Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Riders on the storm

I'm almost done with the rip of my CD's to the hard disk. I knew I had a few hundred CD's but I didn't realise it was quite this many. There are a few missing that I can't seem to find; the Beatles White Album, Szymanowski's Violin Concertos, Michael Nymans String Quartets and some Roger Waters aren't to be found yet I know I listened to em half a year ago. They'll turn up; I can't imagine anyone pinching them!

One of the discs I rediscovered was 'The best of the Doors'. To be honest they were never one of my favourite groups but then again, the Beatles weren't either. Y'know, I typed band there and then reconsidered; back then they were called groups.

But there are one or two good tracks in there. 'The End' with it's maniacal, 'Mother? I'm going to kill you.' 'Father? I'm going to kill you'. And there's 'Riders on the Storm'. A big hit in 1970 when I was a first year apprentice at AWA. I've already written a little about that time. My main duties were to install car radios but when there were none to be installed I was allowed, nay, expected, to repair dead radios.

For some reason 'Riders on the Storm' was popular with all of us in that workshop; whenever it cropped up on the radio we'd all tune to the station (I remember people shouting 'Storm - 3KZ' to tell us which station). We'd all turn the volume up loud and sing along. Only we didn't quite sing the words the Doors had written. Our version went something like 'Shagging on the shore'...

It seemed funny at the time :-)

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