Songs of Summer, #6 - "White Bird" (1968)

"White Bird" by It's a Beautiful Day may have been the song that introduced me to the possibility that there might be more to music than what you heard on AM radio.

When I was growing up, we always spent a week up at Lake Tahoe, the kids enjoying the beach during the day and staying with grandma in the evening when the "responsible adults" would make their nightly trek down to the casinos (I say that jokingly, only because dang it, I really wanted to go!).

We stayed in the same cabin every year for almost 20 years, and the first year we were there we discovered that the radio only got one station.  And even though it was an AM station, in the late 1960s they had a playlist that was very much like the FM stations one could hear in the "free form" era of that medium.

"White Bird" was, without a doubt, the most exotic song I'd ever heard - exotic and even a bit scary.  What the heck were these people singing about, anyway?  In any event, this station played it a lot, at least a couple of times a day (so it was an AM station after all).  To this day, when I hear it I think of that Lake Tahoe cabin, and that radio which could only pick up one station.

"White Bird," It's a Beautiful Day, from the summer of 1968.