January, 1982: Young Private First Class Cecale found himself serving on 3 long weeks of Marine Corps mess duty in the middle of the Mojave Desert: Marine Air-Ground Combat Training Center (MAGCTC) Twenty-nine Palms, California. The local radio station you could pretty much set your watch to. Same songs, every day of the week, same rotation, literally, you could set your watch by it. Got real old long before the end of the first week.
Fortunately, one of the guys I worked with found a cassette tape: Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere...how appropriate! LOL Not a huge NY fan at the time, but this was so much better than the slop they were playing on the radio. Marie Osmond's "Paper Roses" was not a song Marines were wanting to hear, out in the desert.
We played it non-stop, 13 hours a day! I quickly became a fan of Mr. Young.
By the end of the third week of mess duty; two weeks of Neil Young's droning whine of wanting to live with with a Cinnamon Girl was old...no, ancient! "Down By The River", I would have been happy to shoot HIM, and let "my baby" run free! LOL
Fortunately, nobody was hurt, nobody found a "Cowgirl In The Sand" and we all returned to El Toro and a much more varied music selection on the radio. (This was long before CD's) To this day, I have a difficult time listening all the way through any song from that tape on the radio. Not to say they suck, it's just that the scar tissue is still sensitive, after all these years!
Randy