Car Tunes and Late Nite DJ's

What if you created your own personal deck of Tarot cards? I don’t mean simply designing your own version of the traditional Tarot symbols – magician, moon, lovers, etc. I mean what if you created a whole new deck using symbols and images that pertain specifically to you and your own life? What images would you put on those cards?

(And before we go any further let’s just acknowledge that reading what follows doesn’t require anything resembling ‘belief’ in divination via Tarot cards. Though if you’re into that kind of thing, that’s cool, too. This is all about symbolism and only symbolism. Make what you will of each symbol. We can have fun with that kind of thing, right? My own interest in Tarot cards no doubt originated via my collecting habits, which I’ve had as long as I can remember. Baseball cards and Star Wars cards were early and formative manifestations of that habit, and in that sense Nolan Ryan and Han Solo are at least as interesting to me as The Magician or The Fool.)

Think about your life and consider the moments that define it for you, those occasions that figure most prominently in your own idea of yourself, the modes or motions that form the building blocks of your sense of self – the person you have been and the person that you currently are.

Snapshots emerge; you’re sitting behind a desk in school, or you’re in the kitchen learning how to make linguini. Either of those might go on a card, and they’d symbolize education, teaching, exploring new ideas.

Or let’s say maybe you took an archery class in college and in doing so you somehow discovered a heretofore unknown secret self, one that’s charged up by the whole process of archery and everything associated with it. So you spent hours outside practicing the craft. And now, all these years later, even after you’ve long since given it up because other interests or obligations took precedence, you still remember with fondness all that time spent out in the open air pulling the arrow back in the quiver, aiming, letting go, watching it hit or miss, feeling the thrill or letdown. Maybe that memory calls up some part of you that feels like a fundamental aspect of the person you still are. So you come to cherish the reminder.That could go on a card: THE ARCHER. It denotes precision, goals, the act of taking aim. 

Maybe in retrospect the endeavor feels like it was “just a phase” but in any event the memory provides some kind of emotional or motivational sustenance. Or growth. That’s the kind of thing we’re after. 

Could be it’s something fraught with difficulty, like maybe your relationship with a parent or sibling was strained, so one of the images your subconscious dredges up is of the two of you in a room, arguing. This card is called THE CONFLICT, it depicts each person wearing an exasperated expression, and when you consult your own personal book of Tarot meanings you find that it symbolizes friction, disagreement, the navigation of complex interrelated emotions.

It could be something a little more light-hearted or frivolous; a patch of grass in the yard you claimed as your own personal dreamspace. (THE QUIET PLACE. It means escape, solitude, communing with nature. Not to be confused with A Quiet Place, which is none of the above.) 

Could be it’s the act of standing in front of a candy rack scanning the selection on offer, deciding between chocolate and gummy bears. (SWEET CHOICE, it means a surfeit of sensation, intoxication, dental bills.) Could be it’s something even more mundane, a small moment (those can be just as important as the big ones, and often enough they’re way more important) like you and a group of friends simply sitting around the table talking, or some still frame image representing all those hours you spent in your room alone reading comics and listening to records. (I regret nothing.) 

These moments are like touchstones, in a way, paradigms that we carry around as signposts of our consciousness, charting our histories, mapping our emotional terrain, informing our idea of who we are. Each image contains whole sets of interrelated feelings, in the same way that each Tarot image contains within it layers of interrelated meanings, foreshadowings, puzzles to be solved, hidden subtexts waiting for us to apply our own knowledge and intuition in an effort to intuition in an effort to untangle the web of our (sub)consciousness and identify more clearly our own complicated place in the world.

Our sense of self can feel like a slippery, illusory thing. It can help us to have a fixed idea of where we’ve been, what our values are, where we feel most at home or most disoriented, what we most desire to be. Where exactly our fears are lying in wait to devour us, and what those fears look like.

Just as a for-instance, my fears look like Linda Blair in demonic make-up and they are projectile-vomiting in my general direction. I really do not wanna put that on a Tarot card, though. Let’s think of some other option.

I can think of a few. A whole lot of ‘em, actually. It’s pretty easy once you start considering it to come up with moments that linger in the psyche like dream polaroids, reminders of key instances, ongoing occasions of growth or joy, obstacles overcome or fears to be faced. The kind of image —or series of images—that crystalize in our mind’s eye some version of the favorite self we’d like to be.

When I started considering this idea, scanning my memories for suitable snapshot moments, I was surprised and amused to find that I kept drifting into territory laid out in George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti. Seeing that movie rearranged my brain as a young person. Or rather it helped organize my brain, and helped shape some of my ideas about the world. Maybe not this particular world, but one that could be eerily similar. Some kind of world, in any case; the kind I imagined I wanted to inhabit. 

The characters in American Graffiti are all confronting big changes. They’re teenagers, recent high school graduates, thinking about adulthood and how they’re gonna handle it. Each is contemplating decisions that it’s understood will have drastic effects on their future; whether to head off to college, whether to sever romantic ties, whether to give up drag racing altogether. Those questions lurk as subtext even in the scenes during which they are not being directly addressed. Mostly, these scenes involve people riding around in cars listening to the radio.

It’s easy to imagine that when these characters eventually look back on this time in their lives (if they were, you know, real people) they might be less likely to care particularly about the specifics of whatever Big Decisions they were making at the time, and more likely to remember some larger feeling, one colored by the context, the backdrop against which all of the pertinent factors were weighed. Probably, this would boil down to some blurry vision of cars cruising small town streets, the spontaneity and joy of driving around at night, the allure of the lights and sounds, the quiet excitement of making connections, missing connections, feeling a sense of shared drama in their collective lives and in all the songs flowing nonstop out of the radio. This is the stuff that George Lucas most memorably captured in the film.

The stuff of memory. We all know how tricky it can be. Artists have utilized that trickiness since time and art began, but the craft has especially flourished in these last few decades. The creation of a mood or an atmosphere that recalls a supposedly bygone era can hit an audience in a couple different ways: it can either ring particularly poignant emotional bells in those who lived through that era, or it can create a particularly compelling fantasyland idea of that era for those who were not around to experience it. American Graffiti was a giant hit because it did both so effectively.

Notoriety bred imitation, and American Graffiti in the mid 70’s became a front-and-center example of a new wave of nostalgia for 1950’s/early ’60’s culture that spread like wildfire throughout the entertainment media landscape. Suddenly doo-wop music and leather jackets became ubiquitous.

Some people just got sick of the whole thing, the same way we often become annoyed with whatever is popular. Some people decried the whole idea of using nostalgia for effect as a facile and opportunistic move, to the extent that nostalgia itself, in some circles, became a semi-dirty word.

That might be fair enough, anyone watching American Graffiti is likely to have some memory that jibes with what goes on in the film, especially if they grew up in a smaller town in the latter part of the twentieth century. If that’s the case the film is likely to provoke a kind of warm fuzzy glow, maybe a yearning for lost youth or some specific memory from it. Those kind of memories can be idealized versions of a time you only vaguely remember or merely wish you could remember. Subjective, potentially misleading stuff, it’s understood. We remember what we want, in the way that we want, regardless of facts or perspective. So it goes.

But whether a viewer experiences the movie as something to be enjoyed or endured is purely subjective, too. One person’s criticism is another person’s resonance. Per Wikipedia, Pauline Kael said the film in fact had “no resonance except from the jukebox sound and the eerie, nocturnal jukebox look.” She meant that as a criticism but as soon as I read those words my own Inner Eyes started spinning madly; wait, did you say eerie nocturnal jukebox look? I WANT TO SEE THAT MOVIE.

