Your most unusual/lasting first-time song impressions

What unusual “first impression” of a song has stuck with you for a long time?

After posting “Danny’s Song” in another thread, I thought of this .

The first time I heard this song was in a hotel in Hawaii, where a big fat Hawaiian guy wearing a grass skirt was singing it while strumming a ukulele in the hotel lobby. I will always associate that song with that image, and this was probably 1991 or so. (Hope I didn’t ruin the song for anyone else haha)

 

When I hear or think of Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” I flash back to a series of TV ads from the late '60s/early '70s. Here’s one:



As best I can recall, those ads were my first exposure to the song.

 

I’ve repeated this many times on this forum:

The first time I heard “Holding Back the Years” by Simply Red on the radio, I thought “Wow! Buffy Ste. Marie finally has a hit single!”

 

That’s a scary image.

 

I had just landed in LA after graduating high school, selling everything I had except my records and a few clothes, and buying a one way ticket on TWA from LaGuardia to LAX to find my fortune in California at 17 yrs old. As I descended the escalator and stared at a giant sign that read "Welcome to Los Angeles", I heard Tom Petty's "Free Falling". I'll never forget it.

 

Your thread reminded me of a Dick Clark clip when he introduced the Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever videos on his show. Afterwards he asked the teens in the audience what they thought of them . Many of the girls didn't like them saying that The Beatles looked weird and old with their mustaches. But one young guy said it was fantastic. You can tell by looking at him that his mind has been blown open.

 

When I was in high school, I snuck over to my girlfriend's house after her parents went out, and we started fooling around while listening to the local top-40 radio station. Anyway, "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie played, and I never heard it before that. I completely lost my concentration at the chorus, and started cracking up!

 

Raiding an older brothers lp collection being blown away to Intro/SJ on Lou’s RnR Animal. And I still consider that lp one of the best live lps evah!

 

I remember my Sophomore year in high school our basketball team had an away game and we got there quite early and the opposing cheerleaders were practicing a routine to the Hollies "Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress" over and over again and they were the fattest cheerleaders I'd ever seen.
So my junior year on the bus heading to play that team again I was telling some of the new kids about what had happened the year before.
And wouldn't you know it when we walked into the gym "Long Cool Woman..." was playing again and I swear the cheerleaders were even fatter!

 

Summer of 1965: Was walking to the mall with my transistor radio pressed to my sweaty head. The DJ says here is something new, it's really long ... and you're not going to believe it. And on comes "Like a Rolling Stone."

 

My first exposure to Nick Drake was "Northern Sky", on an Antilles label sampler sent to our Adult Contemporary radio station in 1978, sitting in a stack of un-auditioned LP's in the back room. I was working Saturday overnights, and would sneak a short stack into a nearby production studio to try them out, during the early-Sunday-Morning-public-affairs-shows hours.

As I crossed the country later that year, I stopped in at least one record store at every single town I passed through, looking for information about this enigmatic, then-unknown singer who had entranced me from that night forward.

 

I went to see the Carla Bley Band when they were touring their Musique Mecanique album in 1979, I think. They were performing at UCLA and we got there way early. The stage was being set up and this strange music was playing. Sung by women, it mystified me and sounded a bit Chinese to me. I'd never heard anything like it. I asked one of the stagehands what it was and he told me The Shaggs. "Who are they?", I queried. He said they were some housewives from the mid-West or something.

I became obsessed with finding this weird group, to no avail, but not long afterwards Terry Adams had their Philosophy Of The World album re-released on Red Rooster Records.

 

Awesome.

 

Was just reminded of this in another thread. First time I ever heard "Rise" I was watching General Hospital when Luke raped Laura at the disco as it played in the background. I was a kid. Never forgot it.

 

i was driving west across the united states of America with a nurse of my acquaintance. on the AM radio came a song that grabbed me, but i started to lose the signal. i believe we were in South Dakota. i turned right (north) onto a dirt road so i could keep hearing it.

i found it when i returned to NYC.

