A Father’s Day Sunday Spins: Dad’s Old Records

Father’s Day Album Cover created by my 4.5 year old.

Last week, I covered spooky ABBA, however this week it will be something a little different for Saturday Spins. For starters, it is on Sunday. This is not going to be a traditional “spin.” Here at Ordinary Times, we have a deep bench of contributors from all over the place. As such, this deep bench has all kinds of eclectic tastes and life experiences. I asked them to provide me with a blurb about music they remember their dad listening to, music they experienced because of their dad, etc. I received so many great responses from the OT Contributors, let’s give them an internet round of applause…

Originally, my wife suggested that I do a Father’s Day spin that is dedicated solely to the music my father listened to and what those records mean to me. I even have some of his old LPs in my collection! A lot of my current tastes are directly related to what my dad listened to back in the day. Sure, when I was a teenager, I had some awful tastes, that he wouldn’t have listened to or even given a chance, but the foundation from what he listened to was still there.

My mom has four brothers, and I can remember sitting around a campfire at my Abuelo’s farm in Florida while listening to some Conjunto music and hearing my uncle, who is a drummer, muse, “Remember when we hated when dad listened to this stuff and he hated when we listened to Van Halen, now we listen to this stuff.” I always thought that was very profound in a broader sense, and I am sure there are pieces of music we all revisit now that we used to deride because it was, “my parents’ music.”

Without further ado, and in no particular order, I present to you The Ordinary Times Father’s Day Spin, 2021.

Southern Rock at the Local Watering Hole

“My dad graduated from high school in 1975 and like many of us, his favorite music continues to be what was popular during his misspent youth. Ergo, he is a big fan of CCR and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Now a grouchy old man, he still can’t help but haul himself out of his recliner to boogie a little when he hears “Gimme Three Steps.” Once when I was little, my mom was called late one night to go fetch him from the bar, as his keys had been confiscated by the bartender. When she got there, she walked in to find him leading a line of other drunkards around the pool table, dancing to “Heard it Through the Grapevine”, California Raisins style. If you don’t know what that means, you are not from the 80s.”–Em Carpenter

Real Country Music

“My dad always walked around singing old country songs like “King of the Road” and my personal favorite: “Old Dogs and children and watermelon wine.” I tear up every time I hear that one.”–Merrie Soltis

Suburban Baroque Minivan

“My dad, like my mom, was always more into classical than rock music. When I grew up, his den was filled with reel-to-reel recordings of concerts, sometimes multiple versions of the same piece. But the only time we usually got to share that with him was when we were driving around, and he would put on one of a small number of classical tapes. The one I most recall is a collection of baroque music highlighted by Vivaldi’s “Echo” Concerto in A Major. I can hear it now and picture the minivan with the echoing violins coming from different sides of the vehicle.”–Michael Siegel

The King

“I have never once witnessed my dad listening to any music. Yet, from time to time, when he is alone working at home or behind a closed door and thinks no one is paying attention, he’ll perform an entire Elvis song from start to finish.”–Christopher Carr

A Requiem for Grunge

“My dad is a bass player whose dream is to write the next great song, or as he calls it, ‘Stairway to Freebird.’ He played in a number of bands from the 1970s to the 2000s, opening for acts like Steppenwolf and Molly Hatchet. After his last band broke up, he decided to form a tribute band. It was not to his favorite band or a band he grew up with, but to a beloved band from my childhood: Stone Temple Pilots. Some of my earliest memories involve riding in a car or playing in a hotel at the beach while ‘Plush’ played on a nearby speaker. For some reason, STP stuck with my dad more than any of the other 1990s grunge and grunge-adjacent bands. He hopes that one day he can grow up to be Robert DeLeo, who is three years younger than him.”–Eric Medlin

Frasier Takes in Lennon; Chooses Kiss Instead

“I have often joked that my dad is Frasier Crane without the folksy charm.

If that sentence makes you stop and think “But Frasier Crane HAS no folksy charm,” yes, exactly.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the time he took me to a Julian Lennon concert, stuffed wads of paper in his ears because the music was too loud, folded his arms across his chest and scowled at everyone for two hours – me especially, then put the capper on an epically painful night with a long hostile lecture about never taking drugs. To be honest, just thinking about it makes me want to take drugs.

