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it was the night before christmas, i was in england, in a car with my mother, father, younger brother, and infant sister, we were being driven on the wrong side of the road by one of my father's old friends, he'd brought a son of his along for the ride, we had gotten off a plane earlier at heathrow airport in london, somehow we had all packed ourselves into this car, now we were headed to a little town where my father's friends house was, my parents had lived there before, both by themselves and then also with me after i had been born, our family of three had then returned to the states where my buckeye brother and sister had eventually joined the ranks, now the five of us were moving anew, i was going back to my birthplace, it was a place that i wasn't sure of which i wholly remembered truthfully or not, my parents had told me that the son and i were friends when we were both little, he was a couple of months shy of being a full year older than me, one of our favorite pastimes was putting on pots and pans and then hitting each others heads with wooden spoons, i didn't remember any of that, i could have easily nodded off during the ride but the son was wide awake and he kept talking to me, it wasn't coming across at all, i told him i didn't understand what he was saying, which i think he understood, but he kept talking anyways, i asked my mother if my ears were messed up from the flight or something, she reminded me that people in england have different accents and dialects and that we were both speaking the same language, but each in our own way, i thought i got that well enough, one thing he said sounded like "dooyalykxginrealfixxet?" to me, i didn't know what that meant at all, my mom said it was some kind of british tv show, something else he kept asking me was "dooyalykxpawuntwaht?", i turned to my mom to translate, she told me that he wanted to know if i liked punk rock, she said it was a kind of music, or maybe she said it was kind of like music, i told him i didn't know if i liked it or not, he asked me about tea, biscuits, sweets, tellies, father christmas, i had no idea what was what, we soon found a common bond by singing "jingle bells" (batman smells...) but his version of the song had some new and different words in it, i spent the last part of the ride pressed to the car window with my hands cupped to the sides of my face, it was dark and deep into a cold winter, there weren't many lights or much of anything else to see, eventually we were winding our way along tiny little streets, lined with tiny little houses, rounding corners that were curves and finally stopping to park under the loft of a small barn up the street from my father's friends house, we all got out of the car and walked down to the corner, we were on the edge of the town square, i stood and looked around before crossing the street, there was a town hall in the center of the square, across one corner was the town's main pub, lots of tiny little shops with brightly painted doors and rounded glass windows were all around, silhouetted against the nights sky was a looming medieval church, it was all very dreamlike, we made our way down to one of the doors and the friend of my father's wife welcomed us all inside, we took off our jackets, and hats, and gloves, and scarves, met their other two children and then sat down at the kitchen table where we were all served some hot tea, watercress sandwiches, biscuits and some scones as well, after we ate we were going to watch a little telly before my father's friend was going to load us all back in his car and take us across town to our new home, it was december the 24th, 1977, i was still nine years old, i woke up and i could see my breath, i really didn't know where i was, it was dark and cold when we'd been dropped off late last night, my dad hadn't gotten the heater working and it was still freezing cold now, i was in a bedroom on the upper floor, after wiping some frost off the inside of the window i could see a snow covered garden down below with a tall wall all the way around it, everyone else was still sound asleep or possibly frozen, with nothing better to do i took a look around, out on the landing there was a twisting staircase that led downstairs to the ground floor, i walked in and out of one strange room and then back into another, the house was obviously really old, i felt like i'd woken up in the past, the house was mostly empty, besides our luggage there wasn't anything much of ours there yet, i couldn't go outside so i killed time by looking out all the different windows at the back garden until everyone else finally woke up, it was christmas day and we eventually all headed back to my parents friends house to celebrate the holiday with them, it was a good idea because we really didn't have any food in the new house, our front door opened not onto a sidewalk or a street but more of a paved lane with just the blank side of a building mere feet away, it was a couple of steps to the left from our stoop to the thoroughfare, a narrow one way street lined with shops, businesses, flats and offices that ran the length of the town's old shopping district, it all looked and felt very different from ohio, our thoroughfare there was called main street and the sidewalks, road, shops and businesses were all much bigger than these here, we went down the thoroughfare to it's end and then up a steep hill that led to where their house was, we were going to have some tea and then a proper english christmas dinner that night, maybe we'd get some presents, in the meantime we were going to play with their kids and watch some telly, the one son really wanted me to see a music show that was on that night called top of the pops, he thought it might have some punk rock on it, i was getting curious about this punk rock he kept talking about, i just didn't know