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.
Afterword/Afterward, Then Forward
First, a quick note. This is the final installment in the
Seventeen In ’88 series. If you’re stumbling across this blog for the first
time, this series has been an exploration of one person’s experience as a
seventeen-year-old music geek, seen through the prism of the records he was
listening to at the time, circa 1988.
There’s also, occasionally, for inconsistency's sake, some
baseball stuff thrown in. The series is over now, but it’s all still archived
here, in sequenced installments, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
(And why wouldn’t you be?) If you are interested, it probably helps to read ‘em in order, but damn, that’s a lot of reading, so if you only wanna read one or two, or three, I like
this one, and this one, and this one.
Peace & Jaundice will be going on a brief hiatus over the holidays and
will resume regular activity in January, hopefully with more music, more dirty jokes, and
fewer boring stories of glory days. Though I won’t make any promises.
Our story ends, appropriately enough, with neither a bang nor a whimper. It's more like a long sigh or groan. A motorcycle sputtering out. A record spinning in the locked groove at the end of a side, waiting for someone to flip it over.
Yeah, that last one.
Our story ends, appropriately enough, with neither a bang nor a whimper. It's more like a long sigh or groan. A motorcycle sputtering out. A record spinning in the locked groove at the end of a side, waiting for someone to flip it over.
Yeah, that last one.
Life moves in stages, extended periods of time, sometimes
lasting a few weeks, sometimes a few years, usually defined by whatever mood or
feeling is prevalent at the time. With the benefit or curse of retrospect these stages take on an
all-but-physical shape, shades of shifting tones and colors,
free-flowing, in and out of focus. The dividing lines, the beginnings and
endings, are determined in hindsight, and usually defined by external, real-world events –
a move, a new job, a romantic relationship starting or ending.
1988, the year I was seventeen, was defined by a sense of
uncertainty – confusion, excitement and apprehension about the future; the
exploratory, open-minded joy of young love, lust, and new friendships; the
disillusionment that comes with the withering of those relationships and the
harsh realization that everything, your hopes, your ideals, life itself, can be
pulled out from under you at any moment, for no good reason.
In my little world, all of that uncertainty had a
soundtrack, a series of songs and albums that defined and illuminated that
time. Music, for me, was the most convenient way to make sense of it all, or to
blur it all out so I didn’t have to think about it. They say, though as usual
I’m not sure who “they” are (scientists? rock critics?) that the music you
listen to at age seventeen is the music that stays with you, the music that you
hear in the keenest way, that ends up meaning the most to you and defining the terrain of your emotional world. I don’t know if that’s true in a broad sense, for most people, but it’s probably true for me. To the point that the music during 1988 came to
seem less like mere entertainment, an interesting diversion, and more like a
divining spirit, a holy ghost.
That spirit’s next move was to possess my three closest
friends and I, and convince us to go in together and start a band. This was our
resolution to the annoyingly ever-present question of what to do with the future. That
particular choice of future - our band - wouldn’t turn out to last long, about a year and a
half, and it wouldn’t yield much beyond a few laughs, a lot of disappointment, more than a couple of fractured friendships, and a handful of very muddy tapes containing hours
of amateurish if earnest attempts at being the next U2 or REM.
Really, I probably should have spent the last year writing about all of that instead of what happened before, in 1988. It’s a much more obviously compelling story than the one I did tell. Throughout these posts, one recurring theme is the Seinfeldian notion that sometimes shit seems to be happening even when nothing is happening. That’s what it felt like in 1988, much of the time. The next year and a half – the time that our little band was together - had way more actual drama, more intrigue and emotion, more crazy turning-of-events. It’s probably a story worth telling. Maybe I’ll tell it someday, but right now I gotta go back to living in the present. Inasmuch as I am capable of doing so.
Really, I probably should have spent the last year writing about all of that instead of what happened before, in 1988. It’s a much more obviously compelling story than the one I did tell. Throughout these posts, one recurring theme is the Seinfeldian notion that sometimes shit seems to be happening even when nothing is happening. That’s what it felt like in 1988, much of the time. The next year and a half – the time that our little band was together - had way more actual drama, more intrigue and emotion, more crazy turning-of-events. It’s probably a story worth telling. Maybe I’ll tell it someday, but right now I gotta go back to living in the present. Inasmuch as I am capable of doing so.
So the formation of our band is a convenient dividing line,
the signpost at the crossroads of the stages of life. Even the tone and effect
of the music we listened to seemed to change. Around this time, U2 released Rattle
and Hum and REM released Green, but both of those seem like part of the soundtrack
to another stage, the next one, 1989. They don’t resonate in my memory with the
same sense of foreboding or mystery that some of the music I’ve written about
does. Horses, say, or Run Westy
Run’s “Bye Love”. They don’t throw open the doors of the mind with the kind of
crazy spontaneity and newness that Double Nickels On The Dime does, or define a feeling in the way that Talking Heads’ “Heaven” does. In fact, if this blog were a TV show, “Heaven” would play
at the end of each installment/episode, over the credits.
Music does a lot of things, but for a certain kind of
person, the best thing it can do is get you through. And since you never know when or from which direction the confusion is going to come flying at you next, especially at seventeen, that function – getting you through – is more useful
than drugs, sex, religion or psychoanalysis could ever be.
Uncertainty, then and now, can be both thrilling and
frightening. As I wrote in the introduction to all of this nonsense almost a
year ago, that feeling of uncertainty in 1988 was so powerful, so entrancing in
some mysterious, indefinable way, that I’ve never really been able to shake it.
There’s a kind of heaviness there, in both the positive and negative memories,
that I’ve always been pulled back to. And weirdly, I’ve always felt a sense of
obligation to it somehow, like there was something back there left undone, or
that needed checking up on. And because my life is still made up of music, and
I still listen to the music from that year with some degree of regularity,
those memories were/are always resurfacing, reminding me of….what, exactly?
That’s what I wanted to find out, and why I started writing
this. It was a therapeutic exercise, done mostly for my own psyche, to exorcise
demons and to make them dance. I did my best to make it relatable, and tried to steer it away from meaningless self-absorption. I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it ended up in that territory anyway. But I’m hoping maybe somebody could or can relate somehow.
As for me, it’s a cliché, but hey, whattaya know, it turns
out I actually feel like a weight has been lifted. Whatever it was that my
subconscious felt the need to address, that need has been satiated. I’ve
learned a lot from it, actually. Not all that I learned is
pleasant, certainly, especially the realization that I still adhere to so many of the
beliefs, habits, and points-of-view that I did when I was seventeen. Man, it is
going to be a lot of fun figuring out what to do with that.
Primarily, I learned the age-old truism that the memory is a
tricky beast – coloring the events of your life with a retrospective range of
emotions that don’t logically correspond to the truth or import of things as
they actually happened. In other words, we remember things the way we want to.
If it took forty-three posts for me to realize that boring old self-evident truth, so be it.
Really, it was worth it just for the sheer catharsis of
expunging this stuff from my brain. As a means of self-therapy, I highly recommend it.
So in that sense, it worked. Now it’s back to the everyday
confusion of modern life. Forty-one In ’12.
Hey, some of the music from ’88 still works in that context.
Cue “Heaven”.
Hey, some of the music from ’88 still works in that context.
Cue “Heaven”.