I did see it, at the formative age of eight, too young to have read Kael’s criticism but old enough to have read the Mad magazine parody of the film – my memory of that 1979 edited network television premier is mainly of marveling at the way artist Mort Drucker had so uncannily captured the actors’ likenesses. And in an early example of the trainspottery OCD tendencies that would often go on to plague or enrich my life, I also remember matching the action and dialogue onscreen with my sister’s paperback movie-tie in, which re-printed the script in full. Anytime the actors said something that didn’t quite match up with the book I took careful note, as if the discrepancies were going to add up to some kind of insight that might prove valuable. Nothing’s come of that endeavor so far, but I’ll keep you posted.

Mostly I noticed the way the music so deftly intertwined with the plot and the imagery to create a  very particular mood, a kind of teenage nightdream, crackling with possibility. George Lucas designed the film as a nontraditional musical, one in which the music, drawn from the late fifties and early sixties, is practically a character in itself. The songs he chose constitute a free-flowing, fairly unerring collection of early rock, doo-wop, radio pop, soul and surf music. (That latter genre provides an amusing example of the way so many of us lament the inevitable turning of the popular music tide away from the music of our supposedly glorious youth, when in one scene the greaser character angrily dismisses the Beach Boys, declaring “I hate that surf shit!” It’s so easy to transpose that phrase across subsequent generations: “I hate that punk shit!” “I hate that electronic shit!” “I hate that country-pop shit!” It’s also easy to imagine how easily any person who says something like that might eventually look back fondly on their lost youth and realize how much they actually love that surf shit.)

My older sister had the soundtrack album, which I had already absorbed prior to seeing the film. I think I must’ve been drawn to the deep orange color of the cover, with its neon-tinted illustration of a roller-skating drive-in waitress. (I wanted so badly to go eat at a place where the waitresses wore roller-skates, and was very disappointed to find out it was a trend that had long since died out. How, I wondered, could something so obviously cool die out?) From there it was easy to get hooked by all the hooks — the falsettos, the swinging rhythms, piano fills, sax breaks, and especially all the “ain’t that a shame” and “go, Johnny go!” and “Why do birds sing so gay?”

The 2LP set (or 2CD set, and if you go looking please find one or the other in the used bins, because rights issues prevent the album from being presented on streaming services in all its dream-filled fullness) is a kind of concept album; in its own way it documents the same teenage rites of passage that go on in the movie. There’s lots of strolling and twisting, lots of little darlins and party dolls. There’s teen angels and heartbroken fools trying to break the code embedded in the Book of Love. Several songs are hidden matched pairs; within one side we encounter both The Great Imposter and The Great Pretender, one song has a singer contemplating the journey lovers take from first encounter to the aisle and a few songs later another guy (the same one?) is crying in the chapel. There’s also two songs celebrating a girl’s sixteenth birthday, one of which (“You’re Sixteen”) now sounds much creepier than the other (“Sixteen Candles”), though I guess that’s if you assume the guy singing it is as old as he sounds. (Ringo Starr had a very inappropriate number one hit with a cover of the former, it’s widest exposure happening near-simultaneously with American Graffiti’s cinema and chart run.)

As a kid I became obsessed with those four sides of music, and decades later I still think it’s one of the greatest albums ever made. Bedrock songs by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly sit alongside great novelty numbers by the Coasters and The Big Bopper, then there’s great dance songs (how does one do the Peppermint Twist? It goes round and round, and up and down, of course, plus one-two-three-KICK one-two-three JUMP) and heartrending ballads sung by artists with dreamy, evocative names like The Crests and The Skyliners and The Diamonds. There’s even a reverse ringer – one of my favorite tracks back in 1978-9 was an early-sixties pastiche by a contemporary-to-1973 band called Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. They appear in the movie, too, as the band at the school dance. I thought their song “She’s So Fine” was just as old as all the rest of the songs in the movie, and I didn’t realize I’d been faked out til many years later.

(And isn’t it a little crazy how these impressions involve so many eras of time? Flat circle or not, time is for sure a weirdly elastic thing.)

The album as a whole is a coolly kinetic listen; fast and funny, rife with feeling. I listened over and over, and every time the guy the guy ended up breaking his bottle of love potion number nine I found it both hilarious and heartbreaking. I mean, all that guy wants is to find a little love in this cold hard world. Who can’t relate?

My favorite song back then (maybe now, too) was Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” A number one chart hit in 1961, “Runaway” is a sweeping mini-drama of a song, nocturnal and full of longing, more than a little forlorn. For all that, it’s also fairly lively. Del Shannon’s distinctively grainy voice keens and jumps and quivers so that by the time he begins to wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder why his baby ran away the listener feels his angst right in the gut.

The winding melody and way Shannon sings it is the upfront attraction, but the key feature is the minor-key mood, the bleary atmosphere created via the county-fair calliope sound of the piano and the jarringly high-pitched solo, played by keyboardist Max Crook on something that Wikipedia tells me is called a Musitron. It all adds up to a different kind of vivid, and decades later it still hits with rare raw nerve. Heartbreak doesn’t go out of style.

The song is a deceptively simple thing; it lasts barely more than two minutes, but the shadows and sadness within it seem to stretch and make it longer. It feels sort of small and rickety, but in the mind’s eye it expands into a whole emotional landscape. There’s a cinematic flow to it, a sense of characters and movement and place. Maybe a barren place, but one that’s easy enough to dream on. Romantic fools like you and I are of course gonna be suckers for it, as we inevitably are for any drama that takes place in the rain with one character walking and crying, tears and rainfall indistinguishable. I’ve come to associate that part of the song with Jeanne Moreau walking aimlessly in the rain, wondering what’s become of her hapless thief lover in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, released three years prior to “Runaway” but nonetheless a spiritual bedfellow.

The rain becomes a reflecting pool, and I’ve always sort of wanted to ask the characters in American Graffiti how they felt about it at the time, in those moments depicted in the movie, whether they felt like it reflected back at them anything they were going through. (Um, again, you know, if they were real people. They are fictional. Right?)

Who knows, but if you asked the characters years later, decades later, how they felt about it, then surely the song would conjure a difficult-to-define sense of longing. That underlying emotion is what a listener keys in on, even if they don’t realize it’s happening. That process can happen most easily if you’re moving. As part of a blur in traffic. You’re caught up in the movement and the feeling until you’re feeling it so strongly you have a sense of being both present in the moment and disappearing altogether. As if you’re a character in a movie. (Are we? Nah, we’re real people.)

“Runaway” plays early on in American Graffiti, as the characters are settling into small-town cruising mode, depicted as a series of flashing headlights and spinning tires and kids leaning out of the windows of moving cars, shouting at each other. Cruising as a rite of passage continued for several decades (has it ended? Seems like maybe it has.) but it was in its infancy when the movie takes place, in 1962.

For context, a movie that takes place in 1962 that gets released in 1973 is equivalent to a movie being released today (as I’m writing this, anyway) that takes place in roughly 2014. That movie, if it emulated the radio hit format of American Graffiti, would have a soundtrack containing Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams and OneRepublic. Laugh if you want, but if that movie was made and released today it would likely ring very loud bells in the psyches and souls of a pretty significant number of people, maybe even you or me. We all have our meaningful phases and stages.

The American Graffiti soundtrack album provided an example to me at a young age of the idea that a set of songs can be more than a backdrop or a nice diversion. A set of songs can be a marker of a specific period of a person’s life. A scrapbook, sure, but better yet it could be a territory. A terrain of consciousness that we share with others, friends or family, or keep within ourselves like a secret map, an electric outline of one specific season in our lives.

I’ve carried that idea around with me pretty much my whole life, and one of the first times I remember being conscious of it came with my own cruising-around-with-friends experiences, which took place in 1986-7, when I was 15-16. Unlike the kids in American Grafitti, who only had the radio and were therefore forced to hew pretty close to the music of their own era in their listening habits, my friends and I had a few decades worth of music at our disposal. And we had that genius invention of the eighties; the mix tape. We listened to cheap cassettes that we made in our own homes, usually from vinyl. Lots of Talking Heads and The Who and Ramones and R.E.M. and Patti Smith and Beatles and Violent Femmes. It can be fun to think about what a double album soundtrack from this period might include, and I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time compiling that kind of thing in my imagination (and, truthfully, in reality —hello, era of the mix CD.)