Boney Fingers - Hoyt Axton


a year or two later i was driving i think it was from Needles CA to Kingman AZ with the woman who became my wife for lo these 45 years. she was not then nor ever has been a nurse.

we got chinese takeout to our motel room and on the TV came an outdoor concert of Hoyt performing this song with Buffy Sainte Marie. Never been able to find that again.

hear's another one:

Hoyt Axton - Boney Fingers
Hoyt Axton - Boney Fingers

so it goes

 

The timing was right.

 

lined up at 8am on a nice summer Saturday morning at the local record store[Opus]. Cosmos factory was advertised at 98 cents. Doors opened and Ramble Tamble by CCR was blaring.
Remember like it was yesterday. That was a fun visit and a good investment of 98 cents.

 

This prompts the other story I've told here many times.

I stayed up very late on a school night because Dick Summer, host of the "Nightlight" show on WBZ Boston (I was a huge fan) said he would be playing the new Beatles single for the first time.

All of "Strawberry Fields Forever" was mind-blowing to me upon first listen, but when the false ending came and the song faded back in with those backwards mellotron flutes and that piercing guitar, my jaw just dropped. I had just been taken somewhere I had never in my life been before, and I had the sense that things were going to be different from that moment on.

It was truly a life-changing moment for me.

 

1995, high school; junior year. I would accompany my brother to a local community college where he was taking a night course. During that time I had the library all to myself, as I was also working on a research paper. Anyway, one of the classic rock stations at the time would play an entire album once a week. That's when I heard Live at Leeds for the first time. This if course was when they released the updated one with more tracks. I am also glad no one was around me because I am sure they would have heard fierce rock pumping through my headphones. A few weeks later, I went and bought it at Sam Goody and listened to it all of the time.

 

I have several, both good and bad. But I'll stick to one of the good ones.

It was a few days before Christmas in 2002. I was traveling from central Wisconsin to the Twin Cities to visit family for the holiday. Naturally, I wanted to listen to Christmas music on my radio, but somewhere in western Wisconsin, there was a "dead area" where I couldn't tune in any radio station with Christmas music playing. In my search, I happened upon a country music station, and I caught a beautifully sad song I'd never heard before, a song of young love and a song of loss that filled my eyes with tears before it was over, making it hard for me to focus on the road. I had just heard "Travelin' Soldier" by the Dixie Chicks for the first time.

 

I heard Whole Lotta Love for the first time on my local “classic rock” station when my sister was driving me to school one morning, probably 10th grade. The freak out section in the middle just blew me away. Something this weird and obnoxiously ‘out there’ could get snuck into the middle of a hit radio single? What!? How am I supposed to just go to school now!?

The potentiality of music seemed to expand exponentially from this point.

 

At my father’s funeral - Con Te Partiro by Bocelli.
It’s a forever song....

 

In the late 70's I was a pre-adolescent rock fan who went to sleep every night with FM rock radio playing. One night, in the wee hours, I was deep asleep but suddenly became aware of a voice bellowing:

"When I was back there in seminary school there was a person who put forth the proposition that you can petition the lord with prayer!!!...(etc.)"

I gradually came into consciousness as this rant went on for a few more seconds, very confused about what I was hearing. Then the music kicked in and took me through the somewhat bizarre twists and turns of The Soft Parade. I was familiar enough with the Doors to recognize that it was them, but I'd never heard the song before. It was a very striking way to be introduced to one of their oddest concoctions. These days I'm only a moderate Doors fan but on the rare occasions I hear The Parade I always recall that strange awakening.

 

Same here...I saw the commercial circa 1969 and bought the record in 1971 and my first thought on playing it was "this is the song from that commercial!"

 

Surf's Up/Beach Boys - I won a promo album from a local radio station around '68 and one of the songs on it was Surf's Up. I listened to it and thought "what the hell is this" as it was so different from anything I heard from the group before. The lyrics, the structure fascinated the hell out of me, but I loved it but couldn't explain why. Still love it to this day; I never tire of it!

All I Can Do/Savoy Brown - I lost my virginity while this song was playing; I don't think any further explanation is necessary!