Those songs that stick in your head..

I woke up Saturday morning, and Real World was playing in my head. Hadn't listened to it in a long time since the CMC records aren't on Spotify. What a damn good tune, I've been spinning it and the rest of HF from other sources ever since. Now that would be a good tune to surprise us with in NYC! Nice reminder that HF is a damn fine album.

I actually have three different songs, so I'll pick one. The most recent is from last night when I heard it on TV on some show: "Morning has Broken" by Cat Stevens
Hence, triggered.

At my first full time job just after graduating from college, my boss handed me 4 things and said see if you can do anything with it:

1. A Cat Stevens "quadraphonic" LP in CD-4 format
2. A pair of 4-channel headphones (yea, for real)
3. An evaluation board with a CD-4 decoder chipset (not sure if it was already assembled or not)
4. A special phono cartridge for CD-4 records

So I bent up a makeshift chassis to hold the eval board and the RCA phono jacks, wired the board to the jacks, found a power supply, found two identical pre-amps, and a couple of identical lower power stereo amps, turntable, and an armful of RCA jumper cords.

Finally got everything kludged up and fired things up. Too long ago to remember the details but the decoder was very sensitive to cable routing, turning, component values, etc. It didn't take much for it to become "unstable" or sound like garbage.

So I picked Morning has Broken as my test song since I was familiar with it. I managed to get the mess working more-or-less - but it was real touchy.

Bottom line: I listened to Morning has Broken over and over and over and over and over for days and days and days as I tried one thing after another. I was getting sick of it even though I liked the song. But when things were working right, man did it sound GREAT!

So last night when I heard it on TV, I heard it for the rest of the night.

(FYI: I think we sold a few of the decoders to some audiophiles that wanted to play around with quad, but it was a little too touchy to go mainstream. But what can I remember from the mid 70's)

Great tune…great album. This one ends up sticking with me. I defy anyone to listen to this tune w/o tapping their foot.

I said that I had three that play in my head if I hear them. Here's the second. When we were driven up to our wedding reception, some of my friends and co-workers set up some massive boom box outside the entrance and started playing this one just at the right place: "Another One Bites the Dust". I didn't even know that this was a Queen song at the time. (That's not all my good buddies did to me that evening. They about gave the minister a heart attack inside the church, but I won't get into that..) Thank goodness I took a sacrificial car to the reception - I had my good car stashed. All in all really good memories, which keeps the song in my head for the day.