I found out at way too early of an age that growing up was hard.

Sure, like most kids in my neighborhood there were fun times for me riding my bike with my buddies to nowhere in particular, playing baseball games, and fishing down at the pond.

As I grew into my teenage years inside a house depressed with dysfunction, I needed an escape from the gloom and doom.

On my 14th birthday, I bought an RCA stereo record player with money saved from my newspaper route. It was plastic on the outside. Two external speakers disconnected from either side of the record player and I could move each of them about 2 feet away from the player itself to get stereo sound.

Inside my small bedroom became my personal concert hall. In my early teens, I’d cue up songs from Neil Diamond, the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, the Turtles, the Grass Roots, the Bee Gees, the Young Rascals, the Carpenters, the Temptations and Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll. I’d lie on my bed, clasp my hands behind my head, close my eyes and get lost in the songs.

Perhaps Bob Marley said it best. “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

Sometimes, I’d sing along with the songs. Sometimes, I didn’t get the words just right. When the Bee Gees sang the song “More than a Woman, I was singing, “Bald-headed Woman.” Whenever I hear the song now, I still sing “Bald-headed Woman” because I like the funny words.

We had a large Philco radio in our house, and every Tuesday at 3 o’clock I turned the needle to WABC AM to hear Big Dan Ingram play the Top 10 songs of the week. My older sisters watched “American Bandstand” aired from Philadelphia on a black-and-white TV. Dick Clark had a segment called “Rate a Record” where he played a newly released recording and asked members of his audience to give it a score. Most of the ones that got low ratings were because “You can’t dance to that.”

As I advanced into my later teens, I graduated from pop to rock. My favorites were Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf, Santana, Deep Purple, Sly and the Family Stone, Three Dog Night, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad.

“Turn that down!” Mom would yell from the kitchen. Of course, hard rock had to be played loud and long, before the days of headphones and earbuds, I cranked up the volume so much the stereo speakers would vibrate and dance to the music to the edge of my bureau and fall to the floor.

Inside my Plymouth Duster, I had an eight-track player and I listened to the same groups with the volume turned so loud I’m surprised that the windows didn’t shatter into pieces.

My first rock concert was in the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, to see Iron Butterfly. The front group was Chicago Transit Authority, later to become the iconic Hall of Fame band Chicago. Their hit at the time was, “I’m a Man.” During their session, the restless crowd kept yelling “We want Butterfly!”

When Iron Butterfly, a band that would literally be known for the longest song of 17 minutes that took an entire side of an album, finally came on the stage, they played a few songs that were not popular. Then at the stroke of midnight, the band played its iconic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” for 45 straight minutes and they brought the house down. I later discovered that the strange title was supposed to be “In the Garden of Eden,” but the lead singer was drunk when he recorded it and they decided to keep the blubbering words that nobody could understand.

I didn’t get to Woodstock, but I did go to the Summer Festival for Peace held in Shea Stadium, New York in August of 1970. I paid 12 bucks for a ticket and I saw over 20 performances including the surprise arrival of Janis Joplin, two weeks before she would die of a drug overdose. In an impromptu duet with Dionne Warwick, the two sang “What the World Needs Now” and delighted the crowd.

Music is the universal language. I have heard orchestras filled with musicians from different parts of the world who had great difficulty talking with one another, but once they began to play their brass and string instruments, the sounds came forth in perfect harmony.

Music is the great escape from reality. I grew up in the ’60s when drugs became a major activity of the counterculture movement, but not for me. My drug then as it still is now is tripping on pop and rock, and I’ve become more eclectic by enjoying country, classical and jazz.

As far back as ancient Greece, Plato wrote, “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Of course, we like to listen to music that fits the reality we are in. Songs about relationship breakups are many. The poet Maya Angelou wrote: “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”

Certain songs take us back to a particular point in time and place. When I hear, “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James & the Shondells, I’m back at Poppy’s Pizza on my very first date. Somebody dropped a quarter in the jukebox. I heard the song for the first time. I loved it so much I played it three more times in a row until Frank, better known as Poppy, came into the dining room and looked right at me.

“OK,” he said. “We get it. You like the song. But if you play it one more time, my kitchen help is going to leave or I’ll have to pull the chord out of the jukebox.”

And so, with that memory from long ago, I’m now going to cue Spotify on my cellphone. What will I play?

“Crimson and clover over and over,” of course!

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com