I prefer to remember the summer that he unfortunately got a Kiss song kinda stuck in his head and walked around constantly singing ‘I…don’t wanna rock and roll all night, or party every day…'”–Kristin Devine

Midwest Pianist

“My grandmother was the pianist for the movie theater at the end of the silent film era in the small Iowa town where my grandparents lived. The film and score would arrive on Mondays, she would rehearse a few times, then play for the showings on Friday and Saturday night. When Dad was a kid, he learned to play piano by watching her, never learning to read music. For songs he liked, he would work out his own arrangement, learning it purely by memory. When I was a kid, he would still sit down at the piano occasionally and play. At some point, there would be a pause of a particular length, followed by him launching into his shortened version of Sousa’s ‘Thunderer’ to end the session.”–Michael Cain

The King, Redux

“After another pitched argument with me over whether an upright bass delivered a better foundation than an amplified electric bass guitar, Dad settled into his easy chair and the self-satisfaction of overstuffed rightness. He hated rock–absolutely hated it, particularly pop. My mom hated pop music because she bought into American fundamentalism, but I think Dad hated it because he loved the American Songbook. In his mind, the heavily gated snare which defined the 80s sound had utterly destroyed the minds of all people who listened to it. “It’s just one explosion after another,” he’d say, handing me a Coke as we searched somewhere in the Southeast for yet another family graveyard. “Pow! Pow! Pow! How can you endure it?”

Nevertheless, the day Elvis had died in 1977, when I was four, he had come home from work and turned on the TV, and it stayed on all day, repeating the news incessantly: The King of Rock-n-Roll is dead. At one of the anniversaries of Elvis’ death, there was a documentary on the TV. Dad was in his easy chair, sitting before the opiate of the masses, completely tuned out, chasing the commercial dragon, eyes glazed over, when suddenly, he began to spasm. “That’s right!” he shouted at the TV. “They tried to break us, but we won!” His legs and feet kicked into the air as he punctuated with a pointed finger. “They tried to break us, but we broke them!”

Dad would be 80 this year, but he succumbed 16 years ago, just before his namesake was born. RIP, Old Man. I see you every time I see Elvis gyrate, and I’ll see you when we all break out of this Jailhouse.”–John David Duke Jr.

Blood on the Statesboro Tracks

“Seems like my musical tastes formed around the time I was seven or eight years old. And my exposure to music was dominated by my father, who was a great partisan of music playing when there were people over for nearly any reason. He taught me how to use the record player and to be careful of the delicate needle, and surely enjoyed how fascinated I was that the vinyl disc and the needle gently rising and falling on it could somehow produce so many different kinds of sound. It was a miracle to my young mind, and a gateway to a more pleasant and fanciful world in my father’s.

Listening to music together taught me how to listen for skill in the musicianship and structure in the composition. And while that seemed to transcend genre, the prevailing rock and roll of the day was what seemed to dominate the LPs. Like a lot of men in their early thirties, my dad had the holy trinity of the three “perfect” albums of mid-70’s rock: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Boston’s eponymous debut album, and the Eagles’ Hotel California. He loved Sam and Dave and quite a lot of Motown, favoring soul over pop. Disco was popular at the time, but he didn’t have very much of it at home. I can recall him playing a series of curated singles for other music nerd friends when they came over – a preview of what in my teen years would come to be called a “mix tape.” He was always particularly concerned about finding a smooth transition from the mood of the outro of one song to the mood set by the intro of the other.

There were two records that he and I both came to enjoy a lot which I think surprised him. Why would an eight-year-old enjoy Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks? It was Dylan’s divorce album and so a lot of the songs were about betrayal, heartbreak and healing. I’d had a happy home life free from those sorts of experiences. But he interpreted every one of the songs for me and made me understand what Dylan was singing about, and even more than teaching me how to appreciate music, he taught me empathy.

