So the other night I’m down at the local pizza joint watching a dust storm blow through the area, turning the whole world outside the windows a foggy brown kind of color. I’m sipping a Pinot Grigio served by a bartender clearly disinterested in any kind of friendly banter or chit-chat, and the MLB Network on the TV is showing yet another YES Network game where it’s just another embarrassing tribute to everything Derek Jeter: who cares what the score might be, there’s Derek talking to a teammate, there’s Derek belching, there’s Derek laughing at something his teammate said, there’s Derek striking out. I mean, it’s all pretty pathetic.

But the music being played is something else altogether. Every tune is from 1970, and every tune transports me back in time to time and place as only music can. The Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” comes on, and all of a sudden I’m not in the dusty Phoenix East Valley waiting for hot wings and the salmon special, but down in the cellar of my old house in Tewksbury, playing pool with my grandfather, and walking down icy winter streets to see my old friend Paul Porcella.

Three things immediately come to mind: 1) how old I am, recalling memories from music more than four decades’ old; 2) the incredibly transcendent power of music that can lift you from one place to another in a New York minute (thankfully without Derek Jeter’s mug!), and 3) how black music used to be so melodic and positive. Call me racist if you want, but there’s little about urban black music these days that seems either positive or worth listening to. The Delfonics and others from their era (The Spinners, The Chi-Lites, Harold Melvin and The Bluenotes, all of “The Sound Of Philadelphia” groups are just a few that come to mind).

The only point worth making is that times have changed.