Summer Is Always Almost Gone

September happens sometimes. It’s pretty much unavoidable, really. All your lustrous summer dreamz crushed overnight, leaving you with nothing but a half-empty container of bug spray and a keen sense of encroaching dread.

School was the culprit, the root of the mild paranoia that sets in during that strange twilight time between summer’s end and autumn’s arrival. I can’t be alone in continuing to experience that back-to-school sensation even years - decades, truly - since school was a going concern. Impending responsibility is a thing I’ve never handled particularly well, especially in those days when it would rear its demanding head after so many carefree weeks of precious wasted time. Every season is part of a cycle, sure, all about the yin/yang of decay and rejuvenation, but damn, that feeling of sunlit hours threatened by darkness, of daydreams giving way to harsh reality - it really tattooed itself on my psyche. I always wanna hang on to the dreamz.

The worst was going back to school in 1983. I was twelve, not quite old enough to date the girls who already fascinated me (too odd and awkward in any event), old enough to question whether the comics-buying habit I still ravenously fed was maybe an overly childish endeavor best abandoned. (That question had no staying power; I collected comics ‘til I was well into my twenties, still odd and awkward, just more comfortable with it.) 

Summer ‘83 had been all about late lazy nights spent disappearing into strange netherworlds via the tiny black and white television in my room, lights out, window open to the summer air. It was Twilight Zone and HBO and west coast baseball games, and it probably reveals more about the mundanity of my imagination than I should be comfortable with to admit that these nights are among the favorite times of my life. So far, anyway. Maybe one day I’ll treasure more exciting memories, but there was something about those nights, such that they now have a dreamlike, almost psychedelic pull. Like they were part of an ongoing flow, an energy that came from some kind of elsewhere. 

The primary elsewhere was actually in Atlanta, where Ted Turner’s WTBS network had begun airing Night Tracks each Friday and Saturday night from 11PM til the early morning. Night Tracks consisted of nonstop music videos for hours on end, and at the time it was a godsend for those kids not yet hooked in to the glories of MTV. Media consumption happened at a comparative snail's pace in 1983, especially if you lived in the middle of nowhere. We’d only just gotten cable a few short months before. As a music and moving image-obsessed adolescent the joy of staying up into the night getting lost in these three-and-a-half-minute worlds was irresistible, like a drug.

If the songs themselves continue to trigger tiny dopamine shots, as songs almost always do, then the videos offer up visual signifiers, the memory of which work with the same mysterious acuity as a catchy chorus or synth hook; the big red dot that marks the spot in Human League’s “Fascination” video, those eccentrically British-looking hats and glasses worn by the members of Madness in the fittingly unkempt video for “Our House” (this lyric: “And I remember how we’d play / simply waste the day away / then we’d say nothing would come between us / two dreamers”) Annie Lennox’s vivid orange hair and immaculate suit. The wild smile that somehow stays fixed on the face of the dancing girl as she whirls dervishlike through “The Safety Dance”. Decades later I’m still a little in love with her.

Video after video, all of these images and sounds in the late night hours mixed up with the stars and the night air and the impending dreams, one dreamworld giving effortless way to the next. I always fell asleep before it was over, so I was never sure when Night Tracks went off the air for the evening. This gave the impression that maybe it never really ended, like if you kept watching it would just keep going. Can a burgeoning space cadet kid be faulted for wishing those nights might keep going on and on into some kind of forever? 

Maybe the push and pull between impermanence and infinity is a fundamental facet of our existence. That great sage Cat Stevens once noted how we want things to last forever but we know they never will. Still, while I surely wanted those nights watching Night Tracks or west coast baseball games to carry me to some other place for an indeterminate time frame, I was also surely looking for anything that might stave off the certain horror of seventh grade. 

Failing that, I at least wanted the option of tuning into that trancelike summer nighttime feeling any time I wanted. It didn’t take too long to figure out that this is a thing records and tapes and (soon enough) CD’s can do - they allow a person to float away into a multi-dimensional elsewhere before drab reality sets in.

One particularly late night/early morning I was fighting off sleep when Night Tracks ran the video for Dire Straits “Romeo and Juliet”. In my hazy, bleary-eyed state I felt I was experiencing something truly unique and beautiful. An exalted plane of creative expression. Look, I was twelve. Emotional reactions tended to go big back then. Watching the video now, while not quite caught up in the same kind of thrall, I’m also not terribly disappointed. It’s quite evocative - simple but stylish, moody but humorous. It’s a fairly literal interpretation of the song; a hapless, hopeful Romeo comes calling up to a distracted Juliet’s window. The shadows and angles and weird geography of the video - it takes place in a maze - evoked in my addled and impressionable mind images of the hedge maze in The Shining, or the monolith on the moon in 2001, representations of endless mystery. Like the song itself, the video presents love as an unsolvable puzzle that humans are condemned to keep trying to figure out.

