In My Life
Come on in and turn up the volume
Turn up your volume and click on the link to hear the songs I am sharing. I always wanted to have a book where you could actually listen to relevant music at the same time as you read. You can also watch the videos where they exist on the link and think about the songs and whether they were, or are part of the fabric of your own life. Feel free to leave comments or memories of your own too. This doesn’t just have to be me talking to you.
When I was thinking about where to start, the Beatles' song seemed perfect. It’s not amongst the first songs I remember, as I was born a little before 1965 when it came out, but this John Lennon masterpiece from the album Rubber Soul made a lot of sense.
According to an interview in 1980, Lennon described it as his “first real major piece of work”. He said that it came about when English journalist Kenneth Allsop commented that he should write songs about his childhood. How serendipitous it was that it was the song that came to mind in coming up with the first song on my list.
He rewrote the song into the one we know and love today because he felt the original lyrics, about the places he went past when he caught the bus into Liverpool, were ridiculous. He called it “the most boring sort of What I did on My Holidays’ Bus trip song”. Sage words of advice for me to ponder as I embark on this journey.
Mojo Magazine named this song as the best song of all time in the year 2000 and it has featured on many lists of top Beatles songs, and songs in general, including Rolling Stones 500 greatest songs of all time in 2004.
I’m sure you know the lyrics well yourself. We remember the places and people we have been to and known, but we can’t go back. Well we can, but they have changed, while the memories haven’t. Miranda Lambert captured this really well in another song on my list, The House That Built Me.
If music is the fabric of our lives, then the memories of what we were doing when we first heard them, map the timelines. Most of us can listen to a song that we love and evoke memories of what we were doing at the time, where we were living and who the important people were in our lives; friends, lovers, even people we didn’t like.
In My Life turned into a love song, as Lennon rewrote it to make it more commercial and less self-indulgent, as one of my lecturers at Berklee Music used to call the songwriters’ weakness.
So I think back to 1965. Our family at the time was composed of myself, my parents and my little brother, aged 2. We were living in our first home of many, in Titirangi, a village in the west of Auckland City.
It was a great house, edging onto the bush, neighbouring Titirangi Primary School, which was an awesome school, with strong links to the Ministry of Education. It was involved in experimenting with many aspects of education, supported by an office at Lopdell House in the Titirangi township, which is now home to an art gallery, the Titirangi theatre, a restaurant and up to 11 small local businesses.
I often visited there when it was part of the Education Department, going up and down the lift to the third or fourth floor, as in some ways I was part of the experiment. I might come back to that later in this book.
Our house at 1A View Rd had a gravel driveway and a large section. It was surrounded by fruit trees. We had oranges, apples, lemons, grapefruit, mandarins, and even a large fig tree.
To the back and side of the house, we had beautiful native bush which was part of my playground. In summer I would have many adventures in the bush, and once I discovered a track which led me to the school playing field, I would take that route to school in summer. In winter the track became muddy, and I walked along the road. The Waitakere Ranges which Titirangi edges is part of a rain forest that provides drinking water for the west of Auckland.
On the radio, in 1965 a new talent emerged in New Zealand. Ray Columbus and the Invaders won the inaugural Loxene Golden Disk Award with the song ‘Til We Kissed. He would become a star, particularly due to his head-shaking dance to a subsequent hit, called She’s a Mod.
In my later years, I would often see and talk to the diminutive man with a big legacy and heart, when I had a stall at the Takapuna Sunday Markets. I would get up at 4 am and set up a stall selling holographic novelties. I would often sit there playing the guitar while waiting for my next prospect.
The Lawson Quins were born in 1965. They were New Zealand’s first quintuplets to be born and survive. Later as a young adult, I would live on the same road as them in Massey and would see them from time to time.
Kiri Te Kanawa also became a household name that year, winning the Mobil Song Contest.
Back to me. I was in Standard 2, and if memory serves me well, my teacher was Mrs Tuoro. As the only Maori teacher in the school, she taught us action songs, stick dances and Haka, which we boys particularly enjoyed.
We had a school pool and I proudly arrived home with certificates for doing things like swimming the mammoth distance of 25 feet. I remember the smell of the chlorine that got mixed by pulling a bucket with ropes extending to each side of the pool. Those ropes would be dragged up and down the length of the pool until the supervising teacher felt the chemicals had been appropriately mixed.
I enjoyed swimming and other sports, although my coordination wasn’t great where a bat was involved or in athletics. I was pretty handy in squares and played on a school soccer team. Safety rules were a lot more relaxed then, and Mr McLaren a great teacher and the coach was able to fit an entire team in the back of his Morris van for away games.
The only negative, and maybe one of the reasons I used the bush track, was because there was a kid a few houses towards the school who was older and bigger than me, bullied me from time to time.
For example, I took the initiative with all our lemon trees to make lemonade. I had a jug, cups and ice and sold the refreshing drink to kind people walking along the road. I don’t recall how much for, probably a halfpenny. Yes, this was before the days of decimal currency. That makes me feel really old!
Anyway, I remember one day, this bully came along, slapped me around and threw everything off my table at the top of my drive, smashing my glass jug full of refreshing juice. Such is youth. This person would later apologise, on orders of his parents, but took advantage of opportunities to let me know that he didn’t like me.
He was a rarity, though. I had plenty of friends and attending a school reunion decades later, caught up with people whose children were then going to the same school. Even though we were just little kids at the time, we remembered our friendships, and the years seemed to melt away.
Life was simple then. Later in life, I was to hit some stormy weather, as I wrote in my song Life Is Simple When You’re Five.
