WTTR Transistor Radio Time Warp: California Dreaming!

Dedicated to my great Garrett and California friend of 45 years Michael Grimm, and a far more recent but very significant Angola friend, Lou Ann Homan, whose annual Winter Solstice parties evoke memories of "California Dreaming", a song that has resonated for me since its 1965 December release when I was thirteen years old... And to James Oliver Burns, my ever-present schooldays friend, we shared so much... And to the countless others I never knew, yet who were drawn by those Wonder Years. You know who you are, those were times time you will never forget...

 Oh how I longed to go, preferably by motorcycle, though as an alienated thirteen year old rural Indiana eighth grader I was forced to make concessions. Bitter concessions, but necessary.

Still, I had my own bedroom (which I called my “pad”), a transistor radio, and visions primed by 1965 tunes like “Mr. Tambourine Man” (The Byrds), “I Got You Babe" (Sonny & Cher), "Like a Rolling Stone" (Bob Dylan), "Eve of Destruction" (Barry McGuire), and The Animals’ "We Gotta Get Out of this Place."

Indeed.

 

Still, nothing was intolerable, I certainly wasn’t abused in any way…

 

And yet… how my young soul yearned, even ached to be closer to what seemed to be happening elsewhere…

 

Especially come December when Simon & Garfunkel’s " Sound of Silence" and the Mamas’ &Papas’ "California Dreaming" were released.

 

Within a year… that is by the end of 1966, “California Dreaming” and the “Ballad of the Green Berets” would be tied on the 1966 pop charts... a harbinger of yet other things to come...

"Winter Solstice"

The digital image was constructed from a truncated Stonehenge juxtaposed with snow-covered spruce trees on our property. The coloring and flame-like effects were achieved by superimposing  a photo of a Halloween camp fire nearby the trees.