I loved and still love the way all the people in the video dance to a rhythm that is clearly not the rhythm of the song, moving with a kind of nonchalant swagger. It seems to imply that we’re all kind of shuffling along, ultimately, helplessly, dancing to our own rhythm. Near the end the title characters are seated on a couch watching their own story on a movie screen. The woman rises and saunters coolly out of the room, hips swaying in time to a tune only she can hear. The man rises to do the same but he trips and stumbles over himself on the way out. That seemed about right, given the little information I had about the inherent clumsiness of love’s pursuit. 

Luckily my sister owned the Making Movies album, and I kept listening to "Romeo and Juliet" all that summer, caught up in the story, the remembered passion, the unresolved questions. I was very taken with the sense of resignation in the song - the idea that we know we’re probably gonna get tripped up, but we keep going for it anyway, willingly, almost compulsively. I wanted very badly to live the song out. And somewhere a voice whispered, sing-song and sly, “Be careful what you wish for.”

“Romeo and Juliet” had been out for only two years, but somehow in 1983 it felt so much older. Maybe this was due to the fact that I first saw the video on a black and white television. Those used to exist. Somehow I could still infer that Annie Lennox’s hair was an unnaturally vibrant color, or that the street was strangely painted red just outside where the Human League are playing “Fascination”. I totally missed, however, the Wizard of Oz-like shift from black and white to color and back again in The Motels' video for “Suddenly Last Summer”. 

The Motels song doesn’t necessarily need that visual device to get its point across. It’s all melodrama, shot through with a hint of classic Los Angeles occult glamour. Martha Davis, voice wracked and sultry, sings about days of enchantment come and gone, then back again and gone again, replaying in memory like a dream movie. The video reinforces the mood with gauzy beach scenes, fraught with mysterious feeling, late night in broad daylight.

The song is a fever dream, a mirage. It begs you to disappear with it.

While it shares its title with a Tennessee Williams southern gothic that was later turned into a film by Joseph Mankievitz, I’ve always felt “Suddenly Last Summer” has a little Sunset Boulevard lurking at its core, a sense of old Hollywood, faded dreams, fading beauty, romance long since evaporated. A film is flashing on a screen, maybe it’s Romeo and Juliet, and someone is watching it over and over, enraptured and weary, searching for some kind of connection to some kind of real or imagined past. 

The heroine in the video is in bed dreaming, drifting in and out of sleep while reading a trashy romance novel. She wakes up having transformed into a teenager, an assortment of creepy Rosemary’s Baby old people staring from the foot of her bed. This spell is broken in typically ‘80’s fashion by the sudden appearance of the band - only the male members, had to work them in there somehow - all lined up, hats on, dressed in slimming black, doing their best to look tough and falling sadly short.

“Suddenly Last Summer” was released near the end of summer in 1983, a bit on the nose, as the song is literally about summer’s end. But then it’s also about how summer keeps on ending, over and over.

Summer is like that. It happens, and it’s full of sky and water and lust and laughter and then all of those things fade. A slow fade, apt to reverse itself periodically, feeding into an illusory sense that summer might not actually be over. All of it happening like a late-night movie on a black and white television, playing on repeat into the early morning hours, hours that at some point stop being hours and morph into a different kind of time, somewhere between right now and several lost years ahead or behind, the difference imperceptible. 

The same sensation can happen while driving in a car on a long trip, especially at night. Hours pass and life goes static, and maybe you’re not even sure where you were supposed to be going anymore. 

Robert Plant captured that feeling vividly in “Big Log”, another radio hit from late Summer ‘83. Strangely neglected in the years since its top forty run, especially given the ubiquity of so many songs by its primary creator's previous band, “Big Log” is an absolutely exquisite track. A song about movement and loneliness and the emptiness between destinations, it somehow evokes both stillness and restlessness simultaneously. “My love is in league with the freeway,” Plant sings, a lovely keening melody, a Spanish-tinted lead guitar figure adding mournful color, mixing deep longing and wanderlust. 

The promo video honed in on the driving theme, beginning with Plant pulling into an isolated gas station with car trouble. He visualises himself driving the desert highway, pausing to drift ghostlike through a seedy poolhall, a motel room, an abandoned schoolroom. It’s a little like that Twilight Zone where the guy is wandering the empty town looking for signs of life. There’s a sense of something missing or lost, some dilemma left unresolved. “There is no turning back, no.” No turning back to what? The singer doesn’t seem all that eager to turn back anyway. Whatever’s back there would only be a reminder of why moving forward is such a necessity. Finding a way forward might not seem all that enticing either; the singer’s attitude is one of resignation, he’s moving with a shrug and a sigh - may as well, nothing better to do. 

For all the semi-forlornness going on in the song, there’s also a kind of light touch at work - an ease of spirit, a sense of release. That must be what I responded to when I was twelve. Back then I would’ve done anything to get out of the house for any length of time. Driving into nowhere for no good reason was an extremely enticing proposition, a desirable fantasy on a level with almost any other, save maybe pitching for the Dodgers. 

Night driving held a particularly strong allure. Daylight was associated with school buses, textbooks, mouth-breathing classmates. Any kind of escape from that hellishness was more than welcome, especially if it involved a car with a radio, or better yet a tape deck. Those used to exist.

