Favorite moment with music in your car.

In the late 70s I was driving north from Baltimore to New Jersey listening to a decades long folk music show from Philadelphia, Folklore, emceed by Gene Shay. He played a song sung by Priscilla Herdman, who had an utterly gorgeous , angelic voice, called, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. This was not the classic Australian Waltzing Matilda but an anti war song about an Australian at the World War I battle of Gallipoli  who is gravely wounded and about the wasted lives at the battle. The words start with the glory of going to battle and end with the total horror of war. And the contrast of Priscilla's gentle, angelic voice and the horror of the story make the story even more poignant.

This was before the internet and Priscilla was not big box office. It took me years to finally find the album in Baltimore when I was again visiting my friend.

I went to work for the old Ma Bell AT&T and for 5 years my constant habit was to buy the New York Times on my way to work, get to work early, page through the Times and try to do the daily cross word puzzle. Finally one Friday I stopped to pick up the times and it wasn't there. I was pissed and started to walk out of the store but turned around and for the very first time bought a New Jersey paper. I paged through it and at the bottom of the page saw a few paragraphs saying Priscilla Herdman was singing that evening at The Princeton Fold Song Society. Needless to say I went.

Priscilla is retired now. She never wrote her own songs she jus made carefully chosen songs more beautiful with her straight forward approach to singing and with her beautiful voice. I do have every album she ever made. And her version that first song I heard on the car radio is among my most special musical moments.

1975 - 8th grade new kid at school used to take his dad’s Grand Prix... we’d go joy riding up and down Revere Beach blasting Golden Earing, Big Star & Aerosmith - we were 14 & 13yo - 8-Track

1977 - HS blasting around in Rocky M dad's Cadillac playing Bowie, nothing but Bowie - 8-Track

1979 - Graduate HS and busting around the beach again with The Cars, The Knack & Blondie in his Trans-Am - Cassette Deck

1997 - riding my H-D back & forth to work with an FM Walkman Sport headphones on blasting WBCN & WFNX

2008 Back & forth to my son's boarding school in my Landcruiser turnt way up on Jimmy Page w/The Black Crows and old The Jam - CD

I don't listen to music in the car anymore - just talk radio. I play enough music at home... memories, so good and the music always sounded great through very mediocre car systems. Always the laughs and the people you were with. 

I don't listen to audio of any kind in the car. You'd be amazed how distracting it is when you become used to focusing exclusively on the road.

Back in 1971 while I was still in the USAF I owned a 1967 Pontiac Le Mans that had the standard AM radio with one dash speaker and two rear deck speakers. The Base Exchange got some car AM/FM/FM Stereo units in stock and I picked one up. It came with several trim plates so installation was fairly straight forward and looked great installed. FM stereo in cars was still relatively new back then, so I was anxious to hear what difference it would make. I decided to make the front speaker the left and the rears the right which worked quite well. My 'moment' came with the first FM stereo rock station I tuned in that illuminated the red 'Stereo' indicator on the dial. Glorious stereo music filled the interior and I was blown away with how great it sounded. I went on to include an 8 track player into the system and to this day I still have fond memories of that car and the many road trips I made with it while listening to my favorite tunes. 

 BTW, here is an interesting timeline concerning automotive sound systems.

you youngster,

The 1st time I played an 8 track in the car!!!!!!!!!!

8 track was a revolution, the 1st time our music was so easily transported, listened to so easily anywhere, like you say, blasting down the highway!

The player's heads got misaligned, the tape's broke, stretched, 

they were actually to be used for advertising at radio stations, just enough tape inside for that ad campaign (thus lighter, easier to move the tape), use until that ad campaign was over, in the trash can!

cassettes were for dictation, not music, single track, each way, then 2 track forward, then 4 track. It was improvements in the physical parts, cassette innards, player's innards, tape formulations, dolby ... that made them successful for music, of course the same portability as 8 tracks, but far more reliable and very easy to made duplicates or mix your own tracks.

That is when Programmable Turntables were introduced, scan the lp, find the blank spots between the tracks, you pick the tracks, in the order you want, record only those on your cassette.