You never know. That’s why you gotta live it every day.

My sister Anne came out of our green, two-storey house one May day, when the forsythia had just blossomed their spring-is-here yellow, and announced that you can hear music on the radio. This announcement changed everything.

1978 IN THREE-WAY TIE BY MARK GOZONSKY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 55

1978 is in a three-way tie for my favorite year in music with 1972 and whatever year it is when you are reading this.

1972 is when my sister Anne came out of our green, two-storey house one May day, when the forsythia had just blossomed their spring-is-here yellow, and announced that you can hear music on the radio. This announcement changed everything.

I had been running a hose in the gutter of our street so I could dam it up with twigs. I changed to taping songs off the radio.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight by Robert John was my first-ever favorite song. Oh-weem-o-o-away! Then I wanna live/I wanna give by Neil Young in Heart of Gold.

This was a more than golden, more than platinum, more than diamond era of soul music. I got in on the ground floor of Al Green’s string of throbbing, stirring love songs. Let’s Stay Together had been released in 1971 but was still on the air, commingling with Here I Am and Call Me and all the other sultry urgencies that even a chubby-cheeked hose-runner knew meant that when people really loved each other good things could and did and would be happening. Music on the radio was like the bright yellow forsythia, an announcement that life was here.