Why the urge to escape? I had it pretty good, in so many ways, no real hardships other than a kind of vague, inexplicable anxiety. Poverty, abuse, hunger, discrimination? Forget it, mine was a cushy world of frozen pizzas aplenty and hours spent idly watching WKRP reruns on cable television. 

That said, the comedy of being twelve years old often feels like tragedy, and the unwieldy tangle of emotions set in motion by a sea of surging hormones can make it hard to discern the difference in any case. A simple song about driving the empty highway at night can turn into a hyper-romantic reflection on super-sized feelings like desire, confusion, loneliness. I had plenty of friends in 1983, but still my biggest fear was loneliness. Who knows why, but I partly blame it on too much heavy identification with Charlie Brown, always waiting for the valentine that never comes.

Not really sure I knew what loneliness truly felt like, but at the very least songs like “Big Log” and “Romeo and Juliet” allowed for a kind of preemptive loneliness, or better yet an inoculation against future loneliness. 

We don’t really need something to feel afraid of or alienated from in order to feel the need to escape. Escape for its own sake is a downright necessary plan of action on occasion. Even when, or especially if, we don’t realize it. 

Night driving for its own sake, under a full summer moon, radio playing some forgotten song, who doesn’t need that kind of thing every now and again? Even if you can only live it out in your imagination, or vicariously, through songs or somebody telling you about a dream they had that took place on a beach somewhere so many summers ago. We can find a way.

Even if nobody’s there at the gas station and you’re left remembering whatever brought you out here into this particular nowhere, so you fall asleep in the car and dream about driving off again. 

“And the taillights dissolve with the coming of the night.”

Everything dissolves, and summer always fades away. 

It’ll come back around, probably.

The Big Red Room (4 of 4)

My father was a Bob Dylan fan. When Blood On The Tracks was released early in 1975 it immediately went into regular rotation as part of the household soundtrack. I was too young to really notice most of it, but one song - the breezy, mysterious  “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” - caught my ear and lodged itself in my imagination.

A sort of Shakespearean wild west noir set to a skipping, organ-girded rhythm, for nearly nine minutes “Lily”’s lyrics detail a quizzical, complicated scenario in which an assortment of characters experience romance and intrigue amid an ever-looming threat of violence. It ends, decidedly, if rather obliquely, in tears. My dad tried to explain to me what was happening in the song - something about a bank robbery that happens during the performance of a play, with the Jack of Hearts taking a key role in both - but I only heard the sound. Especially the singing, with Dylan’s smoky voice taking on a sly, playful drawl, maneuvering like a maze runner through the verbiage, stretching downwards  at the end of each verse, so the word ‘hearts’ becomes ‘haauuurrrts’. That’s the hook, really. To such an extent that I thought the song’s title was simply “Jack of Hearts”. Whatever drama was going on between Lily and Rosemary and Big Jim was lost on me altogether. 

The Jack of Hearts was an easily identifiable figure - some combination of joker and thief, jester and rogue. A troublemaker, maybe, but hopefully, I felt, a benevolent one. I imagined him to be stylish, funny, ultimately likeable. I still like to think that, no matter that a close reading of the lyrics reveals he is apparently actually a symbol of manipulative, Machiavellian guile. Maybe. Probably. Could be he’s simply (forgive me) a wild card; a romantic ideal for the song’s characters and the listener to dream on. 

Either way, the tumble of words and the quicksilver sound wove a kind of spell that I was eager to fall under, what with our red living room having recently become a strange realm of fear and surreality. That voodoo doll from Trilogy of Terror had really done a number on me. I needed some light relief.

If the Jack of Hearts brought some levity to my little world, it had visual accompaniment in the form of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the British comedy series then being aired in the late night time slot on American public television stations. My parents let me watch it because they thought I might like the cartoons, and they were very, very correct in that assumption.

Those cartoons were the handiwork of future film director Terry Gilliam, and in addition to Python’s usual brand of surreal humor, they regularly featured copious nudity and plenty of gratuitous blood and gore, but I don’t think I cared, or more likely I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. (And if you’re wondering what kind of monsters let their four-year-old kid sit up in the middle of the night watching things like Twilight Zone and Monty Python, I can assure you that...well, I am actually sort of wondering that, too. Eh, it was the seventies. I’m certain that my parents at the very least meant well, and probably weren’t actually all that aware of the gruesome elements at work in Python. They probably perceived it as just good, silly fun. Anyway, I’m glad they did, it made me feel as though they trusted me, and I took it as a great responsibility. Which is not to say that I didn’t get off on the cheap thrills. I did.) 

Ultimately, I just liked the careening, colorful insanity, the manic feel of it all. I imagined Dylan’s Jack of Hearts might be a character in those cartoons. Some of the same anything-can-happen vibe overlapped in both of those worlds.

The gleefully chaotic spirit at work in those cartoons and in Dylan’s song opened up space in our red living room that had previously been occupied by the perilous territory of Al Stewart’s “Roads to Moscow”; ditches and dark woods and wintry, barren fields. Into those fields suddenly flooded a wash of color, trailed by an assortment of odd, unruly characters. Some standing, some crawling. Some in the air. Carnival barkers, fire eaters, mortuary men. Grifters and saints. Spangled dancers and mid-level managers. Birds.