what it was, my parents always had a cabinet or two full of records, my mom was a big music fan, more so than my father, she really liked to play her records on the turntable and listen to the radio, she also liked to dance around and her dances were all pretty wild, they had funny names like the mashed potato, the twist, the watusi, the jerk, she swore they were all real dances and she really took them very seriously, i could watch her dance around the house for hours, laughing the whole time, the records that they had gotten for me were mostly sesame street, the electric co., and sing-a-long songs and stories, real kids stuff, my own favorite band was the monkees, i watched them on tv at every chance, the show was a little confusing for me to follow at times but i got that they were all friends who were in a band together, they played music and would try to help anyone else out of a jam, even when it meant taking some knocks along the way themselves, i knew that it takes a true heart and real guts to do that, i didn't understand why some people kept on trying to put them down for making good music and helping people in need, they were like a band of undercover musical superheros to me, the best part of each show was whenever they played a song, that's when i'd jump up and down, like a monkey, the first record i ever bought was the monkees "more of the monkees" album, i found it in a thrift store in ohio, i'd gone there with my parents, my brother was there but he was still tiny, i think i was 6 years old, i remember that it was in the winter, there were rows of dirty snowdrifts along the sidewalks, the building didn't seem to be heated at all and it was as cold inside as it was outside, minus only the wind and snow, we were the only ones there, my parents were looking around the store and i was left to wander around by myself, they were taking forever, they always did, i didn't find any good toys or books and i knew that i had to keep moving around or else i'd just get even colder, i started to sort through a mountain of records, i didn't know many of the bands but then, with the flip of some now long forgotten album, i suddenly found the monkees all smiling up at me, i couldn't believe it, i didn't have any monkees records, neither did my mom or dad, somehow i hadn't even realized that they made them, i worked it out from the stack and turned it over, i knew almost all of the songs on the back, i took it over to my parents and shared the news of this incredible and fortunate find of mine with them, i didn't have any money so i asked if they could please get it for me, i think it cost a dime, getting my mom to agree to give me that dime wasn't easy, i had to promise to be good, to do my chores without being asked, to be nice to my baby brother, i said anything i had to say to get to the point to where i was awarded the dime and the record was mine, it worked and i just couldn't wait to get back home, once in the car i learned the bad news that before i could actually listen to the record i had to fulfill enough of the promises i had just so eagerly made first, i had some serious motivation, with more time and effort than i would have wanted the day finally came when i got to play that record, wow, the monkees, as loud as mom allowed, i would have flipped that record from side to side all day and night if my mom would have let me, every song was a solid hit but my favorite was "your auntie grizelda" because it had a weird fuzzy electric buzzy bug sound going on in it, besides the monkees the only other band i considered myself a fan of around then was the jackson 5, they were a big family of kids who all played together in the same band, they had a cartoon show that had a cool theme song and then a different song or two in each episode, their music was impossible not to sing and dance along to, i couldn't understand why they were a cartoon if they were real, the only other tv band on the dial was the partridge family, i only watched that show because it was kind of funny, the family themselves were boring, they didn't have anywhere near the same kinds of adventures as the monkees or the jackson 5 did, the worst part was that their songs were all really kind of blah, i blamed that on the kids not writing very good songs, i thought they'd be a good band for a church or something like that, another music show i watched was american bandstand, i really didn't like this show that much, it had lots of lights, music and dancing going on but not very many bands or songs that i liked, most of the time it was more like american blandstand, the only reason i'd even sit there and painfully wait it out was because i didn't want to miss what came on just one short commercial break after it, the weirdest and wildest tv music show on planet earth, soul train, i really thought that it was all coming from inside big train cars with huge dancing rooms in them, they were all attached to the soul train's engine, don cornelius, the soul train's conductor, would welcome us all aboard, he'd fill us in on the names of the records and songs and introduce the bands, then he'd just kind of vanish, leaving all of the passengers to totally cut loose and dance their feet off, the dancers weren't really kids and they didn't all look like teenagers either, i guessed that they were young adults, their dancing was all incredibly cool and totally contagious, they wore some of the wildest looking clothes that i'd ever seen and sometimes the bands could look even wilder than the dancers, i really tried to follow who was who and what songs i liked best, each week i was soaking up some serious soul from the likes of ike and tina turner, the crusaders, barry white, curtis mayfield, the supremes, wilson pickett, the ohio players, i was glued to the tube until the moment the soul train finally faded out of sight over our black and white tv's horizon,

 Soul Train