The next year, when I was in college, HoJo released One to One. Discretionary funds for buying music were hard to come by. Heck, any funds were hard to come by. I remember getting food was a big priority in those college-student days. Kentucky Fried Chicken sold chicken-on-a-biscuit for only 39 cents, and two of them amounted to a chicken sandwich. The best days of the week were when my roommate would bring home leftover pizza from the restaurant where he worked.
Despite the hard-to-come-by funds, I saved my money and bought that tape as soon as I could. There's something magical about the right music -- how it can be more important than food. Especially when you are young. I got a lot of play out of One to One in those struggling times. I listened to it constantly, and it often remained in my stereo for the entire weekend commute between where I was living and my hometown.
While on vacation last summer, I scored a CD of One to One for $3.99. I never thought I'd hear those songs again, because I didn't think the album was made available on CD, except for a limited run.
Listening to those tracks a quarter of a century later amounts to an aurally invoked time machine. The vocals are like a wormhole to a different time. The beats take me back. That was a chapter in my life when I was working as a clerk at a convenience store, picking up 22 hours on the weekend, while attending college and (allegedly) focusing on class and studies during the week.
I lived in a horrible little apartment with a bud from high school who was going to the same college. We watched David Letterman every night on a 9-inch black and white TV that I got for Christmas the year I was in the 5th grade.
If only all the roaches and crickets in that on-the-cusp-of-condemned apartment complex would have contributed toward our rent. It would really have reduced my monthly expenses.
The cost of my jaunt back in time was merely $3.99, thanks to Howard Jones and his synthesized sounds.
No comments:
Post a Comment