A bevy of rabbits filled the room. I went to the center and waited. They rushed by. Next came the lizards. Activity, then quiet. The sound of shuffling, then activity again. I looked around for the Jack of Hearts.

It was all a relief. The idea of our red living room, the center of the world as I understood it then, as both home and foreign territory was shaping up to be a mirage. If this was a place of both comfort and terror in near equal measure, then surely those modes could be molded or shaped to better fit the needs of the moment. When unease and abject fear pose a threat, and it seems they inevitably will, then a song like Dylan’s Jack of Hearts might be a ready, easily accessible antidote. And maybe all the chaos and wonder at work in late night TV, that other plane of existence, might be reflected or refracted into this plane, sort of a useful funhouse mirror. 

It felt like strength. I got up and jumped around a little, testing. It felt alright.

I noticed the faceless statue over by our front door. It was looking at me, no eyes and all. I felt like it was waiting for me to cower or flinch. Instead I walked to the door and pulled the handle forward, ready to get out.

The figure tilted its head as I walked by. I managed a nonchalant shrug and moved on.

The Big Red Room (3 of 4)

Fear is innate. We’re born crying our lungs out and from that point forward it’s all about navigating minefields of potential terrors. Some become better at it than others, and the rest of us pretend.

When I was a little kid I was predictably wide-eyed, it took a while for genuine fear to take shape, to materialize as a recognizable, definable thing in my world. Really, the only thing I was truly afraid of was that my sister might steal from my stash of lemon drops. Again.

Unease, trepidation - these things I understood. The night my family went to see Jaws they dumped me at Grandma’s house beforehand ‘cos they thought I was too young to handle it. I was extremely jealous. I wanted to see it. But they were probably right to do so, since simply looking at the poster for that movie - the shark’s black emotionless eyes, hundreds of sharp teeth headed straight for that lady swimmer - gave me a weird feeling in my stomach. Here’s the thing, though: that was a pretty intriguing feeling.

Once, I woke up in the middle of the night and found my parents awake in the living room, on the couch watching television. They allowed me to watch with them, probably because getting me to go back to sleep was too much of a hassle. What they were watching was an episode of Twilight Zone, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”. It’s the one where five figures - clown, ballerina, hobo, soldier, and bagpipe player - find themselves in the middle of a blank, colorless nowhere with no memory of who they are or how they got there. After much speculation and hand-wringing about the nature of their existence, they work up a plan to get out. Able to see a rim just above, at the top of the circular white wall surrounding them, they build a human ladder. The soldier is able to reach the edge, and get over, whereupon he plummets to the snow-covered ground below, only to be picked up by a small child several times his size. Turns out the five figures were dolls the whole time, being gathered for charity Christmas gifts.

That episode has a nice, weird atmosphere, perfect for viewing while half-awake. There amid the shadows against the red wall in our living room, the tv screen seemed like a brightly lit portal into some other plane of existence. Those characters each had a kind of primal appeal; clown, soldier, ballerina, each with its own specific mode of dress and behavior, very basic, very vivid. The mood was one of claustrophobia, accentuated by the black and white, so sharp, so stark. I was sucked in.

The ending, with the revelation that the figures were dolls, was both puzzling and unnerving. I had a lot of questions. Do dolls really come to life? Could it be that I am actually a doll? Would I ever get out of this red room? And if I did get out, could I get back in? This is where I keep my lemon drops!

The episode wasn’t particularly scary. A mild disappointment, because for whatever reason, my young mind was very infatuated with the idea of being scared. I would like to claim I had a preternatural understanding that on a psychological level experiencing vicarious fear works as an inoculation against genuine fear, but I suspect I was merely out for cheap thrills.

In classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fashion, that Twilight Zone episode would come to seem like a warm and fuzzy enterprise compared to another doll-related TV event from 1975. The movie that would irreversibly sully my heretofore pure and unwrinkled childhood consciousness was Trilogy of Terror, a TV movie that starred Karen Black in three separate segments, each written by Richard Matheson, who himself had written several classic episodes of Twilight Zone.

I was one among many thousands of Gen X’ers scarred as a young person specifically by the third segment of Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black buys a voodoo doll as a gift for her boyfriend, only to have the thing come to life and terrorize her in her own apartment for half an excruciating hour.

Based on Matheson’s fantasy classic “Prey”, the sequence is a small masterpiece of horror, with a downright brilliant performance from Black as an upwardly mobile suburbanite with troublesome mother issues. She carries the whole segment, vacillating in turns from weary nervousness to full-blown hysteria. The performance is not particularly subtle, but it is believably grueling.

Her performance is more impressive given how easy it might have been to be overshadowed by her little scene-stealing sparring partner. All sharp cheekbones, tiny crazed eyes, unkempt black hair, that damn voodoo doll is scary even when it's inanimate, so imagine the effect when it’s scuttling across the floor, shrieking. Early on Black ponders aloud, “Aren’t you an ugly thing?”. Pretty rude. No wonder it attacks her.