A set of songs can sum up the emotional tone of one of life’s seasons. For me and my little friends it would’ve been So. Central Rain and Psycho Killer and Blister in the Sun and Squeeze’s Up the Junction. Look, we’ve got our own soundtrack album!

Those days of driving around aimlessly listening to music, the act of doing so, now feels illustrative of some greater guiding spirit at work in my little world. That memory qualifies as a Tarot card representation of one facet of my own particular peculiar soul: a moving car, me and a friend in front, music streaming from the speakers and moving us along as surely as the wheels or the gas, invading the spirit in indelible ways so that the sense of youth at work and play miwith the sounds and the sense of discovery and weird soul to form some kind of locked-in-place yet still-elastic paradigm. It’s that feeling of only having been there once, yet still somehow always being there.

Is any of this making any sense? Here, try this:

You’re in a car, passenger side, someone else is driving and you’re caught up in some song coming out of the speakers. It carries you, nudges like a wave, whispers encouragement. You think for a minute that maybe this is enough to go on, that this is what life’s all about. If you’re thinking at all, that is, and it could be that you’re not – you’re just drifting in it, blending with the mood, living in the moment the way we’re always told we’re supposed to. And then the same thing keeps happening, year after year.

This is what the characters in American Graffiti are up to, and as surely as “Runaway” must’ve continued to carry resonance for those characters in their imaginary world, it’s also the feeling that any number of R.E.M. or Violent Femmes songs (played on a beat-up Memorex tape) will always conjure in my own allegedly real one; a sense of adventure and comradeship, with an underlying subtext of unanswered questions, a future and an outside world that we're not too keen on getting back to anytime soon. Because we want to hear whatever song comes next. 

Sometimes now when I’m out and about in traffic I’ll look around at passing cars and see people who must be experiencing some version of the same stuff. Worrying about whatever crisis large or small is going on in their lives, using whatever song they’re listening to as a way to navigate their feelings. 

Sometimes I’ll even spot us – me and my high school pals – still out there driving around aimlessly. You know, out looking for KICKS. It’s 1986, and we’re not wearing seatbelts. Guys, please be careful. 

Maybe we’re on our way to work. Work can be a thorny subject when you’re a teenager; it’s so dangerously close to adulthood, and it takes away so much time that could otherwise be spent hanging out with your friends doing basically nothing. The Silhouettes’ doo-wop lament “Get a Job” taunts the kids in American Graffitti just as annoyingly as it would me and my friends, in some spiritual way, years later. We got our recorded version of that sentiment via The Smiths: “I was looking for a job and then I found a job / and Heaven knows I’m miserable now.” 

Through some stroke of luck, skill, or nepotism (my grandmother knew the owner) a couple of friends and I managed to realize a modest dream when we got hired as on-air disc jockeys at one of the (only two, though I guess we were lucky to have that many) commercial radio stations in our little town. That particular ambition had been inspired at least in part by American Graffiti. The kids in the movie are united not only by the music itself but by the DJ who brings it to them, portrayed in the film by the legendary real-life on-air personality Wolfman Jack. His asides, exhortations, and silly jokes, delivered in the burry growl that gave him his name, are used as a linking device between songs and scenes. The kids regard him as a mystery figure, speculating about his real identity, his location, how and why he does what he does. Kids of all different social groups rally around him in an almost religious way. On air via telephone between songs one young girl gushes “Oh boy, I love you, Wolfman!” 

The sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, a moderate TV hit around the same time as the first network airing of American Graffiti, had already instilled in me a romanticized view of the DJ life. I particularly liked the “cool” on-air personalities on that show; Howard Hesseman’s burnout rocker Dr. Johnny Fever, perpetually dressed in jeans and faded t-shirt, sunken eyes always hidden behind dark glasses, and Tim Reid’s Venus Flytrap, who conducts his evening-hour smooth R&B show with the lights down low and candles lit, windchimes at the ready for ambient sound effects. But the allure of being a disc jockey really crystallized for me via one scene late in American Graffiti, when Curt (played by Richard Dreyfuss), confused about his future and desperately pining for a mystery girl he’d glimpsed earlier in the film, seeks out the Wolfman at his outskirts-of-town station base.

There in the desolate station he finds a lone DJ sitting in a tiny ill-lit room, surrounded by tape cartridges and records. The scene resembles the cover of Donald Fagan’s 1982 album The Nightfly, which features a similarly nocturnal scene of a DJ sitting at a microphone in a room full of shadow and smoke. Somehow that struck me as a very desirable place to be. Not only might being there provide a good way to escape the rigors and confusions of our big bad world, but it might actually be something more: I imagined being in that little booth as a kind of parallel world, an existence just slightly outside or beyond this one, a small universe all its own. 

The DJ character in the film tells Curt he is not actually the Wolfman, he’s only filling in. But later, as Curt is leaving, he spots the DJ speaking on air in the same raspy voice that clearly belongs to the same person that the characters in the film have been looking to as a kind of spiritual guide. That he doesn’t want Curt to know his true identity is paradoxically a humanizing trait, crucial for a character who basically spends his time sitting alone in the dark perpetuating his own mystery cult. He tells Curt “The Wolfman is everywhere,” then he offers him a popsicle. (The freezer’s broken, all the popsicles are melting.) Then he plays the next song.

Technically it doesn’t feature at this spot in the movie, but one song that might have fit well within these scenes of nocturnal mystery is “I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos. It’s a lovely, haunting tune, swaying, gentle, sung by a person who can’t see the moon and the stars because he’s so blinded by love, his devotion so great it renders him senseless. I believe to the core of my potentially misshapen soul that this song, in addition to being a perfect choice for this moment in the film, and the perfect song to play in a dark radio station near the midnight hour, is also among the very tiny few thousand finest works of aural art mankind has yet produced. If that sounds like hyperbole, maybe it is, but I am hardly alone in this conviction.

“I Only Have Eyes For You” is a moonlight ballad, charged up with a sense of stillness, drunk on sky and nighttime and unfathomable ardor. There’s a languid, hypnotic quality to the sound, along with a little bit of a warm smile; the slow-strummed chords of the guitar underline the vocals as if to say “Hey, man, keep going, ride this feeling as long as you possibly can.” For the listener, it might last for some kind of forever.

Background voices chant “shoo-bop, shoo-bop” and the sound echoes across the track like some ethereal chemtrail, adding a little levity to the dreamy mood. The dreamlike quality is apt; guitarist Terry Johnson claimed the arrangement, background vocals and all, came to him when he fell asleep with his guitar on his chest while trying to figure out how to record the song. When he woke up “It was like God put my fingers just where they were supposed to be.”*

Divine intervention or not, life sometimes (maybe not often enough) has a way of putting us exactly in that place we’re supposed to be. At my radio job we carried a syndicated oldies show that ran deep into the night every weekend. Often I’d be working that shift and sometimes “I Only Have Eyes For You” or “Runaway” would pop up and I’d get that sense of having been in this place before and of knowing I’d be there again. That might sound like a mystical idea, it felt like one for sure, but it’s also just realistic - I worked that shift every Saturday.

Sometimes at the station during those late night shifts, especially if one of those moody old songs came up, I’d get up and wander through the hallways, watching shadows, counting cobwebs. I’d think about how ten years earlier I had wanted to find myself in a space just like this one. I’d wonder if I might be visited by some sort of character like Curt. I didn’t have any advice or popsicles to offer. Now that I’m thinking about it I guess I’m glad that never happened, it would have freaked me out.

