A Visit From My Dad

For some reason this memory of my dad popped into my head tonight.

My dad was a connoisseur of opera. Saturday afternoons the radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera was always on (and invariably gave me a headache, although the true cause might have been his stinky pipe tobacco.) He was especially fond of Mozart and Gilbert & Sullivan. He had no interest in the popular music of his generation and he seemed totally unaffected by the popular music his kids listened to: Herman's Hermits, the Beatles, Sam Sham and the Pharoahs … their popularity with the younger generation in our house waxed and waned, but never seemed to register on his radar screen -- except for two notable exceptions in my memory:

Sylvia's Mother by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show and A Horse With No Name by America. There was something about these two songs that he found particularly irksome, enough to comment on it each and every time he heard them. I think he found Sylvia's Mother to just be awfully whiney. I chuckle when I think about his reaction to A Horse With No Name. I can hear his voice saying in a slightly amused and incredulous tone, "What the hell is this song supposed to mean?"

He wasn't narrow in his musical tastes. He gave me my love for Tom Lehrer and the British duo Flanders & Swann. We had Ed McCurdy's and Alan Arkin's recording of bawdy Renaissance songs, When Dalliance Was In Flower. When I was older and had discovered The Bonzo Dog Band, my dad was really taken with their song Hunting Tigers Out in India; their brand of humor was right up his alley.

Thanks Daddy, for making me smile, so many years later.