Seventeen In ’88 – A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
On the night of Graduation, hours after the ceremony, our little group of friends found ourselves somewhere on the outskirts of our little town. Someone in the group led us up a grassy hill, through weeds, branches, and menacing-looking trees. Eventually we came to a clearing at the top of the hill where the expanse of our little town could be seen, stretched out, all lit up like an exceedingly modest Christmas tree. It was quite a sight, really. I’d lived there my whole life, but I’d never been to that place before.
I still had another year of school ahead of me, but a couple of us had graduated earlier in the evening. Elliot had strongly considered not attending the ceremony but gave in at the last minute. You weren’t supposed to applaud or cheer as individual names were read, but the obnoxious few often did anyway. I can remember the sound of my lone, weak “woo” disappearing into the expanse of sober auditorium silence as Elliot crossed the podium. Max was also supposed to graduate, but found out at the last minute he had to go to summer school for one last credit. He was pissed off, but we had also seen the Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School the year before, and it made the prospect of a few weeks of summer classes seem not so bad. I mean, all those guys did was party, play with fake gore, and burn stuff.
That night, looking out over our fair city, even though the predominant mood was one of relief, the sense of years stacking up began to take on new weight. We’d already been fretting over our fear of a bleak, unfulfilling future, but that fear had new meaning now that some of us had to face up to what’s next. Only instead of a feeling of What do we do now? it was more like a feeling of Do we have to do it here?
In 1988 Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was all over the radio, impossible to ignore. That song did a fairly good job of summing up the need for escape, that feeling that most of us have at one point or another that we need to be elsewhere. It resonated. Maybe too much for Chapman herself, who immediately pulled away from the spotlight. So much so that it’s hard to remember now how very famous she was in 1988, how ubiquitous “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution” were. Did she find the elsewhere she wanted, only to realize she didn't want to be there either?
“Fast Car” was on the airwaves,
with its yearning to punch “a ticket to anywhere” to “be someone.” I could
relate, but all I could hear in my head was a song by Van Morrison that had
come out sixteen years earlier.
In the early seventies Van
Morrison made a series of upbeat albums celebrating domestic bliss, nature’s
glory, and dancing under moonlit skies. They were solid, enjoyable albums. Even
had hit singles – “Come Running”, “Domino”, “Wild Night”.
Then in 1972 Morrison suddenly
turned back to the contemplative, spiritual searching of his 1968 classic Astral
Weeks. 1972’s St. Dominic’s
Preview marked the point of transition, and
it closed with a ten minute song called “Almost Independence Day”, though
“song” seems too small, too inadequate a word for the feeling at work.
It opens with Morrison humming
along wordlessly to an increasingly intense, circular pattern on acoustic
guitar before dissolving into an expansive, lurching two-note rhythm, time
kept by a slow, woozy synthesizer. It could be the sound of waves hitting a
shore, or clouds billowing black before a storm. In his fascinating study of Van Morrison’s music When That Rough God Goes Riding (PublicAffairs, 2010), the critic Greil Marcus likened it to “the sound of a
tugboat pushing through fog.” The feel is elegiac, but insistently, urgently
so. A listener has no hope of escaping into the calm, safe retreat of
melancholy. It’s an aural undertow. You’re caught up in it, and you have to move
with it.
“I can hear them calling,”
Morrison sings, “way from Oregon.” Oregon? Somehow, the specificity is jarring, the feeling in the song is otherwise so amorphous,
vague. Later, Morrison would explain to an interviewer that he wrote the song after he received a phone
call from a member of his old band Them, phoning from Oregon, but they couldn't talk because the connection kept fading in and
out. The song kind of works that way too.
Disconnection gives way to a
few lines about Van and his lady stepping out on the town, acoustic guitar
arpeggios swirling around his voice so gorgeously that until I listened just
now I had never noticed the lines about buying silverware in Chinatown.
Then he’s back out in the cool
night, admiring the lights of the harbor. Listening to the fireworks. Watching
the boats go by. And it’s almost Independence Day.
The song is a summoning, an
incantation, a prayer. A lament, a reverie. It lingers on the fade, drifting,
endless. Maybe it doesn’t want to let go. Maybe it doesn’t want to face
whatever’s next, when independence finally, truly arrives. Maybe it can’t wait for that moment,
but it just wants a little more time to mourn whatever’s gone on before.
Out in that field under the
endless June sky, the song hovered over me, my friends, the grassy hill and the
small town lights. Moving in waves. Surging and receding.
Music fits into everyday living in so many ways. Mostly it accompanies moments, adds textures and atmosphere. Inspires, creates diversion. Provides a signpost, a means by which to remember experiences.
Somewhere around summer 1988
the music stopped being mere accompaniment or diversion. It became something
else. Something like…the boss. Around this time the music began to dictate the
mood rather than simply amplify or enhance it. The songs began to inhabit the
moments like possessive spirits. You were helpless and you had to do what the
music said.
“Almost Independence Day”, mysterious as it was, as it is, told me a few things, but they all seemed to contradict one
another, and I got lost. Then, as now, I found it very easy to get lost.
The one thing the song seemed
to clearly say was “Be ready.”
I wasn’t ready. Not at all. For
anything. But out there in that field, looking at the city that raised me,
molded me, messed me up as surely as friends or teachers or DNA ever could, I knew one
thing: I had to get the hell out of that place.