In any event, working those shifts felt like a realization of something, less a dream that I’d aspired to than a dreamstate I’d wanted to conjure into reality. Alone in a booth, music playing. Lost in a series of small dreams but also hearing the whirring type of the news coming over the teleprinter. Isolated and connected. That connection was a key part of the equation – the feeling of being away from the world but also an active part of it. At least inasmuch as it was my responsibility to make sure the sounds kept going out to the public without interruption and that the news and the station ID’s ran at the required times.

Then there was all of that music and the sense of flow and reversed time it inspired. So many of the songs that we thought of as oldies then were less than two decades old at the time they were being aired on those syndicated shows. This is, again, at the time of this writing, the equivalent of considering something like Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” a golden oldie. Jarring dissonances in the perception of time are just a given in life. No point in obsessing, I guess, but Holy Crap, “Crazy” is still a new song, isn’t it?

Dissonances in art and/or time can be jarring and/or stirring, and I think part of the reason “I Only Have Eyes For You” works so well and endures so strongly is not only the beguiling mood it evokes but also because, whether it’s actually there in the song or not, the listener can’t help but come away with a tiny chill. The song carries in it a forever feeling, outside of time. Simultaneously, as the song is playing the listener also understands, implicitly, that the act of listening is only an ephemeral state. There’s a cool and unnerving friction at work there. To quote 1974 Cat Stevens (and why not, timeslips are already abounding here) we want it to last forever but we know it never will. Is that really true, though?

We’re told that nothing lasts, and we’re supposed to believe it, to always keep it in mind, right?

That’s why symbolism like that contained in the Tarot can be so powerful, because it hints otherwise. That’s why those weird little moments in time and the images that represent those times – or the feelings inspired by them – tend to resonate so strongly. They feel like forever. The sun, the moon, the lovers, the tower. The archer, the DJ, the kid in the candy store.

They’re fleeting things, in a way, for sure – the tower’s already collapsing and the sun’s gonna go full-on red giant eventually. Then there’s all those big ideas; Strength and Temperance and, ultimately, boo, Death. Judgement. You know, the everyday things. Those uncomfortable ideas that we just have to live with somehow, so we make symbols out of them.

It’s that part, the living with it, that we sometimes end up taking for granted. All the small ways we deal with the big things. Aren’t those moments worthy of being made into symbols, too? They help, right? The driving around, the car radio songs, the sense of movement, of going somewhere (or nowhere) on one hand. And the sense of staying put on the other, the radio DJ’s sense of isolation and connection, of being heard and not seen. 

Both of those symbols represent a need to get away from the world at large and both also represent a hidden, haunted need to connect, to share in the moment. Those are evergreen human traits. The same kind of traits we transform into songs, and then we put those songs into collections that constitute one multi-faceted single emotion. No wonder we make mix tapes and playlists. Also no wonder we gathered all those paradigmatic images and put them in a deck of cards. And also no wonder that deck’s allure has lasted centuries; it’s a mirror. Maybe it’s cracked and dull, maybe it’s shiny and clear but we obviously find comfort in the reflections. 

Those paradigms represent less a moment in time or reversed time than forever time. Human nature, as long as it lasts. (It’s been going on for a while, right?) The friendships and the cars and the records and the moonlight and all those other things that come and go and linger. Riding and listening, hanging out, being alone.

In a place like that the bearings go a little loose. Time begins there and it also stops there. And then it keeps on going.

*https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-flamingos-only-have-eyes-you

Woodland Songs and Years Bewitched

I grew up surrounded by trees. We – me, my family, neighbors – referred to the lengthy stretches of trees around my childhood home as “the woods” even though the area probably didn’t stretch quite far enough to truly justify the term. That didn’t stop my childmind from imagining the whole place as a near-infinite expanse of mystery and adventure. Basically, I thought I lived in a damn enchanted forest.

Which doesn’t mean I grew up to be some kind of rugged outdoor adventurer. Far from it. I was a burgeoning space cadet, head already more-or-less irretrievably up in the clouds. My first priority was to whatever weird dreamscape my brain felt like concocting in the moment. Often as not that involved drawing paper, or some kind of media. The stuff of messy, air-conditioned living rooms. Being outside was just an extension of the same kind of Imaginationland that went on indoors, only with fresher air, and dirt, and bugs. I liked having the autonomy to choose my outdoor time carefully, which meant taking it in small, digestible increments. (My time in Boy Scouts didn’t last long; it required too much outside time, which meant too many mosquitos, too much sun, too much mud. And I had way too many movies to watch and comics to read. Sorry, Scoutmaster Greer, wherever you are now.)

That said, I did still spend a good deal of time out there exploring the woods, and I especially loved to do so in the fall when the air was brisk and leaves were everywhere. Those leaves became as much a comfort as summer reruns or radio songs. I created trails, found favorite spots to hang out. Sometimes I’d find a securely attached vine and mimic Indiana Jones swinging across an open pit. Sometimes I’d climb on top of a log and pretend to be a rock star playing a show, the sea of leaves in front of me serving as an audience. 

It was kind of perfect; since the woods were right there next to my house I could go out and mess around for an hour or so and still be back in time to watch The Dukes of Hazzard.

Years of quality time among trees turned out to be good preparation, because in summer 1984 (I was thirteen) my father moved into an old house way outside the city limits. It was a creaky, dust-covered place, and it was surrounded by acres of woods. In front of the house just a few yards down a tree-covered hill ran a pretty large and lengthy creek. It circled around the perimeter of the property, a length of a few miles, and if you followed the water’s path at certain points the width stretched to the extent that it may as well have been a river. The water could be heard rushing by at all hours, an effect that especially at night could be calming or eerie, depending on your mood. 

That place was an ideal setting for what we might now call a folk horror film. To get there you had to turn down a near-hidden gravel road, which before too long turned into a dirt road. Clusters of tree branches hung down in all directions, throwing shadows everywhere. Moss-covered rocks sat among alternating patches of weeds and mud. There was some heavy rural ambiance going on. If somebody was looking for a place to start a cult or summon some dark entity they couldn’t have done much better.

True to form, for a good portion of my time there I tended to stay inside, which in itself could be a risk to the nerves, because I’m pretty sure that place was haunted. The wood flooring created a natural creakiness that took some getting used to, given my otherwise carpet-covered suburban existence. Other strange sounds could be heard more-or-less daily. My dad told me that once, just after he had moved in, before the electricity had even been turned on, he had been sitting in the living room when he heard a strange, soft jingling sound, something like wind chimes or keys shaking in someone’s pocket. The sound was accompanied by cold air, and it moved just in front of him across the main room and into the next before slowly making its way up the stairs to the attic. 

I experienced my own sensory phenomena there; more than once at night I heard footsteps pacing up and down the hall outside the bedroom when I knew no one else was around. Another time I left a box of magazines in one corner of the attic and went up the next morning to find the box had been moved and tipped over, the magazines spilling out. In that same attic a piece of wood paneling mysteriously dislodged from the wall and somehow ended up lying several feet across the room. It was pretty freaky. I looked for ectoplasm everywhere, to no avail. (It was the summer of Ghostbusters.)

I did, however, find Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, squirreled away amid my father’s sprawling stacks of records. The cover of that album, with its mysterious photo of an elderly bearded man carrying a load of sticks on his back, seemed right at home in that old house. It suggested old ways and antiquity. I kept looking for a title and it was only later that I learned that people called it “Four,” since it was the band’s fourth LP, and also because in place of a traditional title the inner sleeve and label featured four arcane-looking symbols, runes that the band themselves designed. That ploy added to the mystery, and enhanced my eerie feelings about both the album and the place I was listening to it in.

So it was in this setting that I was officially introduced to the classic rock radio hits that I had certainly heard before but up until that point did not realize were performed by Led Zeppelin; “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll” and the Unkillable Classic Rock Beast that is “Stairway to Heaven,” which I played endlessly on repeat and then played some more until my soul’s shadow was tall enough to say “Hey, why don’t we play side two?”

