Because the “Golden Half-Hour” was just that, a half hour, you only heard five to seven songs and a mess of commercials. So, you’d hear it only once every few days and then it was gone. So if you didn’t own the record it made learning a song a very difficult endeavor.

Another way to hear a song was at the local diner. If the place was popular (we had both types) then it might take a while to hear your particular song because the queue for the jukebox could be an hour or more. The joke was that if you put your quarter in at high noon you could go back to school and return at four o’clock just in time to hear it. I spent many nights with pen and paper writing down what snippets I could hear; verses, parts of verses, and words to fill in for the ones that went by too fast or we couldn’t understand because the singer drawled - like Mick Jagger. The Beatles, for the most part, were very easy to understand.

The best way to learn a song was to buy the record, a 45rpm disk, for 79 cents + tax. If you had a birthday you could ask for the LP, or long-play “album,” so named because the old, heavy 78 speed disks came in a photo-album-like package with paper sleeves. (I still have Al Jolson’s, ‘The Jazz Singer’ in that format) The regular, monophonic ones were $4.95+ tax and the “Full Stereophonic” versions were $5.95. However, unless you got the ones that stated on the cover “can be played on monophonic phonographs” you could miss out on some parts like harmonies, etc. Still, whatever mode of playing the song, you still had to play it over and over again to get words and the chords and the lead solos (or as close as you could for the level of playing. My 3-note bass lines didn’t require much inovation especially since I couldn’t make out the bass parts anyway.)

I still have the words to “Little Honda” and they start like this: “I’m gonna wack-it-up-girly-’cause-I’m-gonna take-a-ride-with-you.” The the proper start is, “I’m gonna wake you up early. . .” Still, I don’t feel so bad when John Prine talked about the fan who wanted the “Happy Enchilada Song.” Confused Prine asked, “Sorry, what song?” The fan yelled out, “You know, ‘It’s a happy enchilada and I think I’m gonna drown!’” The actual words are, “It’s half an inch of water. . .”