The reign of terror this voodoo doll inflicts on Black amounts to an extended and harrowing cat and mouse game, including plenty of eerie shuffling sounds, broken lamps, kitchen knives, and not a little bloodshed. The editing and sound design are each unusually effective. Once it has sprung to monstrous life the doll is shown only in glimpses, usually in a blur of motion and shadows, so the viewer can never quite get a fix on it. The sound it makes, sort of an obnoxious, hostile gargle, would haunt my dreams from that point forward.

I don’t think I dreamed the night I saw the movie because of course I couldn’t sleep. And that awful, raspy screech kept ringing in my brain. This despite the relatively happy ending of the story, in which (spoiler alert) both Black and the doll come out of the whole ordeal with claim to a kind of victory, the doll having survived Black’s attempt to bake it in the oven by taking possession of her body, and Black in turn now fully prepared to properly face up to her overbearing mother; with a giant knife at the ready and a big, grotesque smile spreading across her face.

I think this movie had such an effect on me because we had a small statue in our red living room that I was pretty wary of even before that voodoo doll raged across my psyche. Afterwards, forget it.

It was an odd statue, a human figure, faceless, limbs posed at awkward angles. My father had a bizarre predilection for that kind of thing. There were always statues of weird heads or misshapen torsos around. But this statue had an aura about it. That thing was not my friend. 

I’d walk by it cautiously, pretty sure it was turning its head to follow my steps. Sometimes I’d see it move. Taking a couple steps forward, jutting its arms out in a weird parody of human movement. I’d be caught there breathless and it would catch my eyes with its no-face and I could feel it giggling. A vacant, barely-there sound, muffled but unmistakably malevolent. I’d try to move and it would mock me. Standing in the doorway, still twisting its arms and legs in a senseless jerking motion. Once I even saw it kneel and curtsy. 

Maybe it was only making an attempt to communicate. To be my friend, in its strange, stop-motion way.  

Nah. I didn’t have time for that shit. Go find friends somewhere else, maybe in whatever creepy statue netherworld you materialized out of. 

I had to find some means of avoidance, some way to blot out this bizarre spectacle that the red room had birthed. I needed a way out. A song or a movie or some drawing or some companionship. Something with noise and smoke.

I needed a parade or an airshow, something with light and color, where the laughter is gentle and open and amiable.

I needed to find something to get me through. 

Don’t we all, at some point?

to be continued

 

The Big Red Room (2 of 4)

The Peanuts gang would prove to be key figures in the hot-wiring of my young imagination. The TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features a sequence in which Snoopy, fantasizing that he is a WWI flying ace, rages through an air battle in his doghouse plane and is eventually forced to crash land. He then journeys back to safety through dangerous terrain, travelling alone under the October night sky through starkly wooded areas, over barren plains, under barbed-wire, through ditches and streams. The tone of this scene is unusually moody, even bleak. It stirred something in me. 

I felt bad for Snoopy, it seemed so lonely and scary out there. I wished I could be there with him, side-by-side, helping to evade enemy capture, finding a safe route back to the pumpkin patch. And so I was. The living room - red carpet and strange shadows in every direction - became that rough terrain. The couches and chairs and tables became the various obstacles and markers along the way. I was there. Layer upon layer of fantasy - me imagining I am friends with an imaginary dog as he imagines he is a downed fighter pilot. 

There was a song that played in my house with some regularity that provided an appropriate soundtrack to that imagined journey. My sister was a fan of British singer/songwriter Al Stewart, and I became fascinated with “Roads To Moscow”, a highlight of his American breakthrough LP Past Present and Future. In stark contrast to that fanciful battle scene from the Peanuts cartoon,  “Roads to Moscow” describes in vivid and poetic detail a very real situation from a very real and terrifying time in history. 

“Roads To Moscow” is a story song, much like a traditional ballad, told in first person from the point of view of a Russian soldier during WWII. The narrator describes the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the push towards the Kremlin and subsequent turning away of the German army back towards Berlin by the Red Army, with assistance from the harsh Russian winter. After years of fighting the narrator finds himself happily returning to his home and family, only to be imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Gulags on suspicion of being a spy. According to Wikipedia the song is based loosely on the experience of the Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would go on to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about his time in the Russian labor camps.

The song’s dusky mood is established right off with a stately, insistent guitar figure, overlaid with Spanish guitar flourishes that will provide color throughout the remainder of the track. Stewart’s singing voice keeps his British accent intact, and there’s a slight sea shanty feel to the melody that makes the whole thing seem like it might have emerged from the British Isles, despite taking place mostly in Russia. 

Stewart describes the initial phase of the German invasion in terms at once practical and poetic, with the Soviet aircraft rendered useless by bombs and the muffled gunfire an increasingly less distant sound. Particularly evocative is his description of the Red Army soldiers forced to move slowly, quietly, through mist and shadows, trees and fields, crawling on all fours. This is no doubt the bit that connected the song to the scene from the Peanuts cartoon in my brain.    