Just before “Stairway” on side one, track three in the sequence, is the song that has proven, in my little world, at least, to be more deep and durable than all the others, classics as they are. “Battle of Evermore” fits perfectly as a change-of-pace after track two, the full-throttle, thundering Little Richard tribute “Rock and Roll.” “Battle” emerges from that tumult, fading in slowly, lightly, mandolins plus acoustics plus voices providing a gentle warmer for “Stairway”’s white light ascension. It unfolds over six eventful minutes, moving like fog falling over a forest. Male and female voices sing in duet, trading off the lead, then harmonizing, weaving together a story based loosely (or firmly, depending on your point-of-view) on a Tolkien tale of war and mist and blood. lf the music is an ethereal respite from the harder rocking sounds of much of the rest of the album, the tone is firmly in keeping with the centuries-old mysteries implied by the album’s cover and title runes. It’s like something that might be sung around a small campfire, or around a witch’s cauldron. 

When we’re younger, I don’t think we consider how much the atmosphere and mood of a place can inform the way we hear music. I can remember sitting in the living room of that old house, looking out the window at the dusk settling outside, listening to the slow fade-in of the mandolins on “Battle of Evermore,” a faraway sound that might have resonated in my mind with the eerie story my father had told me about the strange chiming sound he had heard. I’m sure that the running water of the creek outside and the corresponding sense of isolation informed the way I heard the song in some indelible way that I may not have recognized at the time but is still there whenever I hear it now. 

This despite the fairy-fantasyland content of Plant’s lyrics, which I’ve always been able to hear as charming even when so many of my friends through the years have been put off by them. They’ve been subject to no little derision from music critics, as well. 

We get too hung up on lyrics sometimes, I think. The lyrics here include lords and queens and princes, dances in the dark night, and even a direct reference to Tolkien when near the end Ringwraiths appear. As we get older our reality-principled left brains tend to roll their figurative eyes when confronted with the stuff of magic on dark mountainsides, and it might have all seemed a little silly even to my thirteen-year-old sci-fi/fantasy sensibilities. I loved that stuff, so I guess on one hand I must’ve relied on that side of myself to accept the song’s lyrics. On the other hand it’s possible I misinterpreted or even misheard them – I’ve never really noticed that there’s a dragon in the song until I read the lyrics just now, while writing this. In that sense, maybe this song helped me develop a habit I’ve often used over the years of simply ignoring the lyrical content when the flow of the words or the mood the music invokes – the overall sound – is powerful enough to allow it. 

In that setting, in that creaky old house in the woods, the song felt very vivid. And I’ve come to believe in my perhaps all-too-credulous soul that “Battle of Evermore” is so much more than the sum of its lyrical subject matter and/or nicely-played mystic folk arrangement. I think it’s a kind of conjuring, a haunting. It’s the sound of a multitude of voices – ghosts, really – coming back, as they do again and again, century after bleak century, to experience some kind of absolution or deliverance. Calling out like they’re owed something. There’s a sense that we, the listeners, are implicated in the process, as if we’re supposed to help somehow. “Repay, do not forget,” says the singer, implying a kind of cycle, that all of those voices might be our own.

On the recording those voices belong to Robert Plant, toning his lustful Golden Rock God persona down for the occasion, seamlessly entwining his voice with that of the eternal Sandy Denny. I can say with some degree of wonder and thankfulness that hearing Sandy Denny’s voice at age thirteen had an impact that has resounded clearly and deeply through the decades of my life since then. Her voice sounded, and sounds, of another time and place. Golden, at once earthy and unearthly. 

I could’ve sworn I’d heard that voice before, which it’s extremely possible I had, after all my father owned this record, and he very well may have played it while I was around at any point in the previous thirteen years. I mean to say, though, that her voice sounded familiar in that sense of when in real life you meet someone that you feel you’ve known before, someone with whom you experience some innate and unnerving sense of connection. Often enough that person does eventually become a best friend or life partner. 

Not that I fully understood any of this while I was listening back in 1984, and definitely not that I  would have been too keen on sharing it with my peers, even if I did. Part of adolescence is forming a sense of self, and this includes the things that you choose to like and the things you choose not to like. That process can lead to some difficult choices, a wrong one can lead to a damaged social standing and/or a confused self-image, already a pretty natural state when you’re a teenager. Those concerns fade as we get older. (Don’t they?) Which is why I’m embarrassed about it now, but I gotta confess that when a friend at the time dismissed “Battle of Evermore” as the only song on Zeppelin’s fourth album that he didn’t like, complaining that all the folky airy-fairyness ruined an otherwise perfect sequence of hard rock music, I lied and said I agreed with him. 

I wonder how that friend would’ve felt about the band I latched onto next; Jethro Tull. Maybe he loved the hard-rocking FM radio hit “Aqualung” and the piledriving “Locomotive Breath”. Those are heavy enough to appeal to the average early-teen-boy sensibility. Not sure how he would’ve reacted to the folkier, near-twee sounds of so many of my other Tull favorites, as contained on the 1972 compilation Living in the Past, an LP that I would discover shortly after absorbing Led Zeppelin.

“Battle of Evermore” must have primed me. The lure of the ancient, of stories and feelings that recur throughout history, was a thing that surely must’ve planted a seed in my brain, because I pulled Living In the Past out of my Dad’s record stacks based purely on its cover design, which was put together to resemble some kind of centuries-old book of ancient wisdom. It had a wraparound gatefold with a thick spine, it was printed on heavy stock that was textured like a holy book or a wizard’s manual, dark maroon background with illustration and text embossed in ornate gold. That the photographs in the inner booklet featured photos of the band in ragged, multi-colored hippie garb that placed them somewhere between forest minstrels and court jesters was an added bonus. That so many of the photos were also so purposefully goofy - one featured a band member emerging from a trash can, which I thought was gross but hilarious - necessarily took the edge off and made the whole enterprise a little warmer. 

Finding an object like that in that musty old house was a little like discovering buried treasure. In turn, I used that notion as a guiding spirit while listening. Tull’s musical palette was always an eclectic one, and even though much of the music throughout the 2LP set explored relatively recent 20th century territory (mostly blues and hard rock, though one side is made up of a live excursion that melds jazz with classically-influenced progressive rock) my ears heard all of it as an echo of ancient impulses, particularly the folk and folk-rock stuff, which was plentiful, and particularly British. 

The Britisher the better, as far as I was concerned. English folk is naturally evocative of trees and greenery, rolling hills and grassy expanses. And woods where witches sometimes appear, often with the express intent of seducing young, fragile hearts. That’s the basic premise of “The Witch’s Promise”, a song that’s risen from the sprawl of Living In the Past as a battle-tested favorite. 

It’s a peculiar recording*, opening with a fanfare of Tull leader Ian Anderson’s multi-tracked flutes, giving way to a melody that’s gentle and pretty but nonetheless tinged with menace, with Anderson smarmily (Along with the ever-present flute, Anderson’s voice is a primary obstacle to those approaching Jethro Tull’s music for the first time – critics and naysayers would and will complain that he knew no other way to sing except smarmily, fans love it) warning the listener about those woods and the witch who lives there and the ill fortune that awaits whoever falls under her spell. (Reading over the lyrics now it is very possible that I’ve completely misinterpreted them for decades, seems like the witch actually ends up falling for the narrator, who rebukes her. Put it down to the willful interpretation games we all play with songs, and the way we tend to always hear them the way we want. Also put it down to the “leaves falling, red yellow brown, all look the same.”) It’s another fairy tale, sort of, but the dark melody is buoyed by flutes that beguile like the Pied Piper, with a more-felt-than-heard mellotron providing an air of unease. It’s a sound akin to threatening gray clouds, such that it can’t be simply dismissed as the extract from a children’s storybook that it might be reminiscent of. If it’s a fairy tale, it’s probably one of Grimm’s. 

