Traveling tunes

Joan Baez concert - Red Butte Gardens - July 2010

Family roadtrips are among my favorite memories from my childhood and teenage-years.  We never had a large car, so it was always the three of us girls sitting in the back seat.  Always getting along.  Never pushing or shoving or complaining about who was "crossing the line."  Tracey, being the youngest, usually got stuck in the middle seat, where your feet had to either straddle or rest on the center carpeted console thingy and where you had nothing to lean against when you wanted to sleep.  No way would she put up with that today.  When we'd drive into the night, we'd arrange it so one of us could spread out on the floor with pillows to even things out, while the other two would stretch across the seats with heads at opposite ends, somehow sharing that space.  What were seatbelts, anyway?

Some of our destinations:  Las Vegas was hit usually once a year--usually at the conclusion of tax season (my dad was a CPA).  St. Anthony, ID was our Thanksgiving trip--this used to be a really long trip before we could take the freeway so much of the way.  I remember a favorite trip to San Francisco and up the coast of Oregon and some of Washington.  We spent a lot of time in the car on that trip--I can still picture my dad's Audi cautiously zig-zagging down Lombard Street and painstakingly inching through the large Redwood tree.

There was our infamous motorhome vacation down to southern California where we visited our cousins and had a great time, once we got rolling.  I could be wrong, but I think I remember someone flagging us down in a small Utah town to tell us that we were dragging a mattress.

What stands out in my mind more than anything from these many roadtrips, is the music we listened to along the way.

My dad had quite a collection of tapes.  Randy Travis, Neil Diamond, Marie Osmond, Anne Murray, Willie Nelson...I can't hear songs like "Diggin' Up Bones" and many other old country songs without thinking about my dad.  He also had a few collections of what we referred to as "Oldies."

My mom had her own music.  Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan were some of her favorites, or at least of her tapes.  I believe she owned every Beatles album (as in record) ever made and a few Janice Joplin albums, but these never traveled with us.  I remember songs like "Both Sids Now," "Let us Break Bread Together," and "Everybody Must Get Stoned" and so many others.  We'd all sing along, some of us not really understanding what we were singing about.

It's funny, because I know my sisters and I also had "our" music--our own tapes that we'd pack along and insist that our parents play every now and then, but none of that music really stands out now, or at least as much as my parents' music.  Sure, there was the Duran Duran and Belinda Carlisle phases; I even owned a Milli Vanilli single that must have had its moment or two in the car tape deck.  My sisters and I would sometimes do this thing to annoy my mom where we'd sing just slightly out of tune from each other on cheesy Wilson Phillips songs...until she'd finally catch on and say, "Okay, that's enough!"

Val and I took my mom to the Joan Baez concert up at Red Butte Gardens earlier this month.  I knew I liked her music, but I was surprised at how much of it was familiar to me, thanks to my mom and her music on the road.  I'm grateful for good music of all kinds and for things that never get old (because there are certainly a lot of things that do).