Forever Heading To Winnipeg

 by whiteray

It was about this time in 1972, fifty years ago, that my pals Rick and Gary and I crammed some stuff into my 1961 Ford Falcon and headed out on a road trip to Winnipeg, the capital of Canada’s province of Manitoba. 

Our plans were minimal: drive the nearly 400 miles to the city of about half a million, settle down in a motel for a couple of nights and wander around the city to see what we could see. I’d been there twice before, so I had some ideas – the impressive provincial capital building, the zoo – but we were mostly going to freeform it. 

And we did. We were lucky enough to be there during the annual Winnipeg Folk Festival, so we heard some good music on a couple of outdoor stages downtown. We did hit the zoo and the provincial capital building. We wasted time wandering through a few record shops and a few of those quirky little shops of the time called head shops, checking out posters and other stuff and generally ignoring the accessories offered for the ingestion of illicit pharmaceuticals. 

We were young adults – well, Rick and I were; Gary was still seventeen – on a road trip having fun. We drank some Canadian beer as we camped under the northern lights in a provincial park on our first night out; on our last night, we stayed in a commercial campground and spent a portion of the evening talking to some girls from Okemos, Michigan. 

All of that is pretty vivid fifty years later. But even more vivid in my memory is the music. We brought along my cassette tape player, and each of us offered some tapes. Either Rick or Gary brought along the newly released Rolling Stones anthology Hot Rocks, and that and the other tapes were played frequently enough during our 1,000 or so miles that nearly every time we stopped for gas, we needed to buy batteries, too. 

And there was Top 40 radio. About half the time on our journey, we were able to tune into a decent radio station along the way. When its signal began to fade, it was the job of the front seat passenger to find another AM station that we might want to listen to for an hour or so. The stations varied, but the tunes we heard didn’t differ all that much. Almost all of the top fifteen records listed in Billboard for the last week of July 1972 call back those five days viscerally: 

“Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan
“Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” by the Looking Glass
“Too Late To Turn Back Now” by the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose
“(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right” by Luther Ingram
“Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” by Wayne Newton
“Where Is The Love” by Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway
“School’s Out” by Alice Cooper
“How Do You Do” by Mouth & McNeal
“Lean On Me” by Bill Withers
“Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)” by the Hollies
“Layla” by Derek & The Dominos
“Take It Easy” by the Eagles
“Day By Day” from Godspell
“Rocket Man” by Elton John
“Coconut” by Nilsson

Some of those stand out more than others. We didn’t hear the Luther Ingram record a lot, and we weren’t crazy about “Alone Again (Naturally)” or the Wayne Newton record. The others, we all liked, and for my part, I’ve continued to like them all as fifty years have somehow gone by. But when they pop up on oldies radio or on my own listening devices, they don’t all immediately whisper “Winnipeg” to me; most of those records bring other connections. “Layla,” for example, either puts me in the lounge of a hostel in Denmark where I lived for a few months in 1974 or else it puts me on stage in a suburban Minneapolis home in 1998, playing keys in a recreational band. 

But one of those fifteen has been for fifty years an immediate reminder of that trip. No matter where I am when I hear “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl),” I am once again in that old Falcon, heading north on Interstate 29 with Gary and Rick.