Bill, Esq, you ain't the only one. . . .
For the benefit of our younger readers, and maybe to tickle the memory of other 'experienced' pilots like Bill and yours truly:
I was 12 years old in 1967. I always say people who didn't live through the 60's just can't get it, what an upheaval this world went through in the 10 years from 1960 to 1970. When I went to 1st grade in 1960, Eisenhower was the President, and America was still like the 'nifty 50's', like an episode of 'Leave It To Beaver'. This was the time of that cool suburban angst beginning to brew that Donald Fagen has mined and expressed so richly over the years.
By 1970, Kennedy was dead, VietNam, the Summer of Love, Nixon, De-segregation, Women's Rights, drugs, you name it. The whole world turned inside out.
And it's a small-er world. No internet. FM radio was only played in Dentist's Offices. Three-network TV. Newspapers. Black and white TV. It was still a big deal to place a long distance call, if your 'party line' was free.
So the girl I was sweet on in 6th grade (STILL think about her from time to time . . . ), her Mom had gone to Floyd's Record Shoppe and bought SPLHCB and it was waiting on us when we got off the bus, and we ran to the house to listen to it.
All those people on that Peter Max cover. Opened it up and they looked . . . . very different. Put it on. All those 'found' sounds. And the songs, and the production, nothing I'd ever heard sounded anything like it before or since.
That record created and owned its own time and space like nothing before or since. They owned the world leading up to it, and after it, nothing else was ever the same. Whether it was two kids in East Texas, or anyone anywhere else in the world, it rewrote the book and closed it behind itself in one shot.
J o e y
