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.
Classic Rock Is The Naked Truth
It was a dark and stormy night. Only not really. It
was actually one of those nights where the threat of a thunderstorm seems to linger in the air for hour after menacing hour, without actually giving way to full-on rain and thunder.
One of those nights where the wind is swirling and howling and lightning
periodically flashes like some quiet, crazy strobe light. It was unnerving.
Regina and I sat in her kitchen doing homework. I was cracking up because Regina’s father and his new wife
were in their bedroom, and Regina and I kept hearing moans and gasps emanating
from behind the door. Regina was mortified. At one point we heard a series of
slaps, sharp and rhythmic. I totally lost it. Regina just put her hands over
her face and shook her head wordlessly. Looking back, I’m tempted to think it
was immaturity, a lack of experience with the ways of adult sexuality that made
me react with a bout of hysterics, but I also suspect it was actually just
really funny. Maybe I’m still immature, but I’m betting you woulda laughed too.
It was in this atmosphere, with Regina and I attempting to
concentrate on our schoolwork, trying to ignore the distraction of loud
parental bedroom shenanigans, that the last ghost of the year made an
appearance.
On New Year’s Eve, while Elliot and Max and I listlessly
rung in 1988, Elliot swore he saw a ghost. We thought he was delusional, but the eerie feeling of that event continued to chase us down. Throughout the summer, amid the
natural confusion of teenage growing pains and paranoia about the future, all
set to a soundtrack of oddly ominous music, the prevailing mood had been one of
dread; the atmosphere seemed to be always touched by a strange haunted quality.
Then in the fall death reared it’s all-too-real-and-ugly head.
On the night of the hilarious sex sounds and the pseudo-storm
Regina and I were sitting quietly at her kitchen table, concentrating hard,
lost in academia, when only a few feet away from us the back door of her house
opened, all the way, all by itself, slowly, with a sick creak.
Neither of us said anything, we just looked at the door, then back at each other, wide-eyed. Beyond the door there was nothing but the black sky and the trees swaying madly in the
wind.
We started laughing, a little uneasily. Of course it was
only the wind that jarred the door open, but hell, it may as well have been a
ghost. I like to think it was the same ghost from New Year’s Eve, having grown
tired of hanging out with me and my group of friends all year, finally deciding
to say goodbye and head off to haunt somebody else. Yeah, that works. Dammit, you create closure where you find it.
1988, or 1988 as I think of it, was ending. One phase of my
teenage life was morphing into another. Life moves in phases. Maybe we make
those phases up in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and all that. But still.
The soundtrack for this phase, late fall 1988, towards the
end of my age seventeen year, was classic rock radio. One of the local rock
stations had recently shifted to the then fairly new classic rock format, and
it was still enough of a novelty that we listened to it all the time. In
addition to the predictable Zeppelin, Stones and ZZ Top the station also played
some selected modern acts. So these days whenever I hear “Angel Of Harlem” by
U2 or “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS it makes me think of driving to or from
school in fall 1988. The sound of those songs makes the memory so vivid I can taste it, the sensation is almost physical.
The personal connection between that time and those songs may seem like a quaint, virtually meaningless memory,
but think of your own equivalent songs, whatever they may be, and the emotional
resonance those songs carry with them. This is what music does. It’s a weirdly
heavy thing. When I mention “Never Tear Us Apart” it’s more than some kind of
wistful memory of bygone teenage days (though it definitely is that, too). It
carries with it a kind of depth - part joy, part pain. Small doses of each,
maybe, but still, it’s real. Like a scar.
And this effect can happen with great songs, mediocre songs,
terrible songs, the whole gamut. Whatever hits you in a certain way, in a
certain moment. Make no apologies. Maybe for you it was “Sea Of Love”, or
“Stairway To Heaven”, or “Sweet Child Of Mine” or “I Want It That Way” or that stupid song about the way Mick Jagger dances. Er, I mean, I guess that song's not stupid. Especially if it means something to you. MAKE NO APOLOGIES.
For me,
one of the songs that hit at just the right moment in Fall 1988 was “Night Moves” by Bob
Seger. These days I think there’s maybe a perception of Seger’s classic rock
stalwart as a cheesy song, made up of cheap nostalgia and cliché. But so what?
A good deal of life is made up of cheap nostalgia and cliché, who says you
can’t revel in it every now and again, if you want.
I’d been hanging out with Regina regularly, and every night
I’d drive home from her house and listen to the classic rock station. It was
probably the night of the sex and the storm that I heard “Night Moves”. That
seems like the right combination to lend extra resonance to the song.
We all have different lives, different experiences, but we
also each have common denominator experiences, too, whether we want to admit to
it or not. Clichés become clichés because they’re true, as the horrible cliché
goes.
So I’m driving home with the fall colors all around and Regina on the
brain and Seger’s song comes on and for whatever reason I found myself relating
to it in a way that I never had before. Seger sings about being too tall, says
he coulda used a few pounds. I wasn’t tall, but I could relate to being gawky,
physically insecure. Then he sings about he and his black-haired beauty, out
past the corn fields, in his ’60 Chevy. I drove a
gray ’82 Ford Escort. Not quite as romantic, but what are ya gonna do.
Those kind of details don't matter anyway. What matters is the gist of it,
and that’s outlined in the breakdown towards the end of the song. In the early
nineties the comedy/folk singer Wally Pleasant had a song where towards the end he lowered his tone to a hush and announced “Okay, here’s the quiet dramatic part, like Bruce
Springsteen would do.” I think he may have also been thinking of Bob Seger’s
“Night Moves”. Maybe I’m a gullible simp, but the quiet dramatic part of
“Night Moves” gets me every single time.
That night I actually pulled over so I could listen more intently to this song that I’d already heard a thousand times without really hearing it. So I’m sitting on the side of the road as Seger strums a few gentle chords and
sings about sitting in bed listening to the thunder. Remembering a time he
didn’t “have so much to lose”. I was acutely aware when I was a teenager that I
should be milking each moment of those years while I could, but I don’t think I
understood why. That line sums it up. You will never have so many roads open to
you again, so little weight to carry around.
Then there’s this, sung so gently, so matter-of-factly:
“Strange how the night moves…with autumn closing in.” The music lingers on the
languid strumming for a while before building back up. Autumn, for Seger, in the case of this song, is obviously adulthood - unknowable, unstoppable.
I’d been freaking out about that unknowable future for the
whole year, and suddenly here's Bob Seger, not solving any of my problems for
me, but providing some kind of perspective, at least.
Things were changing. Phases ending, phases beginning. The
creepy ominous feeling so prevalent throughout the year was fading. A fog was
lifting, but new problems would fall into place, as they always do. The next
few months would consist of a lot of clumsy maneuvering through a lot of
stumbling blocks. I thought at the time that those would eventually clear up,
but I was wrong. Way wrong. They never clear up. They just change shape, multiply, dissolve and reappear. All you can do is deal with it. Everything passes, everything changes, do what you
think you should do. Bob Dylan said that.
The naked truth, the horrible truth, the wonderful truth, is
that you make everything up as you go along. I said that.
