We start this series with track 1, which is a personal addition to the collection from my youth. I call this track:

My parents were born only months apart during a tumultuous time in the United States. The world was about to go to war and no one knew if America would participate. My father, a fledgling songwriter of self styled 'shit kicker music', described their entry into history in a song I vividly remember, because he kept playing it incessantly. The "musicule" (my own description of the musical "molecule" that makes a song memorable) was the lyric: "Nobody sings about our generation, too long in silence, just looking for more. Nobody sings about our generation, born just before the second world war".

As a result of their inter-generational position in society, they were a bit too old to be hippies when fashionable, yet hipper than the era of the crooners. This put them pretty much at puberty when Rock and Roll was in it's heyday and The Beatles were still contemplating a gig in Hamburg. I don't actually recall my par ents ever playing any tunes from the Fab Four or The Rolling Stones for that matter, my awakening to that came in my own formative years. A track for another day.

My Dad was a bit of a gadget freak in his day, and we were one of the first people to have a reel to reel tape player in our living room audio rack, complete with stacks of poorly labeled boxes of 'Shamrock' tape stock. recording tape was an expensive consumer proposition back in the day, so he bought it in bulk, despite it's clear inferior quality compared to the more expensive brands of the day like BASF and Memorex.

All these boxes contained compilations of music and loosely one could put each reel into one of three categories:

    1.    Country and Western
    2.    50's Rock and Roll
    3.    Recordings of a budding Disc Jockey experimenting with tape delays and            echos made possible by our recorder's three heads

These tapes were in heavy rotation in the Curry household in Kensington Maryland and a few years later in our suburban home in the small village of Nes aan de Amstel, just south of Amsterdam where we emigrated to in 1972.

So it's not too surprising that when my parents had one of their famous 'egg nog parties' themed to 50's Rock and Roll, complete with musical trivia quiz, I was able to answer every question they asked, including the make and model of the car that couldn't shift out of second gear...

Play along at home, by building your own copy of this exclusive compilation and support the talented musicians that make it possible by purchasing this track on Amazon through the link provided at opsol.podshow.com