Music Experiences - Early Sounds

I had a very intense music experience growing up in Philadelphia during the 1960's. I was interested in all aspects of different kinds of popular music. I listened to lots of music and I played music too on piano, clarinet, tenor sax and sang in the church choir. A lot of my life at that time revolved around music. I also loved going out to see live performances whether it was the Vienna Boys Choir or the Velvet Underground. 

As a kid I was always around someone listening to music on the radio. My older sister and her friends listened to top 40 radio stations and of course it was the time of Beatlemania. Before that it was Chubby Checkers and The Twist, doo-wop, Elvis Presley and the fun times of early rock and roll. I heard it all on the radio. Mom used to listen to WIP and some other stations playing an easy listening style of pre-r&r while the older kids were at school or when she was in the kitchen making dinner. We were also exposed to a lot of "music of your life" programming which at the time catered to older folks and played lots of Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Mel Torme, Maguire Sisters, Tony Bennet and the like. We heard it all. Otherwise most of the time we had the top 40 popular stations on in the house as more of us kids became teenagers. However, I did eventually did get to appreciate Big Band music and the singers of the Forties.

Long before I became a teenager I was exposed to a lot of early rock and roll by Aunt Dot, our babysitter, who lived down the street at Nana Emery's house along with her brother Uncle Charlie and Aunt Nellie. We were down at that house a lot and Aunt Dot always had the radio going somewhere in the house. She was in her late teens and early twenties when she was babysitting us. She was obsessed with Elvis Presley in the late 1950's. One time she actually took me and Tom to see Chubby Checker performing a free show in a parking lot up on the avenue when I was about ten years old. Uncle Charlie had a lot of blues and rockabilly records and there were times when he took me up to his room to listen to his records. It was my first exposure to a lot of interesting music that I wasn't hearing on the radio at the time. About ten years later I had him up in my room listening to my records which he strongly disliked anything close to being "hippie music".  Now at that time he still looked like a 50's greaser with the ducktail hair. The only thing that was anything like the late 60's was that he grew his sideburns a little longer. One time in 1968 I played Donovan's The Hurdy Gurdy Man album which he disparaging called "faggot music". Oh well. I didn't think very much of him at that time anyway. I was seeing a lot of live music in 1968 down at the Electric Factory and a few other music venues downtown. It would have been interesting taking him down there sometime when I saw the Jefferson Airplane, The Mothers of Invention, Janis Joplin, etc, etc. 

I also went to a lot of dances at some of the area schools and Wagner's Ballroom where the DJ's played current hits and plenty of oldies. It's funny how popular "oldies" music was in the mid to late 1960's and by that they meant early rock and roll of the Fifties and early Sixties. I listened to a lot of the music on the Philadelphia radio stations of the time including WIBG and WFIL along with some of the black stations WDAS and WHAT. Then there was the beginning of the underground radio stations in 1968. It certainly was a good time to be growing up with music.