Some songs bring back memories of more than just people

When Stephen King writes about the '60s, he rarely fails to mention how much the music mattered.

In "Hearts in Atlantis," which was basically a book about the '60s, he referred to the music as the "fabled automatic," and said that all these years later, it never fails to lift his spirits. King is two years older than I am, so he had the first two years of his twenties in that frenetic decade. I turned 20 just three weeks before the '60s ended.

Add in my late blooming socially and in some ways, the '70s were really more significant to me. But there are songs from both decades that not only remind me of the time but of a very specific place.

An example:

Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" was popular in late 1972, and whenever I hear it, it's as if I'm sitting in the back seat of Chris Gullotta's station wagon heading to Georgetown. We were double-dating. I was with a girl named Kathy Ward that I went out with two of three times; his date was the girl I married 2 1/2 years later.

"Dancing Queen" was a worldwide hit for Abba in 1977, and when I hear it, I'm in a bowling alley in Vienna, Austria, where I bowled in an American league while we were living there.

The Beach Boys' "I Get Around" evokes a memory for me of being on my way to the store to buy my first pair of white Levis in the summer of 1965.

With a few other songs, it isn't even the original version that brings out the memories. In 1971 and 1972, my friends Chris Worth and Chris Gullotta were going out two or three nights a week to a great club just off Connecticut Avenue called The Montage. The house band, the Eye, did great covers of a lot of songs, and when I hear "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" or "Witchy Woman," it's their covers and that club I remember.

Sadly, that was one of the first casualties of construction when they started building the Metro.

These aren't the songs that meant the most to me, the ones various girlfriends and wives and I considered "our songs." Those are different and will always be important to me.

But it's the songs like the ones mentioned above that are my "fabled automatics" and always will be.