Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Among the "Here's a topic. Discuss" gimmicks that is making the rounds on Facebook of late is "Name your top 15 Albums". Got me to thinking: music matters, but maybe not in the same way it did "back in the day". The way we listen to music has changed a lot over the years. Not just vinyl albums to cds to digital music on the computer or MP3 players, but that's part of it. Part of it, too, is the "music on demand" nature of i-Tunes and dominance of virtual culture. Radio stations used to dictate the music we heard. Sure, we could, if we were very lucky, get through to the studio with a request for a song, but generally we listened to what they gave us. It was a shared experience. Sure, album sales may have dictated, to a degree, what music was played within a given format; but probably to a greater degree, the albums we bought were dictated by the music that the radio stations played. The release of a new album by a popular artist was an anticipated event. In the early-1970's, Elton John was king. I didn't have all of his albums, but I had a bunch. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was Elton's first double album, and its release was an event. I loved this album, and that's a good thing, because in the Summer of 1974, there was no escaping it. "Bennie and the Jets", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", and "Harmony" were omnipresent. I remember walking the beach in Clearwater (or was it Ben T. Davis Municipal Beach in Tampa?) and hearing three different songs from that album on three different radio stations at the same time. Good times. Good times. The video below is just the song and the album cover. Just like back in the day.