*This is a bit of nitpicky music geek minutiae that you can feel free to ignore, but I gotta mention that if you feel compelled to listen to “The Witch’s Promise” please go to the version included on Living in the Past, which has recently, as I write, been reissued in expanded form via Parlophone/Warner. The song is on any number of other Tull compilations, but Past contains a unique mix that deftly blends the vocal and music in a way that the others do not. Maybe at age fourteen I would have heard any other version the same way, and I’d still be writing about it now in the same way, but who knows. Tiny subtleties sometimes make a big difference.

“Witch’s Promise” tended to blend into the flow of the album unobtrusively during my early listening. I think the song’s tone, that air of suggested menace, combined with the dark woodland sensibility I so readily brought to the listening experience in the first place, somehow infected all the other songs such that they all took on a little bit of eeriness. The hard rock of “Sweet Dream”, along with its lyrics that advocated getting away from your parents to experience the grit and gristle of city living, became a little more of an intense and scary thing. (This despite the fact that the track is fleshed out by a very non-scary horn section.) The jazzy take on a Bach melody in “Bouree” sounded like a jovial frivolity that might be played in a medieval king’s court before an execution. “Life’s a Long Song” is an essentially positive and very charming folk song that nonetheless sounds a little melancholy in all this darkly hued company. 

All of these songs bounced and flowed through my brain and spirit as I went through the usual rigors and ecstasies of being fourteen years old during summer 1985. Anderson’s flute and hard-rock rhythm section accompanied me, acting as a buffer and companion as I checked the baseball scores and read my comics and my music magazines and shyly longed for the attention of any number of female acquaintances. Music is good that way, it can work like friends or family, easing burdens or making them more tolerable. And it can be especially useful when the friends or family aren’t around, a thing I was in the process of learning.

By this time my father had moved out of the old house in the woods, and even though I had liked it there, I was kind of glad. That house had been a place of some turbulence in my early teenage life - in addition to the ghosts always knocking about it was often full of loud, inebriated people. My father’s door was always open, especially to people with outsize personalities and weed or beer to offer. I often found myself navigating varying degrees of raucous behaviour while attempting to do homework or sleep. This was a troublesome dilemma that would be a source of much adolescent strife. 

Every now and again, though, there would be moments of respite and weird wonder that couldn’t have happened under any other circumstance. On one memorable occasion while staying in that house I found myself awake and alone around two or three in the morning, sitting in the dim-lit living room trying to read so I could tire myself out enough to sleep. A man showed up at the door. He had a scraggly beard and wore beads around his neck that hung down over an earth-colored poncho, making him resemble a member of Jethro Tull. He was accompanied by two taciturn, enigmatically gorgeous women. They were looking for a party that had ceased raging an hour or so earlier. In my memory they’re all glowing, though I’m sure in real life they didn’t. Pretty sure.

My overactive imagination couldn’t help itself – it felt to me as though these people had emerged from some kind of portal from some other time or place. Maybe from some dark section of the woods outside. The man said his name was Lucius, and my immediate thought was something like huh, that’s pretty close to Lucifer. I didn’t know it at the time, and only found out when I looked it up just now, but there are also a couple good guys in the Bible named Lucius, so all’s even, I guess. I made an in-game decision to roll with it, and for the better part of the next hour I found myself simultaneously playing host to these three strangers – something I was relatively happy to do, it made me feel like an adult – and listening while Lucius held court. 

I don’t truthfully remember what was discussed that morning, only that it had a tone that was equal parts philosophy, theology and absurdity. Why Lucius chose to converse in this way with a thirteen-year-old he’d only just met is a thing I didn’t then and still don’t understand. I assume he was probably a natural talker, and a person not particularly given to small talk, which was a thing I could relate to even then. He gestured dramatically as he spoke, and the two women wore expressions somewhere between amused and bored, giving the impression they were used to his behavior. In retrospect, his persona might have seemed a little Manson-ish, I suppose. I probably should have been more wary. Somehow, though, I intuited a baseline of gentleness in him, warranted or not. He had a kind of congenial, weary spirit about him that I was a sucker for. Maybe he reminded me of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Also, crucially, he seemed perfectly sober. Sober and smart, both appealing attributes that I also mentally transferred to his two friends. I went with his flow, and tried to keep up. 

I had mixed feelings about the whole situation, really, I sort of just wanted them to leave so I could get to sleep, but I was also mildly entertained and particularly moved that he seemed to view me as an equal and spoke to me that way, rather than the way most adults were either befuddled or outright condescending around me. That’s an important thing at that age, and the combination of his effort at connection and his obvious charm cemented Lucius in my memory in such a way that I’m sure I would remember this occasion even if what happened next had not unfolded the way it did.

Two weeks after that experience, during my bi-weekly visit to my Dad’s place, my father told me that Lucius had died. At some point in the next several days after our interaction he had committed suicide. 

That news was a shock, of course. Facts and feelings flashed through the brain like movie scenes on fast forward: Wait, you mean that guy I talked to til four in the morning just a couple of weeks ago? He died? And he chose to do it himself? But he seemed so…together. What about those two women? Are we supposed to do something about this?

More than anything, my memory retained and replayed the sound of his voice echoing through that old house, and the sound of the wood creaking beneath his feet as he paced around, the same sound as the disembodied footsteps that used to put a chill in me whenever I would hear them out in the hallway while in the bedroom trying to sleep.

Outside of that initial shock I can’t honestly say that the news hit me in a particularly emotional way – I’d only had the one encounter with him. But I was certainly confused, because in the days just after that encounter I had for one reason or another entertained the vague notion that he might end up being some kind of important figure in my life in some way, despite the fact that I didn’t really know him at all and even now have no clue what his real make-up might have been, whether he was on the side of the angels or possessed by demons or merely a harmless small-town eccentric. My adult brain suggests it's most likely the latter. But my romantic teenage brain had already given him the aura of some kind of otherworldly figure, and now that impression was and is frozen that way.

Up to that point I don’t think I’d known anyone who died. And since I hardly knew this person I was unsure how to measure the loss on an emotional level. I think after acknowledging the confusion and talking about it with my Dad for a bit, I simply went on with my normal teenage pursuits without letting it trouble me too much. At least on the surface. Maybe this is just how we learn to get on with our lives. I had plenty of things to distract me, and teens are pretty easily distracted. There were, again, all those comics to read and baseball games to follow, movies to see. Not to mention all the records I’d been “borrowing” from my father under the pretense that I would return them, though I think he knew they weren’t coming back. 

I was beginning to recognise music around this time as more than a simple distraction or hobby. It was becoming something like a lifeline, a place of refuge from life’s many dilemmas. I liked the sheer sound, for sure, and mostly that meant loud guitars, loud drums and singers singing with an urgency that seemed ultra-urgent. But I think I was also looking to these records for something else beyond all that. I was looking for some kind of understanding, and I needed the music to reflect back at me some of my own confusions. This was maybe another of the reasons I was so easily able to look past what might be perceived as the cloying, fairy-tale tone of some of the Zeppelin and Jethro Tull records I’d been listening to. There was something else in there, and it had something to do with death and spirituality and all of the other adult things I didn’t know so much about yet. (And still don’t, truthfully.) In this light Led Zeppelin’s Tolkein-inspired lyrical content took on a different, oddly spiritual resonance, and Tull’s flute went from mildly annoying to mildly haunting. I felt like the records might contain answers to questions I hadn’t yet thought to ask. 

Pretty sure the answers had something to do with trees.

“There’s something in those woods.” I’d heard lines like that in horror movies, and the truth is I did start to think that there was “something” in the woods surrounding that house where my father had lived, and I carried it around with me well after he had moved out. I’m not sure what that “something” was, or is, though it seems to have something to do with the cycle of life and death, maybe even divinity. Light and dark, eternity, and myth. You know, the usual. 

