When Ffej suggested the March Madness pool prize should be greatest hits CD mixes, his intent was to share new music. Unfortunately, I don't have new music to share. The only new music I've been listening to for the last few years has been The Rock Boat bands. And since we're all on TRB, we've all heard them all. So, I took it literally and put together my greatest hits.

I decided to go with a chronology. I broke it down into eras of influence and I included a couple of front-runners from each period in my life. I realized this was going to take several volumes to get it right, so here's volume one: roughly 1973-1983... from my earliest musical memory until junior high school.

• Earliest memory



My earliest musical memory is raiding my parents' vinyl stacks. I had a portable turntable in my room, one of those old suitcase models with the speaker in the lid and the post was about three inches tall so you could stack several albums at a time. Growing up in Southern California, the first albums I grabbed were The Beach Boys. I used to balance a body board on a couple of tennis balls or something, so it would rock around, and "surf" in my bedroom to Surfin' Safari and the rest.



• My parent's vinyl



Other than that, I used to grab albums based on the covers and one that definitely caught my eye was Paul Revere & The Raiders and their crazy get-ups. I loved every track on their Greatest Hits album, but I give you Just Like Me because it makes a good title for this mix. I used to listen to Dave Clark Five all the time, too, because I recognized the name from TV. (It was years and years before I realized that Dave Clark wasn't the host of American Bandstand.) It was another Greatest Hits album that I used to play over and over, but I totally stomped around my bedroom with Bits and Pieces. Another of my Dad's Greatest Hits albums was The Yardbirds which I grabbed because I liked the typeface of their logo, but bongos kick ass and For Your Love takes names.




From my Mom's side of the collection, I grabbed The Association. My favorite track is queued up for another planned theme mix, but Windy comes in at a close second. I also had her stack of 45's to choose from (I still do!) which included some Beatles from both Capitol Records and Apple Records, but also Walk Away Renee by The Left Banke. (Yes, I entered school thinking "bank" was spelled with an "e".) Finally, I played Tommy James & The Shondells to death. I told you bongos kick ass. I know this, because I had some. And I always played along with I Think We're Alone Now. I was a bongo/heartbeat rock god. Fear me.



• 8-Tracks & guitars



But vinyl isn't the end-all, be-all. This was the early '70s and we were modern. We listened to contemporary music! In our cars! On 8-tracks! In fact, I remember our 8-track collection was abso-frickin-lutely huge because we use to go to the police auctions at the local libarary every 3rd Sunday of the month, and we'd buy multiple lots of siezed tapes. By "lots", I mean "four dozen tapes for a buck"... plural... monthly... I used to use them for blocks and build forts in the living room.




Even still, there are some that stick out. My Mom used to play guitar and we listened to a lot of the acoustic supergroups. CSNY (Teach Your Children), America (A Horse With No Name) and John Denver (Rocky Mountain High) were always in the car. Paul Simon was big, too. Our family used catch phrases from 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover all the time: "Hop on the bus, Gus" when we're going for a ride; "Make a new plan, Stan" when I was about to get myself in trouble. And Jim Croce was fabulous, everything he sang was fantastic, it was so difficult to narrow the choice down to Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels).




Obviously these weren't the only 8-tracks that that influenced me. Consider yourself lucky that I left out my absolute favorite: I played March of the Martians by The Happy Moog until the tape wore out!



• A couple of singles



My Dad and one of his carpool buddies, Al, used to do a lot of bicycle touring. It took them several trips but together they rode the entire coast of California, 950+ miles from Crescent City to San Ysidro. Every other weekend or so, if we weren't camping in Joshua Tree or Yosemite, we were riding our bikes along the aquaducts of Orange County from Yorba Linda to Newport Beach and back. We arrived at Al's place one Saturday morning and his son Joey, who was older than me and used to ride the day trips with us, called us in the house to listen to something: Bicycle Race, my introduction to Queen.




So far, everything I've mentioned has been someone else's music. Most of my own stuff up to this point was totally kid stuff. Novelty albums from Ronco, Alvin & The Chipmunks, and the like. The first single I recall purchasing myself was the theme song to a short lived TV show which was intended to be a modern day "Happy Days" combined with elements of the hit movie "Saturday Night Fever". David Naughton's Makin' It spent 16 weeks on the Billboard Top 40 (peaking at 5), twice as many weeks as the show lasted.




I remember my elementary school years, but the first teachers who impressed me and earned my respect were in the sixth grade. One of those was Mr. Miller, whom I had as part of the "arts cluster" (one quarter each of Music, Art, Shop & Home Ec). Mr. Miller was my first music teacher who did more than break out the recorders and tambourines and make us learn songs by rote. He taught us the difference between verse, chorus & bridge. He had us analyzing lyrics and arrangements and picking out bass lines. He taught us about synthesizers being more than funny sounding pianos. And he did it all with one song, Sausalito Summernight by Diesel. The song already struck a chord with me because it reminded me of living in the Bay Area, but after hearing it over and over again for ten weeks... it's one of those forever memories.



• Top Ten radio



So with Mr. Miller's coaxing, I started listening to more and more music. Radio wasn't just background noise anymore, I began to pay attention. And not just what I was listening to and liking, but what other people liked: American Top 40; American Bandstand; Soul Train; Solid Gold. We had our TV running through our stereo, so I could record the countdown shows onto 8-track and save them for later. (Recording to 8-track was better than cassette because you didn't have to flip the tape!) A local radio station had a Top Ten at Ten feature that I wasn't allowed to stay up for, so I would set my clock radio to go off at 9:58 pm and start recording. I'd listen to it the next morning.




This was 1982-1983, in the gap between Disco and MTV. The radio was filled with progressive bands and power ballads. Phil Collins had firmly taken the lead of Genesis and given us Man On The Corner. The Alan Parsons Project was playing around with the themes of Orwell's 1984 and gave us Eye In The Sky. Progressive supergroup Asia - with members of Yes, ELP & King Crimson - released their first album including Only Time Will Tell.
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• Rejecting the mainstream