Little River Band -- Reminiscing

 

I believe that I've had this Reminiscings of Youth gig going for the better part of two years, so it's a natural that I should have this particular song as the topic for this ROY article.

"Reminiscing" was a song by Little River Band that had a lot of airplay on the radio stations in Toronto when I was a kid, and before I picked up on all of the jargon that goes with music genres, I thought it a rather strange tune initially since it was a pop tune that suddenly got jazzy for a couple of seconds. Of course, being that age, reminiscing was a concept that I had yet to cotton onto with so many decades ahead of me.

Now that I'm at the proper age to reminisce and I've gone through years appreciating and re-appreciating a lot of the AOR from way back when on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, Little River Band's most famous single from June 1978 strikes me as something that is as smooth as silk and goes down like a glass of really good sake...Hakkaisan, perhaps. And I've figured out why the band's guitarist, Graeham Goble, who created "Reminiscing" put in that Big Band riff.

"Reminiscing" hit No. 1 on Canada's RPM Adult Contemporary chart and No. 7 on the regular singles chart while in America, it was up to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. No wonder I got to hear it so often on the old radio. For me, the other big surprises regarding this song is realizing that Little River Band actually hails from Australia and not the United States as I had assumed and that John Lennon himself regarded "Reminiscing" as one of his favourites while he was dating May Pang during a time when he and Yoko Ono had called a temporary timeout on their relationship. I didn't even know that there was an official music video for the song.

Well, checking out the Showa Pops singles release chart for June 1978, I did find a few singles that are already up here on KKP, although they were supposedly released in the previous month of May according to their J-Wiki articles.

Momoe Yamaguchi -- Playback Part 2 （プレイバック・パート２）

Junko Yagami -- Sayonara no Kotoba （さよならの言葉）

Issei Okamoto -- Moonlight Singing（ムーンライト・シンギィング）

(8:07)