“Roads To Moscow” contains echoes of Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan”, another slow, grim song about soldiers working in shadows to conquer a seemingly unconquerable enemy. It has a similar sense of pacing, of suspense and inevitability. But while Cohen’s song has a similarly quiet and haunting feel, much of its power is in its brevity, in the details it leaves out. Stewart’s approach is wider in scope, grand and cinematic. At one point Reich General Heinz Guderian is pictured as a windswept figure atop a ridge surveying the conquered territory below. Later, we get this wonderful description of destroyed German tanks in the bleak Russian winter:  

two broken tigers on fire in the night

flicker their souls to the wind

One might be forgiven for finding the poetry overly rich or the epic scale overdone, especially as the choral voices enter midway through, singing a wordless sequence of three funereal ascending notes, repeated like a Gregorian chant. I half expected to feel that way when I recently re-listened, thinking my admiration for it might be a case of fond memory obscuring schmaltz. I was only mildly surprised to find the song still quite effective, with an emotional pull that’s enhanced rather than diminished by devices like the abundant historical specifics or the dramatic, whirling string arrangement that wraps itself around the final verses. 

The momentum leading up to the denouement is hard to resist. After a combination of winter snows, tactical blunders, and Soviet resolve have driven the Germans back to Berlin, the protagonist finds himself on a train, excitedly heading home. Stewart bunches the words together in an accelerated rush, bass player at the forefront playing a spiraling, insistent pattern above the manic strings. 

Then comes the cruel, fatalistic turn towards which the song has been building. A curious thing  sometimes happens with songs that contain a clearly arranged sequence of events, especially those that do not end well. We tend to end up listening repeatedly, and despite the fact that we know exactly where things are ultimately going, we still hope each time we listen that things might turn out differently. 

One line in “Roads to Moscow” always catches me up short. The narrator is met at the train station and debriefed by officials. They ask about his short time as a prisoner of war, the Germans having captured and interrogated him for a single day before freeing him. This makes him a potential spy in the eyes of Stalin. Here’s how Stewart’s narrator describes the exchange:

"They only held me for a day - a lucky break," I say,

and then they turn and listen closer. 

That last line, with the Soviet officials turning to listen, is painful in its simplicity. Very subtly, it carries an awful and inescapable weight, a fundamental truth about human nature and its boundless capacity for suspicion and fear. We are very weak, in so many ways.

The song ends with the singer staring at the winter sky from within a prison camp, listening to the wind, bereft of hope, no doubt remembering those officers and the expressions on their faces; piercing, expectant, wheels turning. 

Millions were sent to Stalin’s Gulag on the shaky basis of paranoia and pettiness, untold numbers died there. This after the millions upon millions who died fighting in the German/Soviet conflict alone. 

It would take many years for me to catch onto that harsh reality. When I was a child I only heard the sound, the feeling. Any notion of reality, of lives lived and fought for and lost, went completely by the wayside. As I pretended to cross strange and treacherous territory, Snoopy at my side, I only heard the mystery, the dramatic build-up, the lovely melodies. That tumble of words, the shadows and mists, all of it mixing with the deep red in that living room. The way Stewart’s voice takes on that uncanny lilt on the words “You’ll never know, you’ll never know” and the way that repeated phrase would haunt my memory for years afterward, when I couldn’t remember what song they came from and had to search through all the songs on any Al Stewart albums I could find to track it down. 

Al Stewart was describing a scenario that actually existed. If I only heard an imaginary journey, it was still a potent enough concept that I wondered whether I might have to face a real one someday. 

Reality and imagination would subsequently prove to be pretty fierce combatants.

to be continued

The Big Red Room (1 of 4)

All I’ve ever really wanted to do was skirt the boundaries of this reality. I mean, without risking any kind of permanent damage to the brain or body. If possible. 

The living room in our tiny house had red carpet. A dark-ish red, maybe burgundy or maroon. Somehow, when I was a child, the redness of that room covered more space than that occupied by the carpet. It seeped into the air, into the mind, so that it became a state of being, full of trap doors and portals to other states of existence. 

That space, red space, became ground zero of my imaginative world and its many small explosions. 

One of those early explosions was triggered by a set of View-Master reels featuring characters from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Just in case you’re unaware (hey, don’t wanna assume anything, somebody mentioned Pogs to me the other day and I had no idea what they were talking about) View-Master was a popular kids toy in the seventies (maybe it still is, apparently it’s still being manufactured) that consisted of a small mechanical device, kind of like a set of binoculars, into which a circular reel was inserted, allowing the viewer to see 3-D images of cartoon characters, wildlife and geographical images or still frames from popular tv shows and movies. 

The Peanuts View-Master reels were downright surreal. Rather than direct lifts from the strip, or flat stills from the Peanuts TV cartoons, Charlie Brown and pals were brought to life via three-dimensional action figures, arranged in front of fully-decorated background sets. It looked something like claymation or stop-motion animation, only with no movement. The atmosphere created by these scenarios, if one allowed it to, could arouse a strangely disquieting mood. 

It still can.

Something about the figures - blank-faced, motionless yet on the verge of motion - was eerily off. They suggested department store mannequins that might suddenly, threateningly, spring to life. And the backgrounds, full of shadows and ominously deep colors, as in the pure  red wall of Schroeder’s music room that mirrored the red of my own living room, deepened the sense of being on an alternate plane of existence. Looking at these images was good training ground for a future in serious David Lynch appreciation. 

