Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#290) "Drivin' My Life Away" by Eddie Rabbit - The height of Eddie Rabbit's career occupied just a finite stretch of my childhood, but it was an important time, full of new information leading to new experiences, or new thoughts about news experiences anyway, most of which have remained vivid memories. I was nine, ten, eleven, JUST starting to become aware of the adult world, which for any typical young boy means becoming tempted, like the boys in Pinocchio who turn into donkeys, by all manner of sin - smoking, chewing, drinking beer. I'm not saying all these things happened at that age (God forbid), but it was when I remember becoming aware of it all, and it naturally coincided with the discovery of girls, the sometimes psychologically, sometimes almost physically, painful obsession with the tight jeans or short shorts the next-door-neighbor kids' older sister wore, and recognizing the new critically important need to stay tuned in to what all the kids were talking about as we hung out in the alley between our houses until long after the street light had flickered on. I'd never listened much before, but suddenly, at any given moment, it was a good bet that somebody was talking about sex.

For me, it was the first wave of the death of innocence. I came to the heady realization not just that there are choices to make in life, but that sometimes I might actually want to make the wrong choice. A very heady time in general, which, for better or worse, I associate with the music of Eddie Rabbit.

How could I not, really? The first time I ever saw a girl dance the way much older women like to dance was at my hometown's youth center, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in winter. There was a little radio that was always on in the main room where they stored the sports equipment, and a group of girls were gathered around it, talking and laughing. I wasn't among them, I was somewhere else...I can't remember what I was doing, exactly, but it was from across the room that one particular girl's rhythmic movement caught my eye.

She wasn't twerking or anything like that, was not doing anything overtly sexual...she was only twelve (and mind you, so was I...). But nevertheless, she was, in my eyes, a "bad girl", and a pretty thing to boot, and the little bob of her head and quick flick of her hips, that is, her physical response to the rhythm of the song playing ("keeping perfect rhythm with the song on the radio..."), to speak nothing of the bright smile on her face as she moved (which also seemed to be keeping rhythm), sent a charge through me, the likes of which I've never felt since, at least not in the same way.

The song, of course, was "Drivin' My Life Away". Not the greatest song, not the best Eddie Rabbit song even, but there could not have been a more perfect accompaniment to my first real pang of physical attraction. I wouldn't trade that memory for anything.

"Pop it down, jack me up, shoot me out, flying down the highway / looking for the morning..."

#291) "I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit - Same deal as above, with slightly different details. Eddie Rabbit's music was just kind of there, present, for a lot of my first steps into pre-teenage-dom, along with Hall and Oates, Alabama, and Juice Newton. And come on, all these years later, this song still speaks the truth: who doesn't love a rainy night?

"I love to feel the rain on my face, taste the rain on my lips, in the moonlight shadows..."