As a child, I lived in a small town in the heart of the Canadian prairies. Our family had a black-and-white TV set (complete with rabbit ears) that usually gave us two or three fuzzy stations from which to choose – one of which was in French.
I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I never did develop a great love for the visual component of television right from the start. Even after we moved to a bigger community and got an actual color TV (and eventually cable!), I still mostly liked music shows like The Monkees or The Partridge Family. Even cool theme-song music for something like The Avengers (the British espionage series, not the MCU superhero movies) was often of more interest to me. (Well, OK: Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel was pretty cool.)
In those days, the big drawback was that if you didn’t know the title of the song or the artist who played it, you might never hear it again anywhere.
A song like “Wichita Lineman” as heard on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour was a huge hit, and it was in high rotation on the radio – so a song like that wasn’t a problem. On the other hand, I remember seeing a black-and-white performance where these guys in suits played some mesmerizing instrumental jazz thing. It was many years later as an adult when I found out that film clip was the classic “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
It’s a lot easier to figure things out nowadays, with some internet magic and good research skills. For instance:
JUNIP, “WITHOUT YOU” from FIELDS (2010): Over the past few years, I’ve been catching up on old TV series I missed the first time around. Recently it’s been a steady diet of The Blacklist. It’s a darker show than I’d usually watch, but for some reason there was an episode that particularly spooked me. I think I might have been falling asleep in front of my TV set, but I had the presence of mind to quickly ask my phone to what I was listening. As it turned out, this track by Swedish indie-band Junip from their 2010 debut was just the thing to turn the usual murder and mayhem plot into something special.
LIBRARY VOICES, “HEY! ADRIENNE” from LOVISH (2015): I heard “Hey! Adrienne” on a telephone-company commercial and immediately suspected this had to be a real song, because it couldn’t just be incidental music cooked up for a local promotion. Sure enough, my phone app identified this as a track from Library Voices, based out of Regina, SK. Another great summer song. Great band name, too.
KHRUANGBIN, “THE NUMBER FOUR” from THE INFAMOUS BILL (2014): One day I was on the phone with a friend of mine from Toronto. During our conversation, he asked if I’d ever heard of Khruangbin. I replied that I had not, and he sent me the appropriate links, adding, “You’d probably really like them.” A couple of days later, I realized that Khruangbin’s song “The Number Four” was the backing track to a beer commercial that had earwormed its way into my head months earlier. That summer soundtrack music married to the visual image of breezes and beaches is enough to make anybody thirsty for a cool one, no matter the current season.
TAME IMPALA, “CAUSE I’M A MAN” from CURRENTS (2015): Yes indeed, it is sure great these days to have access to all this music. However, I can still occasionally fall right down the rabbit hole. For instance, a few years back I was trying to find an old TV appearance by Canadian indie band Sloan on Open Mike with Mike Bullard, a Canadian late-night TV entry about two decades ago. I was looking for the band’s live version of “If It Feels Good, Do It,” while wearing traditional furry Canadian animal costumes: Moose, Skunk, Fox, and, uh, Shark.
I don’t remember what I typed into the search engine, but on my first couple of tries, I kept getting some puppets in a band called Feltworth complaining about a band called Tame Impala and how they stole their schtick. Eventually I concluded Feltworth might be an incognito version of Sloan – who themselves could be mistaken for the Beatles (I always thought One Chord to Another was Rubber Soul played backwards) or perhaps, by virtue of their Canadian citizenship, maybe Klaatu. Anyway, that’s how I found “Cause I’m a Man” by Tame Impala, which is basically Australian multi-instrumentalist Kevin Parker. A long way to go to find a great song, but sometimes it’s more about the length of the journey as opposed to the size of the rabbit.
UNKNOWN, “LEARN HOW TO SWIM AT THE YMCA” (1960s): And finally, despite my best efforts, here’s one I can’t find anywhere on the internet. Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, this great little track should have been a hit for somebody. Powered by a great surf style track (think: anything by the Ventures) and decent vocal harmonies, the lyrics consisted of several water-safety tips, like: “And never dive unless you know/The water’s not too shallow and it’s clear belooooooooow!” Not the Village People, for sure.
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