I wanted to get into that place, hang out with those mystery figures. They seemed like they were probably nice enough. And if things got scary, like maybe if Lucy suddenly decided to hurl that bust of Beethoven directly at me, finding a way out might prove an adventure. Maybe Snoopy could help.

The Peanuts gang would prove to be key figures in the hot-wiring of my young imagination.

to be continued

The Gray Sunday Science Project

Go find some art that you created as a child. If you have to, ask one of your parents to see if they have any of your childhood art laying around. It’ll be fun, I promise.

Here is a painting that I did when I was three years old:

Say what you want about my style, it looks like a little kid painted it, but damn, I think I had a pretty decent sense of color. For a three-year-old, anyway.

Now take the art that you did as a child and try to imagine how you might go about drawing or painting the same image today, applying whatever artistic ability or insight you’ve developed in the intervening years. 

Would you approach it in more or less the same way? Or would you find some element of the original that you like - a group of colors or shapes, maybe an idea or impression - and start from there, adding or subtracting as necessary?

Don’t think about it too hard.

Here is my modern day approach to the painting above:

Odd, that. I mean, really, the first one is full of brightness and the exuberance of childhood. The thing above is old and ragged, potentially evil.

The knee-jerk reaction is to figure that maybe the decades have beaten me down, erasing the bright-eyed optimism of youth and replacing it with bleak cynicism. Where I once saw all smiles I now see a sinister grimace.

But I don’t think that’s true. I still feel generally, if warily, optimistic. If not exuberant. Also I’m pretty sure I was actually trying to give the figure above a grin that conveyed sincerity, and it’s only the limitations of my artistic ability that resulted in something that conveyed malevolence instead.

Still like the colors, though.

I’m not really sure what any of this means, except maybe to note the various ways our brains and bodies and methods of personal expression evolve, or don’t evolve, over long periods of time.

Now save these pictures and draw the same thing again a couple decades from now.

In Between Seasons

Sometimes the period of transition is more interesting than the periods that it connects. Even when the stages of time on either side are - ostensibly, at least - full of action, sustained emotion or deep meaning, those quiet connective days in between can take on a tone of their own that lingers in the memory, or in the spirit, with peculiar vividness. 

Those strange days in late February and early March, when winter has yet to truly fade and spring has yet to fully emerge, are always tricky days to navigate. I get easily drawn back to those days in late winter 1990, a time during which I felt that my own future should have been coming into sharp focus. Instead, it was becoming more and more blurry. I’d been out of school for a short while and had a decent job at a radio station, a job that I very much liked, though my dedication to it was minimal. I knew somehow that I’d need to try something else at some point relatively soon. I had a significant other, my first more-or-less mature(ish) relationship, but the first cracks in that particular endeavor were beginning to spread at an alarming rate. The band I had formed with my best friends a couple years earlier was also crumbling, along with the solidity of our friendships. 

Nothing was at all solid anymore, yet all of this seemed to be sinking in at the speed of molasses. Day to day life rolled on slowly, with no markers designating any dividing lines between any kind of before or after.

That winter was oddly quiet and mild. Overcast, not cold. No snow. A vague, colorless haze seemed to hang in the air, and my psyche reflected it. Call it malaise, I guess. Jimmy Carter famously once used that word, and things only went downhill from there for his presidency. So maybe I could be forgiven for feeling hesitant.  

Something was going to happen soon, and I didn’t know what it was. Was I supposed to be taking some kind of action to set some kind of future in motion? 

Music, as ever, still brought some degree of assurance. On the last day of February I went into a store that specialized in stained glass but also happened to sell used records. (Those two things go together, right? No, really.) There in the bin I found Neil Young’s On the Beach. The cover, with Neil under a drab gray sky looking forlornly out at the sea, surrounded by comically ultra-seventies plastic orange lawn furniture, was an unnervingly accurate representation of my own mood at the time. 

Then those songs. This music has often been described as sad, even depressive, and that’s maybe not altogether off-base, but it is also not wholly accurate. Certainly there’s confusion and exhaustion at work, and the three long songs on side two especially contain varying degrees of melancholy; things are out of reach, torn down, waitresses are crying in the rain and Mother Goose is on the skids. And everything is a drifty, slow, bare-bones blues. However, each song also contains at least some small degree of humor, and a distinct undercurrent of hope. Neil tells a funny story about being alone at a radio interview and later invites his critics to “get together for some scenes”, presumably to find some common ground. Hell, the first song on the record is about moving on in the face of adversity. People talking shit about you behind your back? Walk on. 

Sometimes we need to see a reflection of our own feelings in order to start sorting through them.

Late at night near the end of my radio shift, I would put the station on automatic pilot and listen to the album over the studio speakers. That isolated, lonely little control room seemed like the perfect space for that music, all those wracked, ruminative songs about being worn-down, worn-out, sinking below the depths, but knowing that there will be a way out, if only because there is no other choice. “I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow.” “Sooner or later it all gets real.” The whole album might boil down to the struggle to find clarity through very dense fog. I think it genuinely helped me pull out of my own fog during those first weeks of listening to it. Periodically it has done so in the years since.

