Seventeen In '88 - Installment 31: Three Songs For Late Summer (And Some Baseball Stuff, Too)

As 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.

Three Songs For Late Summer (And Some Baseball Stuff, Too)

As outlined here a few weeks ago, my guidelines for living when I was seventeen years old dictated that I listen to music constantly, and stay awake late at night, every night. So I really, really liked doing both of those things at the same time. Music + nighttime = ideal state of being.

My father had been a rack-jobber in the sixties and seventies, traveling around Tennessee and Kentucky stocking music sections at department stores and college bookstores and, probably, head shops. (Remember head shops? Do those places still exist?) So he had accumulated an enormous collection of vinyl. By my mid-teens I was regularly pilfering from this stockpile, every few months coming away with a new stack of records to memorize, translate, or save for possible use at a later date.

In mid-summer 1988 I got off with quite a haul. I wrote about Patti Smith’s Horses here a couple weeks ago, but there were three others that I particularly associate with those long hot summer nights, sitting looking out the window at the trees and the stars and the sky, imagining the world had stopped, trying to parse some kind of discernable path to take in what looked like a very cloudy future.

All year long so much of the music I listened to seemed to me to have an eerie, ominous tone, if not on the surface, then just underneath it. Right around this time, late summer, that quality seemed to deepen in the music. Really, the whole mood of summer ’88 is covered in that weird feeling. And I guess it didn’t help that there was a killer on the loose in our little town. (More on that later. Unfortunately.)

Back then the full-length album was the music delivery method of choice. I liked a collection of songs unified by some combination of sound, theme or feel. I still do actually, even now, in this age of bite-size media/culture portions. Still, I would always choose one song from each album as a representative moment, one track that seemed to sum up or reflect the gist of the feeling of the others.

Since it sits in the running order between two tours de force, Neil Young’s “Ride My Llama” is an odd choice to represent his Rust Never Sleeps. But Rust Never Sleeps is an odd album, moving wildly between boundaries of time and place, loud and quiet, violence and peace. “Thrasher” is a long, wordy folksong that unwinds in a series of imagistic verses that the rock press at the time pounced on as Young’s comment on the lost, faded ambitions of Young’s generation, particularly his pals Crosby, Stills and Nash. “Pocahontas” is a poignant, if surreal, exploration of savagery, destiny, and the mercurial nature of the American spirit. Yeah, really. “Ride My Llama” is just the strange little song stuck between those two. In comparison, it’s slight, sparse. But it has a powerfully weird feeling on it’s own.

It’s about space travel, I guess. Neil meets a Martian who plays him some Martian music and shares some choice Martian weed.* “Like any other primitive would.” Then Neil decides he’s gonna ride that llama from Peru to Texarkana, for reasons unexplained. He does all of this against a backdrop of halting, choppy acoustic guitar, a haunted echo covering it all. I’d listen to it and look up at the stars and I wanted to be there with Neil and that Martian, even though I didn’t smoke weed.

*It could be Martian whiskey or wine, the song doesn’t clarify, but when dealing with Neil “Homegrown” Young, I just assume weed.

In addition to the ever-present ominous feeling, all of these summer ‘88 songs shared a common lyrical theme - travel. I’m only recognizing that in retrospect. Maybe that linked them in my subconscious. I knew I’d be going somewhere eventually. I just didn’t know where, and I was scared shitless of what the circumstance would be once I got there.

Bob Dylan sings about a similar feeling in “One More Cup Of Coffee”, from Desire, even if he layers it in a gauze of gypsy mysticism. Desire is all over the map, especially lyrically. It's full of long story-songs with tragic heroes and mystery figures harboring dark intentions. Some of these are drawn from real life – Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, in a song that oddly turned out to be a hit, and was used in the Carter biopic a couple decades later, and the mobster Joey Gallo, the latter of whom is depicted somewhat sympathetically. Lester Bangs called Dylan out for the latter in a great article called “Bob Dylan’s Dalliance With Mafia Chic”, probably rightfully so, though I guess it’s up to the listener to decide just how sympathetic the song really is.

Primarily I liked the album for its sound. Maybe it’s the violin, played by a just-picked-up-from-the-street Scarlet Rivera, and maybe it’s the aforementioned mystical tone Dylan spreads lyrically throughout the album like the Tarot cards on the back cover, but the album seems to have a kind of damp, wet quality about it. Maybe it was raining the first time I heard it, and I was looking out my window at the wet green trees, I don’t remember. I do know that I always like to imagine that everyone playing on the album is wearing streaked eye make-up with long colorful scarves and beads and bandanas and feathers. Not so far-fetched - that's pretty much what the participants of Dylan’s contemporaneous Rolling Thunder tour actually looked like.

“One More Cup Of Coffee” is the song that best captures the damp, mystic feeling of the album. I don’t know what the song is really about – there’s a mysterious, potentially deadly dark lady, with a weird family who can see into the future. Again, as in Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, the past, present and the future all converge. But Dylan’s song doesn’t have any of Young’s leavening sense of humor. There's a thick, dramatic atmosphere that borders on schmaltz, but beneath that there’s a real sense of foreboding, dread. Whatever reason Dylan has for traveling into the valley below, it doesn’t sound like he’s particularly looking forward to it.

