You've turned me on

You know that absolutely brilliant feeling you get when an endearing memory from your childhood comes back to you decades later? And how it leaves you feeling marvelous as you share it with the same people who were around at the time. Not something very tangible in my case, I recently felt this way about a 1976 disco song I heard as a child that I never thought I would ever find again.

When still a bachelor, my father had spent a few years in Canada in the seventies when he went to do his PhD. Besides the fact that he returned with a 'Dr' prefix, being deeply attached to music in general he also brought back a small mono cassette player and a mixed tape with music from that era. (Heck, two-in-ones weren't easy to come by either!) I'm pretty sure it wasn't easy getting your hands on the music you wanted back then, but he managed to get a Sony audio cassette, on side A of which he recorded the hottest ABBA songs of the time and songs by some other group on side B. 

Not the exact one, but the mono cassette
player looked somewhat like this

Cassettes those days

The cassettes and the player he brought back with him to India stayed on in our house for many years, and by the mid eighties, when my elder brother Jishnu and I were two little brats up to no good as a rule, we had grown quite attached to the songs and would play them over and over again. One song in particular on side B had a very singular bass groove which both of us got fixated on. We had absolutely no idea what they were singing of course, except a vague phonetic memory of what the words sounded like. 

Over the years as we prospered, we graduated to newer cassettes, twin deck cassette players with karaoke mikes, AR Rahman, Michael Jackson, Guns n' Roses and other such, and those "side B" songs faded away under the attic dust of our minds. All except that bass groove from that one song on the cassette which Jishnu and I would occasionally hum or imitate. The memory of the track remained but a memory until recently, but until then for the life of us we could just not remember what song it was, or which artiste the song was by, nor were we able to "find the right words" to track it down on YouTube. 

I visited his family in Bangalore earlier this month, and our conversation went back to this elusive piece of music. Jishnu could remember the title 'San Francisco Hustle', and we tried searching every possible combination of words matching the 'phonetic' memory we each had! After much searching and browsing YouTube threw a result "You've turned me on", by Silver Convention with a picture of three ladies on the thumbnail. This one had to be it! 

So there we were, a 30 and a 35 year old man, sitting in the living room with an iPad and hitting play on this search result with bated breath. The same singular bass groove came on, instantly bringing back the childhood memory in full and the two of us were beside ourselves with rapturous joy, with resounding high fives, hugs, fist bumps, random clutching at each other and victory dances around the coffee table! It isn't too often you get to relive an unadulterated, un-disillusioned memory without reservations! 

The next thing that hit us was coming to terms with our dad listening to and actually recording stuff that went "You've turned me on, but you can't turn me off!". We generally never talk about stuff like this to our parents, which is probably why it felt awkward even thinking about it; but then he was a bachelor at the time - and younger than we are at the moment. And somewhere, a part of the generation gap between us and our father got a little rope bridge across it with this realization. 

Anyway, my day, week and month were made with this rediscovery. I've got a playlist of Silver Convention and other seventies' songs on my YouTube playing as I write this and relive the nostalgia around it.

And regard the 7 year old me with a benevolent fondness. 

The elusive song we rediscovered in Jishnu's living room