“IT ONLY TAKES A MINUTE GIRL… “

I was a radio junkie when I was a kid. On Saturdays, and late at night, I’d try to pick up the skip signals, pulling in stations from Chicago, Atlanta, NYC and other exotic locations.

Check it out. She’s gone. It only takes a minute. Remember what I told you to forget. Heaven must be missing an angel. Don’t take away the music. Fool of the year. Girl I heard you’re getting married.

Not exactly the typical soundtrack of adolescence for a middle class white kid growing up in the 70’s, but for me, it was the first music I ever lived for. My first cassette I owned my grandma bought on one of our Tuesday “dates” was the 5th Dimension. I still today can sing all the songs on it. The first contest I won on the radio was a cassette from Tavares. I heard “It only takes a minute” on the radio, I won by being caller number 5, and the rest was history. I was 12 years old, and Tavares sparked my nascent musical interests, and then lit them up like a flare. This was the first music that got inside my spine and made me want to do the white-boy shuffle. Like 5th Dimension I knew all their songs. I have no idea why they struck me like they did, but I think it was something about their ballads. I didn’t realize they were the precursor to disco, or I may have dropped them right there!