Pam’s Pictorama Post: The ear splitting sound of electric guitar and flashing, colored lights – fans standing and yelling. Radio City Music Hall on a Wednesday night on a chilly, wet summer night. How on earth did this big band girl end up there?

Pictorama readers know I have occasionally taken to reporting on various aspects of my life, and lately that has mostly taken the form of writing about my new job at Jazz at Lincoln Center. As someone whose interest in music has rarely budged beyond a stubborn point after 1940 or so since discovering early jazz and dance band music in college, it gave me some pause to take a job where, by its very nature, I would be immersed in not only contemporary jazz, but all of the decades between.

I was very upfront about this concern throughout my interview process, often declaiming unwarranted into much of the first months of my job, until I realized that in reality most of the people I work with also have strong preferences and being open to things in a general way is the only musical mandate of the job. Over the intervening months on the march through my first year, I have discovered that I really don’t have to love everything. While my ambivalence about be-bop may be shocking to some (it really is) it is true that I don’t have to love everything. For all of that, there has been very little I didn’t at least find interesting – there was one painful night at Dizzy’s with what I will describe as abstract sax, but for the most part it has been an interesting ride.

Therefore, in the spirit of exploration I will try most things and as a result I have learned a lot. So the recent offer of a ticket to hear Steve Miller, who plays a blues program at our venue annually, resulted in a trip to Radio City Music Hall where I have not been in more than a decade. I met him recently and he seems to be a lovely person. His music is sometimes described as an entry point between rock ‘n roll and blues and with this in mind I accepted the offer of a ticket.

My most recent visit to Radio City was to hear the Dalai Lama. The long line and wait to get in for that was sort of epic, although he was fascinating as always and worth the wait. I had not thought about that particular talk in a long time, but it came back to me when I arrived at Radio City on the Wednesday night of my late June vacation. (The only other time I remember being at Radio City was to hear Frank Sinatra shortly before he died. My then boyfriend Kevin, who had the tickets, had gotten the date wrong and we had to rush to the theater, arriving late with the concert underway.)

The flashing lights and shock of the opening act, Peter Frampton, knocked me back even further, to my childhood. After the initial shock, and admittedly thoughts about running immediately from the room, I was surprised to realize oh-my-gosh, buried deep in my brain were many of these songs, as if planted there by aliens. Not all of it, but about a third of what he played kicked off a sound track in my brain, of long forgotten AM radio. (This coming to mind recently with the death of Dan Ingram. DAN’ Ing-ram, his intro playing from another soundtrack in my brain.)

Popular music blared daily from the radio in our sea green Pontiac station wagon, and from the large brown and gold affair of a radio (a bit out-dated even then) atop of our refrigerator – as soon as my sister was tall enough to change the dial from the constant news radio of the day. (WCBS I believe. My mom favored them as her brother worked for the station at the time. News was a family business.) Music of the ’70’s also blared from my bedside clock radio, (the clock radio which I later, if only briefly, discovered jazz on but about that another time), and of course from a series of small Sony transistor radios I kept with me to the extent the batteries held out. Later, in high school, top 40 music would follow me to parties at the beach at night, and ring in each New Year with a countdown of songs. WABC, top 40 radio. Little did I realize that a small tape recorder was going off in my brain and decades later someone would hit the playback switch.

My co-workers filtered in around me shortly before Steve Miller came on. When Steve Miller started the tape recorder revealed a greater knowledge and memory of his music – albums on my sister’s turntable. Then he and Peter Frampton played some blues together, blues of course being what I really came for after all, and I started to get it – not so bad for a big band girl.