That’s all stuff that I heard in the music, too. When Robert Plant sings about bringing the balance back on “Battle of Evermore” I could just about understand what he meant. It helped that he sang those lines so emphatically, even convulsively; “Bring it back! Bring it bayyck! BRING it back!” Then on the record that outburst gives way to a strange chorus of voices, moaning as if they’re part of a séance.

Something like that feeling must have fed into the way I also heard Tull’s “Witch’s Promise” as a multi-layered mystery box, with a murky, oddly evocative quality running through it. I think I was hearing Lucius’ death in there, along with so many other things, including the inherent teenage desire to find a place, a way to fit in. Or to find a place and a sense of self via the act of not fitting in. Either would do. “Keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be,” Ian Anderson sings in the exquisitely modulated bridge, and I think I took that command to heart, in a way that I maybe didn’t recognize or think about at the time, but also in a way that sends weird chills echoing through me when I hear those lines now.

I found somewhere to be a couple years later in the form of my high school Speech and Drama team, as I drifted into becoming what some classmates (and even some people now!) would ungraciously (though not inaccurately) call a “theater nerd.” I was grateful to find that place and those people, and throughout my age fifteen and sixteen years I nurtured not only my first meaningful teenage friendships, but also found my first success as a public performer, as well as my first romantic relationship. That latter felt like the heaviest development at the time, as first love so often does. Which is not to say it doesn’t retain a certain heaviness even decades later. It does, but in retrospect the whole time period is colored with so much activity and upheaval that it’s hard to pin too much emotional weight on any one aspect of it all.  

Becoming part of a friend group is a formative thing that happens to most of us, hopefully, at some point in relative youth. Maybe it happens at summer camp or college or at our first job. For me it happened to happen in high school. The process can be especially meaningful for those of an inherently shy or naturally creative persuasion; we suddenly realize we are among a group of people with whom we identify and are finally able to share all of the enthusiasms and insecurities that up until that point we might have kept to ourselves. Vulnerability and the semi-realization of selfhood within a group of like-minded people can be pretty powerful bonding agents. As a result, we come to keenly value and rely on those relationships. 

It may not occur to us so readily that just as things can flourish they can also fade, and in turn we can easily become troubled when some force from within or without threatens to disrupt the established status quo of a friend group. Life has a way of providing that threat naturally, and it would come for me and my friends in the form of the looming, unknowable future. Good times always end. College, career, family, life, they’re all waiting in the wings, beckoning. The future and what to do with it not only twists us into emotional knots but it also tends to remove us physically from wherever we might be. As the last year or two of our high school days unfolded and we watched our little group splinter due to graduations and college and life pursuits my left-behind friends and I struggled to reconcile the very recent memories of bonding and good times with the knowledge that those times would soon be over, and that heavier, more complicated realities awaited.

In that same wary, disoriented sense, when the person that I wholeheartedly believed at the tender age of sixteen to be the love of my life moved away to go to college I knew deep down that our relationship as we had known it was over, but of course my heart in all its wholeness couldn’t accept it. So began the long process of subconscious acceptance, slowly and painfully working its way up the emotional ladder into conscious form.

Acceptance, of course, does not often come easily. Serendipitous, then, that around this time I discovered the music of Fairport Convention, whose most famous album Liege and Lief was born out of a need for acceptance.

Discovering new music (or old music that’s new to you) in the days prior to instant digital connectivity could often mean navigating a circuitous maze of byways and hints and mini-connections. The way I found Fairport was via reading about Jethro Tull, particularly Tull’s explorations in rustic British folk, which I wanted more of, in whatever form, if any existed. One of the music books I had in my ever-growing collection linked that sound, as Tull played it, to the precedent set by Fairport Convention. When I found an entry on Fairport in yet another music reference book I discovered to my wonder and delight that they had for a time employed as lead singer none other than Sandy Denny, owner of the same lustrous voice that had co-sung Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore” with Robert Plant. That simple shock of recognition was such a thrill that it still reverberates in me a little bit. Wait, I know that name! She was in a band? You mean there’s more of that voice somewhere? Take note and remember. And go looking.

My father’s records were now in a different house, hidden in the corner of a back room. Rifling through them one day in fall 1987 I found a trove of Fairport Convention records, and it felt like hitting the jackpot. I felt a little breathless, had to listen immediately. The record review volume in which I’d read about them recommended the third album, Unhalfbricking, which I listened to first and liked well enough (I would grow to love it) but I was really looking for something else. What I was looking for involved ghosts and dirt and ancient voices and tree bark.

Liege and Lief was the natural one to gravitate towards, featuring as it did a cover illustrated with vines and ornate Olde English lettering and an inner sleeve outlining centuries-old folk customs like morris dancing, wren hunting and something called the Burry Man. All of this stuff is somehow audibly infused into track one, a lively “calling-on” song called “Come All Ye”. If the use of the word “ye” (in this context roughly the British equivalent of the American south’s “y’all”) wasn’t enough to earn my endearment then the sound of Richard Thompson’s electric guitar in swirling, snakelike duet with Dave Swarbrick’s violin certainly was. Sandy Denny’s vocal is, as ever, magic.

Track two is where the feel of the album really emerges in full flower, in Fairport’s haunting reading of a century-plus years-old ballad called “Reynardine”. It’s taken at a slow, stately pace, the sound shimmering, the violin holding one raga-like note in the background and Denny’s voice moving through the music like a ghost floating through an old house. Wikipedia says the song is about a werefox who lures beautiful women to his castle, but Fairport’s version leaves the plot a little vague, enhancing the mystery. I’ve always heard it as a song full of drama, where lots of action happens despite the slow pace and empty spaces, but that isn’t really the case. The action is minimal, it boils down to a brief exchange between a maiden wandering out “among the leaves so green” where she meets up with a “sly, bold” stranger. He tells her he lives in a castle and she should come up and see him sometime. She spurns his advances, fearing he’s a rake, the use of which word - “rake,” British slang meaning “scoundrel” - is a nicely evocative detail. The finest detail: “His teeth did brightly shine."

The implicit violence of “Reynardine” breaks through forcefully in the song that would become Fairport’s signature live showstopper, the traditional “Matty Groves”. The story is simple; the wife of a nobleman seduces a farm boy, said nobleman finds out about the tryst and kills the farmboy using one of his prize swords, and when the wife admits she still prefers the dead guy to him he kills her too. Fairport play it up for maximum drama, building the track on a chugging two-guitar rhythm over which Swarbrick’s violin provides ominous color, with Denny’s vocal a masterclass in tension and release, all of it building towards a lightning storm climax of raging electric guitars and cymbal clashes. 

Liege and Lief provided much-needed respite from the rigors of high school life during the fall semester of my junior year. I’d retire to my room around sundown and turn all the lights out and just listen, sometimes concentrating on the mood or the sheer musicality and sometimes drifting into dreamlands of my own, usually in which my erstwhile romantic interest would return to me and promise to stay forever and in turn she and all my friends and I would live happily ever after in a big sprawling mansion of our own, listening to records and watching movies and telling dumb dirty jokes into eternity. Maybe not an altogether healthy kind of fantasizing, I guess, but I still think it's better than geometry homework. 

Sometimes when I hear Liege and Lief now it is very easy to find myself back in that dark little room, staring out the window as I’d already done for years, looking at the trees against the sky. Speculating, imagining. Merging my own modern fantasies with ancient fantasies from the British Isles. Dreading the inevitable goodbyes, fearing the unknowns around the corner, listening to the gently winding and unwinding music-box melody of Fairport’s “Farewell, Farewell”.

It’s always goodbyes, isn’t it?

Fairport may have been helping me accept the farewells in my own life, but at the time I was listening I was completely unaware that they had recorded this music in an effort to deal with their own traumatic changes.

