When my son was very little, a new band called Jane's Addiction started putting out amazing albums. I consumed the recordings voraciously. When we drove around in the 1975 Plymouth Valiant with more than 200K miles on it, we had a small boom box stereo on the front seat that played tapes and FM radio, since the '75's AM radio was broken. Jane's Addiction was frequently in that boom box. When we took our 1988 Honda Civic EX on road trips from South Carolina to OH and IN to meet relatives at holidays and vacations, Jane's was a mainstay in the tape deck (the '88 had no CD player) as well.
Our little boy sat in his car seat in the middle of the back seat - safest place in the car statistically - and absorbed every bit of music we played for him. As I played drums on the steering wheel, he'd play drums on his brown car seat, and I'd smile as I'd catch a glance of him doing so in the rear view mirror. We exposed him to a vast variety of music: hard rock, punk, classical (Chopin, Dvorak, Mozart), classical (Who, Led Z, Stones, Beatles), progressive, 70s, 80s, metal, grunge, goth, dark wave... if it was fun to dance to or had a difficult drum part or just touched the soul (as Chopin always does to me) then it got played, and Christopher drank it in, deeply.
Mountain Song, by Janes Addiction, was one of our favorites to play while driving on I-26, I-40 and I-75 through the NC, TN and KY mountains. The '88 Honda Civic had a speedometer that went to 120 mph. Christopher and I hit 115 going down the I-275 descent to cross the Ohio River from KY to IN while singing and drumming to this song when he about 5 yrs old. We coasted down to 80mph as we crossed the river, protected by the bridge's steel super structure. Unfortunately, a dozen Indiana State Troopers and a spotter aircraft saw us emerge from the bridge, and wrote us a ticket for 72 in a 65 mph zone before we could cross back into Ohio. After the ticket, Black Flag was put into the Civic's stereo.
Jane's Addiction "Mountain Song" from Andrew Doucette on Vimeo.
I hope you enjoy this song as much as my son and I did, whether we were in the car, or drumming with two sets in the bonus room above the garage in South Carolina, or just hanging out in the living room.
I'm also attempting to use this song as a way to Jump Start my Monday morning... which appears to be suffering from significantly lethargic inertia.
