Dad's Playlist

There are no seatbelts in dad’s old Fiat, and in this memory, I am hanging over the back seat as we sing together.

The tune is from the 1930s, Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those Peepers, but somehow it is so much fun in a 1960s drive with Dad. Music made him happy and when he was happy, I was happy too.

It was like that in our house, Dad kind of set the tone for when and where the fun was, and despite the fact that we were growing up in the 1960s, times of social revolution and evolution, our mid century modern house in an emerging coastal suburb, was filled with ‘all that American jazz’ – Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Glen Miller, Peggy Lee and big enduring ‘voices’ Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, and then of course old blue eyes, Frank Sinatra – a little time capsule of my father’s youth.

We didn’t stay in that time warp, he discovered knew voices and sounds, but our old record player and radiogram remained the heart of the living room for my early childhood. We’d move the lounge suite and dance on the hard jarrah floors in our socks or slippers, goofing it up with dad and my brother and sisters, learning the Twist from Chubby Checker and early rock and roll from Bill Haley and His Comets.

It was Dad who discovered and endorsed Diana Ross and the Supremes, Bert Bacharach, and Dione Warwick, and my sisters who sang their hearts out to Baby Love, but when my brother brought home a Beatles EP – I Feel Fine and A Hard Day’s Night, he drew the line. (Some years later, when symphonic versions of the Beatles’ hits were released, he conceded that their music was really very good.)

By the 1970s music had exploded into a diverse array of threats – Heavy Rock, Heavy Metal, the music of drugged out hippies. The world was shattering into groups that somehow undermined his sense of family. For a start, the notion of a teenager as a person separate from the rest of the family was born. The global marketers were carving up families into financial units…why sell one stereo system to a single family, when you can market, portable ones to young people and encourage them to listen to their own music. Double the sales.

So, while we explored the sounds of our own generations, Dad went on his own musical journey.

He discovered, Cleo Lane and her miraculous range. In the car he still listened to Frankie on cassette and adored the soundtrack from Cabaret, never quite settling in his mind if Liza with a ‘Z’ Minelli was a better performer than her mother Miss Garland.

And then there was the musical Fiddler on the Roof. I swear he identified with the Papa, as the daughters sought increasingly untraditional life choices. Sunrise, Sunset could always spark a dewy eye.

We saw the film together and ‘got’ the association.

We watched quite a lot of drama together. TV series that swept the English-speaking world, like Rich Man Poor Man, Roots, and of course, the Holocaust. Good acting, good stories, good musical scores, my father liked things that moved your soul, made you think, brought you to feel things, to see humanity at its best and worst.

I suppose in so many ways he was an everyday Dad.

He worked hard for his family.

He could be incredibly dogmatic, as was acceptable for men when they were still considered to be the undisputed head of the family. He could also be very funny and was not averse to playing dress ups for a night of silliness with the family.

We weren’t rich, so he enjoyed the idea of treating everyone to something special, like a big night out at the drive in. He told regular dad jokes and liked to argue about world events, or maybe he just liked to argue, I was never quite sure.

He was quite demure, and never went in for big drinking at the pub, or scantily clad women – as far as pin up girls go, he was more of a Maureen O’Hara than a Marilyn Monroe fan.

He was handy and did most of our painting, fixing, and renovating himself, sometimes commandeering us to help with carrying or holding things while he worked.

But in so many ways he was quite extraordinary.

On my 16th birthday we trekked the city to find me a pair of white platform heels. Dad thought they were ugly, Frankenstein shoes, he called them, but because I had my heart set on them, we visited just about every shoe store in town to find them.

I look back and yes, I see his faults and flaws, but in everything I see his love.

When he died, at a ridiculously early age – just 56 – we were all shell-shocked and bereft.

Just getting through the weeks before and then the necessities of the funeral seemed insurmountable.

None of us could speak at his funeral, we could not get through a speech.

And now all these many years on I still wish we had simply been able to put together a Spotify playlist, a soundtrack to his beautiful soul.