[caption id="attachment_810" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="The fabled automatic"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/h29327npsb2.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-810" title="h29327npsb2" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/h29327npsb2.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="198" /></a>[/caption]

In Stephen King's book "Hearts in Atlantis," he wrote about the feeling baby boomers of a certain age get from listening to music from the '50s and '60s. He called it "the fabled automatic," since it never fails to bring back the feelings associated with the time it was first heard.

During the years I spent in high school, from the fall of 1963 to the summer of 1967, I was pretty well obsessed with the music. I remember during my sophomore year, my friend John McIntyre and I made top forty lists every week based on the music we heard at night from far-off WBZ in Boston, WKBW in Buffalo or occasionally -- when the atmospherics were right -- WLS in Chicago.

On Tuesday nights we listened to Cousin Brucie's countdown on WABC in New York, and I remember picking up WCFL ("The Voice of Labor") out of Chicago and CKLW from Windsor, Ontario.

By 12th grade I wasn't listening quite as much, but for some reason, songs from that year -- 1966-67 -- resonate with me in a really special way.

That was the year I was finally 16 -- I had skipped a grade in elementary school -- and I was getting out of the house a little more than in the past. During the winter, I was playing in the band for the Extravaganza and then in the pit band for the senior class play, "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."

We would rehearse in the evenings and then some of the time, before heading home, some of us would stop off at Cleve's Pizza at Fairfax Circle for pizza or steak sandwiches. The juke box would always be on, and the two songs that seemed to be playing all the time were Tommy James and the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now" and Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music."

For some reason, the line we always perked up at was "Spotlight on James Brown."

It still makes me smile every time I hear it, and I downloaded it from iTunes tonight to put it on my super-eclectic iPod.

But that's not the purpose of this post. This post is about the way songs from that year resonate with me, in an almost mystical way. When I hear certain songs from that time, songs like the Happenings' "I've Got Rhythm" or Lou Christie's "Rhapsody in the Rain," I swear I can close my eyes and almost believe it is that time and that I'm 16 or 17 years old again. I almost believe that if I closed my eyes long enough and concentrated hard enough, I could open them and be sitting in my bedroom in Mosby Woods or in a booth at Cleve's Pizza waiting for my steak sandwich.

It is odd. There's no other time that can make me feel this way. I don't hear "My Baby Loves Lovin'" and feel I could step into 1970 with Shelley Marcus or hear "Heartache Tonight" and feel I could step into the 1980 GMU dance marathon with Lisa McGrady. Those are memories and good ones, but they don't have the same, oh, <em>texture</em> as the music of '66-'67.

I'm getting weird in my old age.