Looking back, I guess I probably needed some respite from all that weird dread. That’s where baseball always enters the picture. (It was another guideline, one that still applies – baseball is life’s best mirror.) Often in the background on those long summer nights while this music played the baseball highlights would be flickering on my crappy little black and white television. I was and am an L.A. Dodgers fan, and being on the east coast meant that I would usually have to wait for the midnight or 1AM airing of Sportscenter to see the highlights from the west coast. On the night of August 20, 1988, a Saturday, the Dodgers entered the ninth inning down 3-2 to the Montreal Expos. I was at work at the radio station that night. Between punching in the latest Randy Travis and Highway 101 songs I was listening off-air to a CBS Radio Network feed of the game. This was the night that I realized that Kirk Gibson, rather than a simple mortal human being like the rest of us, might actually be Superman. 

Gibson had been having a great year, but plenty of players have great years every year. I was a pessimist, always convinced that the Dodgers would find a way to lose. I was ready for three quick outs, prepared to go home and watch highlights of a Dodger loss. Then Mickey Hatcher doubled, and Gibson followed with an RBI single to tie the game. 

Cool, I thought, at least now we’ll have a chance in extras. It’s probably a character flaw that I aim so low. Kirk Gibson, as always, wanted to win right now.

After a Mike Marshall fly out, Gibson stole second. 

Then things got crazy. 

Montreal reliever Joe Hesketh unfurled a wild pitch, moving Gibson over to third. At least, that’s what usually happens in baseball when the pitcher throws a wild pitch, the runner moves up a base. A base. Gibson, however, partly because he recognized that the foul ground at Dodger Stadium covered a whole lot of territory for the ball to roll around in, partly because he wanted to utilize the element of surprise, and partly because he is made up of nothing but pure unfathomable guts, barreled right around third, like a bull, or a very fast steamroller, and came all the way around to score, sliding into home and slapping it with a passion normally reserved for Game 7 of the World Series. 

In fact, less than two months later Gibson would author one of the great moments in World Series history. Even if you're not a baseball fan you've probably seen it; Gibson, on two bad legs, pumping his fists as he limps around the bases after hitting a shocker home run to win the game. That was one for ages, but when it happened I simply felt it as an echo of that August night against the Expos, when Gibson would not be denied. And even if Gibson had never had that World Series moment I’d still remember that earlier night, that incredible sense of determination.  

I guess all that doesn’t really have anything to with music, though. Except insomuch as music and baseball have always been entwined together in my little world, twin strands of ongoing, limitless lifeforce. And except insomuch as I probably had some of this music playing on the stereo as I waited to watch the highlights. Dylan’s Desire, or Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. Or Richard & Linda Thompson’s Pour Down Like Silver, which was the other big album around this time. 

Pour Down Like Silver is the Thompsons' spiritual album. In the mid-seventies Richard and Linda Thompson had converted to the Sufi religion. The effect it had on their music was significant. Wikipedia says that Sufi “is popular in such African countries as Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical expression of Islam.” Again, with the mysticism. It’s all over the music, along with a profound sense of stillness. Even when the songs are about movement, stillness wins out – “Jet plane in a rocking chair / roller coaster roll nowhere.”

Richard Thompson fans are especially passionate about the darker aspects of his music. A series of fanclub releases in the eighties bore the title Doom and Gloom From The Tomb. Pour Down Like Silver is not necessarily dark, but it is certainly deep, working as it does from a place of intense spiritual yearning.

Which is not to say that the songs can’t be appreciated right here on Earth. In fact, most of them could be interpreted as simple love songs. Even if, as in “Night Comes In”, amid some of the most vivid, searing guitar-playing of Richard Thompson’s career, the lovers dance until they fade away. Presumably leaving this realm to be closer to God.

The song that really got to me on those summer nights, the one that really grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go as I sat looking out the window, contemplating the heavens, or waiting for the baseball highlights, was “Beat The Retreat”.  The song shares plenty with some of my other favorite music of the time. Like Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day” it moves at a funeral pace, with huge billowing clouds of empty, open space.  Like Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”, the sense of resignation, regret, is almost too much to bear.

Unlike “Bye Love”, though, it isn’t about leaving, it’s about coming home. So much of the album is about having a change of heart. In “Beat The Retreat” the singer has wandered off, away from home and loved ones, out into the wild. With a heavy heart, he’s now returning. Really, it’s probably allegorical, the singer has moved away from God, and is now trying to get back.

Who knows why this affected me in such a powerful way when I was seventeen. I didn’t have any inclination at the time to come home to God, or to come home at all. I only wanted out.

It’s altogether possible that I interpreted “home” as home plate, and the singer as Kirk Gibson storming around third on his way back where he belongs. Everything is a baseball metaphor. Yeah? No? Sigh.

Really, it was just the sound. And that feeling. That feeling of yearning, of searching for something else. Somewhere else. Whether it’s in that dark valley below, or on a spaceship with a stoner Martian.

Something about late summer, the air, the atmosphere, seems to break life open for all kinds of possibilities. That can be invigorating, but it can also be frightening. I’m not sure whether I heard all of this music as a key for letting those possibilities free, or a door for shutting them out. It worked both ways, I suppose. 

Hell, it doesn't matter. For years I've carried around this memory of these songs that, combined with what was going on in my world at the time, produced this distinct and terrible ominous feeling. But most of these memories are actually fond ones, and it's taken me writing all of this nonsense to realize that. Looking out that window, listening to Desire, waiting to watch the footage of Gibson roaring home. It was just life. Life and life only. And life needs a little color now and again, even if, often enough, the shades go dark.