In spring 1969, Fairport were on the verge of releasing their third album, and hopes were high. One morning they were returning home to London from a gig in Birmingham when their van veered from the highway and crashed, killing Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn and Fairport’s brilliant young drummer Martin Lamble, and doing immeasurable psychological damage to the surviving band members. They were all in their early twenties at the time.

It’s hard to imagine the toll such an event takes on a young psyche. It would have been understandable if those within Fairport had chosen to each move in their own direction after the crash. But enduring a collective shock can also bring people together, and in that spirit Fairport made the decision to keep the band going. They decided to make a clean break from the band they had been before, cutting out the American singer-songwriter covers that had been prominent in their repertoire, focusing instead on the traditional music they had only dabbled in to that point. They recruited a couple of new members and retired to a rented house in Hampshire in order to rehearse and record a whole new set of material that fused ancient folk and balladry with modern rock rhythms and amplification. This material became Liege and Lief.

It had become something of a trend in the late sixties for bands to seek solitude and bucolic bliss far away from the city limits; The Band and Traffic had famously rented houses in the country in an effort to spur musical inspiration, with vibrant and enduring results. In Fairport’s case the rented house was called Farley House and it had a nicely divine history, existing since the 1700’s and having formerly been a rectory, where clergymen had lived, and, presumably, prepared sermons. (“All very Jane Austen,” notes Thompson wryly in his autobiography.) Located deep in the Hampshire countryside, it had a big front room in which the band could set up and play music and a big yard in which they could play football. It was surrounded, of course, by trees.

It's always goodbyes and it’s always the trees.

And it's always voices returning. Even after all the sad goodbyes of autumn and the deathcold of winter, the woods have a way of regenerating, of course; it’s called nature, and it works in cycles. In turn, that regenerative power can work its weird ways on human beings.

The whole enterprise of putting Liege and Lief together served as a kind of therapy for the members of Fairport Convention. The music bears that out, though there is plenty of lingering melancholy. “Farewell Farewell” consists of a valedictory lyric written by Richard Thompson set to the tune of the traditional ballad “Willy O’Winsbury.” It is almost unbearably light and pretty, and it is also, paradoxically, almost unbearably sad. (In a flashback to my too-cool-for-school younger self’s outward rejection of “Battle of Evermore”, I told myself that I didn’t like “Farewell Farewell” too much at the time – too light, overly pretty, nobody gets murdered. Now it's a favorite.)

On side two the traditional reworkings continue, culminating in the raging Halloween tumult of “Tam Lin” a tale of witchcraft that matches “Matty Groves” for dramatic verve and musical pyrotechnics. After that fiery excursion some kind of restful balancing is in order, and it comes in the form of the album’s final and perhaps finest track, the Thompson/Swarbrick original “Crazy Man Michael.” 

To call the song restful is misleading. “Crazy Man Michael” is a quiet song, but it is anything but calm. Listening to it one gets the feeling of waking up from a nightmare with a discomfiting mix of relief and dread, as if the dream had been spiked with a touch of reality. Dreams and reality can be difficult to separate sometimes, even in the best of times.

Thompson wrote the lyrics, and Swarbrick set them to his own sympathetically pastoral music. The sound is like wind through branches, smooth, light. It’s also full of profound disquiet; beneath its smooth surface shiver currents of longing and strange portent. The song is a lament, an elegy that sings in the same arcane language Thompson and Swarbrick had absorbed via the traditional music they’d been immersed in.

Given an understanding of the story behind the creation of this music, it is difficult not to hear Thompson’s lyrics as an attempt to come to terms with the recent tragedy in his life. The song is in ballad form, telling a tale in which the title character wanders by the seaside where he meets a raven that offers to tell his fortune. The prophecy, it turns out, is that Michael will end up murdering his own lover, a prediction that causes Michael to go mad and kill the bird. Only then, when Michael observes the dead beast at his feet, he realizes that the body is actually that of his lover, thus fulfilling the prophecy. It is folk horror, through and through, right down to the description of the cold earth and the spinning sky. “You speak for the devil who taunts me,” Michael tells the raven, revealing that his mind had been haunted by evil and madness long before he met the soothsaying creature, which like Poe’s raven may itself be a figment of his fraught imagination.

What I made of this story at age sixteen, or whether I bothered to parse the lyrics at all, I don’t really remember. I only remember listening in my dark bedroom and feeling comforted, somehow. (And right in the middle of autumn, perfectly.) It’s a horror story, that’s obvious enough, but why do we tell horror stories except as a way to deal more bravely with the horrors of the everyday? I was very conscious at the time that this listening experience was a kind of therapy, a way to deal with the unknown. Listening to “Crazy Man Michael” eased the intense longing and dread that was otherwise so prevalent in my psyche at the time, and I think it genuinely helped me reconcile with possibilities I otherwise wouldn’t have been too keen on facing up to.

Putting the pieces together, trying to solve the puzzle of both this song and this life, would become in itself a meaningful occasion, with its own kind of psychic and emotional weight that would end up outlasting the moment. The simple act of listening had become a kind of signal event, a paradigmatic one in my little world, as though I knew that this music, including but not limited to this specific music by Fairport Convention, might be able to help me navigate through the coming years in any number of ways. I’ve ever since, in a sense, been sitting in a dark room listening to this music, contemplating the past and considering next moves just like I did each night during those weeks in 1987. All while looking out the window at the trees, and in 1987 that would have been the same run of trees in which only a few years earlier I’d cavorted around pretending to be Indiana Jones. Who can I pretend to be now?

The last lines of “Crazy Man Michael” continue to resonate with quiet power. Michael is still wandering, maybe he’ll be wandering forever, and he’s whistling and he’s quite calm and collected, thank you, despite the ordeal he’s endured. But he also longs to be somewhere else, somewhere far away, and when he encounters wild wolves he practically apologizes for his weary demeanor, begging their pardon, “for his true love is flown / into every flower grown / and he must be keeper of the garden.” A few final strains of violin and guitar underscore that regenerative sentiment, a soft caress that fades slowly, enigmatically. 

All of our precious phases and stages work like apparitions. They come and go, right? Mostly they go, or at least that’s the way it feels sometimes. But as we get older they sometimes drop back by to say hello. Maybe it’s best to acknowledge them. Say hello back. When my father told me the story about the weird experience he had in the old house with the strange floating chime sound he confessed that while he had been somewhat alarmed by it, he also felt like the experience had been sort of nice. Like it was maybe a kind of welcoming, an acknowledgement that if we gotta share this space, let’s try to get on with it by using a little lightness of touch on both our parts.

Maybe life is an accumulation of ghosts, real and imagined. Maybe we’re always dying in some way and coming back in some other way. The dream of the perfect relationship, say, realized in small, invigorating bursts, then gone. Faded, gradually or abruptly. Maybe it will come back, we think, hopefully, and sometimes it does. Friendships wither, then they’re renewed. Green leaves fade into brown, then a sea of dead leaves morphs into a crowd of people. A house haunted by footsteps and strange sounds and talkative early morning visitors is subsumed into a group of songs, a few hazy memories and a lot of trees.

The inexplicable is a given. How we deal with it is, maybe, our primary dilemma. We can’t force an answer, we can only hope to finesse it. The woods might be a good place to look for advice, with all those leaves dying and coming back every twelve months, and all those birds singing their weird little songs. They pass those songs on, brood after brood.

I mean, if and when we do come back, imagine how much fun that might be! Hey, we’re unmoored from our physical bodies! And we get to hang out in these trees! Though I guess it’s possible it might actually not be fun at all - maybe we’ll be only one sad voice in some haunted, low-moaning chorus. That doesn’t sound particularly exciting. But, you know, keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be.

Whatever the form or circumstance, let’s try to err on the side of ghostly prudence. Repay, do not forget. I think that means let’s try to be helpful, and do our best to be unobtrusive. All these other people have to live.