson 5 and the Bee Gee’s dominated the chart for some of those years might explain why I didn’t buy many records.

But I don’t own any Doobie Brothers or Loggins and Messina, and I didn’t buy a single Jackson Browne song until relatively recently, even though “Doctor My Eyes” is one of my favorite songs of all time. I recently figured out that’s when my daughter was born and my wife quit her job to stay home and raise the kids. Considering that my average purchase from iTunes runs 80 dollars, it’s no wonder that I have a ten year blank in my music collection. I didn’t dare let myself go into a music store.

In the last few years I’ve been filling that blank slowly but surely with the assistance of iTunes. I probably should turn the “Genius” function off because whenever I play a song it will recommend a similar song, all too often a song I liked in the past but hadn’t purchased. Unfortunately, I find albums with titles like “Greatest Hits” hard to resist when I don’t own even one of the songs on the album.

Last weekend I bought $80 of singles and albums of the The Doobie Brothers and Loggins and Messina. I discovered that I didn’t own a single Loggins and Messina, even though they were a staple on KINK radio, Portland, the only station on my car and home radio was tuned to for nearly the whole 30 years I lived in Vancouver.

I’m particularly fond of this Loggins and Messina song:

or

this version