But I’m sure that the song he was most surprised to find me enjoying was the Allman Brothers Band Live At The Fillmore East. Not so much because the songs were as mature as Dylan’s (they surely aren’t) but because the Allmans got into such heavy blues jams. I can remember him closing his eyes and smiling and air guitaring just a little bit to the riff on “Whipping Post,” and I noticed that he would very often have a beer and bop his head along for “Statesboro Blues” or “No Way Out.” When he and I are together even to this day we still love listening to the Allman Brothers, appreciating the enjoyment of the timeless music – and the knowledge that sharing this pleasure is something that we’ve done nearly my entire life and more than a majority of his.”— Burt Likko

It’s Not Called Blue Headed Stranger

“My father’s favorite record started as just that, a record. By the time I came along and was old enough to get into music cassette tapes had replaced vinyl, but in the basement of Up Yonder the record player remained. It sat on a dresser retired from an honored bedroom placement to random storage down below. The drawers full of records, not clothes. Lots of the great vocal groups: The Temptations, The Spinners, The Planters. 70s soul music, classic R&B stuff, and the tracks that filled the oldies radio station he preferred. Collections of rock from the 60s, compilation albums that let me delve deep into the origins of the genre.

But in that stack of records was Willie Nelson’s seminal “Red Headed Stranger”, his 1975 album that many folks think might be the greatest country album ever. By the time I found it, my father was on his second cassette tape version for the car, having replaced the 8-track that was not kept, and the record album that thankfully was. The years rolled by, the cars changed, music changed, we all changed, but there was always a tape of Willie mourning his way through a concept album of a man on the run after killing his wife and her lover. A sound that was stripped down and simple compared to the country of the time. It is timeless, widely regarded as one of the greatest examples of one of America’s greatest musical artists. The mix of cover songs, originals, and even a hymn — and an expanded version that includes Willie’s battered guitar Trigger working over classical music as well — is just the sort of hot American mess that the warbling Willie lends enough real-life authority to make perfect.

From a thousand road trips, and endless hours in the basement listening to a wide range of music that was only available out of that dresser and not on the Walkman-turned-Discman 90’s technology as I grew up myself, by osmosis Red Headed Stranger just got into me in a way nothing else did. Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain brings the feels, but my father zipping along the hills and hollers of West Virginia or wherever we roamed singing badly to Willie — and loving every minute it of it — is pure joy.”–Andrew Donaldson

Eagles in Kansas

I don’t have anything terribly unique to talk about. One thing that does stick out to me is how much my dad loves Kansas and Eagles. In fact, the first concert he took me to was Kansas at Binghamton’s Spiediefest. No longer a band in their prime, they still performed an excellent set. Most of my early musical memories are those two bands, among others, blaring in my dad’s workshop or his truck. To this day, I still crank songs like “Hotel California” and “Carry On My Wayward Son.” The first song I learned to play on the guitar was “Dust in the Wind.”

When I was in high school, my good friend was more into vinyl than I was, and for some dumbass reason, I let my dad give all of his old LPs to him. Recently, he held a garage sale and put a bunch of LPs out and he let me browse, I quickly realized that a lot of my dad’s old LPs were in there! He let me take whatever I wanted; I feel as though they belong in my collection anyway. Now, my dad and I not only discuss older bands, but he has recently taken a liking to blues virtuoso, Joe Bonamassa, who I got into a number of years ago when I played guitar heavily. Here’s to hoping we can go see him live soon.–Christopher Bradley

Psychobilly, Country, and Hotcakes

“When we were kids and living on a small farm far from any neighbors, my dad used to spend Sunday mornings cooking us piles of pancakes and listening to bluegrass gospel on the AM radio. He was also fond of country music legends like Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. When I started listening to the Cramps in junior high school, their brand of “psychobilly” sizzled somewhere between punk and the hillbilly music my dad loved, so he enjoyed their demented takes on classics like “shortnin bread” or “uranium rock.” My tastes were, thus, rebellious, but recognizably American.

He also loved folk music and I remember he used to play us songs on the dulcimer and guitar. He changed the lyrics to Puff the Magic Dragon by adding an extra verse where the boy grows up- the song suggests Jackie Draper grew old and died!- and his son Jackie Junior now frolicks with Puff in the Land of Honalee. He was also fond of playing Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, although he has said that Cohen’s other songs are all boring!

Currently, I’m saving money to go see my dad in Maine. It’s been too long since I had those pancakes.”–Rufus F.

Chris Sells Out

Many of you have read my constant derisions and diatribes against Spotify. I knew that for this particular post there would be a whole range of music, so I decided to bite the bullet and finally create a Spotify account. When I told Managing Editor, Andrew Donaldson, that I finally sold out he pithily added, “Haha suffering for your art I see.” So, here it is, the official Ordinary Times Father’s Day Playlist: