Music Blogs

That's where I first heard the Beach Boys. Via the jukebox at Nutmeg Bowl down on Kings Highway. After you bowled your strings, you hung out. Even at age 10. Polished your ball, ate french fries and listened to the jukebox.

But that wasn't as much fun as tobogganing with my family at Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course. My father purchased a seven-seater. I remember winter Sundays whooshing down the slope to the sand trap. Not that we always made it that far. Usually the toboggan would start going sideways not long after we pushed off. And then it would flip over and we'd be spewed all over the snow.

But then we became skiers, converted on our trip to Mt. Snow in February 1964.

But the journey to Bromley the following Christmas was a bust. You see it rained. We went for a lame lunch of canned spaghetti at a long gone restaurant in Manchester and retreated to Connecticut the following day. And when it came to February vacation, my parents were wary of repeating the process. They didn't want to risk being rained out. Instead we went to the Concord. My mother shushed me down by recounting how a friend of a friend, an intermediate skier, had found the skiing satisfying.

I wouldn't go that far. There were a couple of t-bars, slopes longer than those I'd first experienced in Bobby Hickey's backyard, I went every day, but I was disappointed. My parents made it up to us by going to Stratton the following month, but I remember more than the skiing at the long gone Concord.

There was the dining room. Where the menu was irrelevant. My father told me we could have whatever we wanted. Both lox and blintzes. It didn't matter whether we ate them.

Then there was the indoor pool. A sweatbox that made the local JCC look like a spa.

I didn't do much hanging out in the teen room. But I remember the music playing through the overhead speakers. It was Jay and the Americans' "Let's Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)." The follow-up to the sixties gem "Come A Little Bit Closer", "Let's Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)" was what today would be called a throwaway. But none of the songs we heard on the radio back then were categorized as such. They were hits. Which we knew every lick of. Every single track from the Beatles on. But what came before?

The Concord was not only about food and sports. Every night there was entertainment in the nightclub. Where you pounded sticks with wooden balls at the tips on the table instead of applauding. And the last night we were there the headliner was...Neil Sedaka.

I had no idea who he was.

My older sister kept referencing "Calendar Girl." My brain didn't click.

And my father kept calling him Neil "Sebaka." Which he then chuckled and said meant "dog" in Russian.

I didn't care. Although I loved the Four Seasons, I was a dedicated fan of the British Invasion. I looked forward after the Beatles, not back.

And then this grinning Brooklynite took the stage and in a moment out of "Dirty Dancing" started singing hits I didn't think I knew but had somehow penetrated me, had become lodged in my DNA.

"Calendar Girl" was great. But the finale, the piece de resistance, was "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do."

I wasn't the only one addicted. Elton rescued Neil's career in the seventies, putting out "Laughter In The Rain" on his Rocket label.

But now even Elton no longer releases records. No one wants them. Even if they're good. He's become calcified in the audience's memory. He's a has-been.

But maybe at some point we all become has-beens. Maybe we all start looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, remembering a better time, before all the losses of life accumulated and started crushing us under their weight.

That's what songs do. They bring you back. When I heard "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" on XM twenty minutes ago, I was in junior high school, living upstairs in my parents' split-level, my father was still alive.