The atmosphere of those days in late winter 1990 has hovered regularly in my world like a bewildered ghost. It was a strangely quiet, reflective time, something like a calm between storms. The moody, contemplative air of On the Beach is to me the sound of that emotional transition, of someone realizing that life will go on in the face of all the good and bad and better or worse. We do stand a good chance of it being better more often than not, it just takes being a little proactive about it, right?

Snow Songs

First it’s a day in third grade, standing at the window of the classroom with my best friend, each of us begging the high crisp orange-tinted sky to deliver us, to deliver the snow. Praying, making up songs, chanting. Some kind of communion, a ritual in childspeak. Promising God we’ll stop using curse words. And afterwards the electric thrill when the snow actually comes. Celebrating in strange waves, barely believing it actually came. Curse words swiftly back in the lexicon.

Then it’s years later, walking through the snow with my father from his house to a nearby diner, and the cheap, washed-out small town feeling in that place, with those little square hamburgers, the steam and the yellow decor. Buried in the white, a rest stop between dead ends, nowhere on anybody’s map. But people keep trudging in. Who are these people? 

Weeks later, arguing with my father and demanding to be let out of the car so I can trudge through the snow back home, bitterness and confusion coursing through me. Locking myself in my room and listening to Quadrophenia, the sound reverberating, occupying the space where my sense of balance ought to be. Looking out at the endless pure white everywhere and hating it for how trapped it made me feel. 

Then it’s early in high school, looking out the same window at different snow, lights out, night, listening to Sandinista! by The Clash, but only side five, feeling like nobody else had probably ever heard that particular stretch of music before. Buried deep at the end of the side there’s “The Street Parade”, a three-minute fragment that sounds like a sketchy radio transmission from your subconscious - a steady, barely-heard heartbeat, faint, fading in and out. Getting lost in the drift of that distant ghost of a song, with all its impossible yearning and missed connections. Waiting for phone calls, feeling like you’re about to burst. Then the disappearing act, not giving in but persevering. That fractured, false start guitar pattern, over here, then somewhere else. That song and the sense of possibilities it kicks up. The white landscape gleaming under the moon, seeming to contain those possibilities. What’s possible? Maybe whatever you want, maybe a fraction of it. Maybe none! That seems pretty pessimistic, though. I guess we’ll find out eventually, but really, as far as possibilities go I’m really just hoping at that point in life for two things: A) That someone will have sex with me soon, and B) that the snow will all melt so we can get the baseball season started. 

Then a couple years later a connection is made. Walking through the snow with my girlfriend from her house to the park, hiding out together in the base of the tornado slide, hoping that moment would last, maybe into some kind of forever, if that’s a thing that exists. Is it?

Maybe we’re still there. 

We probably want out by now.

Your First Least Favorite Songs

Hating stuff is boring. It’s easy, and unproductive. And yet we sometimes strangely seem to enjoy the act of disliking the music we dislike most; just check all the random internet lists and YouTube videos of “Songs You Love To Hate”. 

We may have fun with these things, but in this age of musical plenty, not to mention abundant access, isn’t it so much easier, and healthier, to focus on the stuff we like? Sometimes I suspect we focus on stuff we dislike out of some kind of insecurity within ourselves that we don’t yet understand. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. And let’s not even get started on “guilty pleasures.” 

That said, of all the things to expend energy on hating, songs are relatively harmless. And maybe investigating why we dislike specific songs can help us shape or understand our own personal taste. 

“Love Will Keep Us Together” is an innocent song, it doesn’t deserve hatred. Yet since the days I first endured its omnipresence on pop radio I’ve hated Captain and Tenille’s huge 1975 hit with a passion most reasonable people reserve for street mimes or political lobbyists. 

It isn’t any one specific aspect of the song that inspires my loathing, it’s sunk by a whole collective gathering of musical traits - any one or two of which might be inoffensive on their own in some other song. The bounciness, the sugar-sweet melody, the perky delivery, the overwhelming cuteness of it all - it’s a perfect storm of horrific American mildness.

I’ve listened to the song recently, just to try to come to grips with it somehow, and I can recognize why so many people loved it. It’s a catchy, tight, perfectly Pop production. Light as air, well-meaning, fun. I even kind of like the way she says ‘whatever’ with the same kind of shrug that came so naturally to any number of grunge alterna-kids twenty years later.  

So maybe I just don’t want to like it. But, you know, taste is yours to do with as you please. It doesn’t bow to logic, and it doesn’t cave to pressure easily. We can nudge it in specific directions via willpower or intellect, but it mostly works from intuition and gut feeling. And my guts hate this song. Quite literally, actually. One night during the song’s reign of relentlessly bubbly terror I ate way too much Frankenberry and got sick, and in the moments of peak nausea I happened to be watching Captain and Tenille performing the song on television. So yeah, after that the song became an instant trigger for revulsion. Which explains why it endures in my world as a least-favorite song, a kind of anti-“Jumping Jack Flash”. 

“Love Will Keep Us Together” is innocuous enough, at least. It’s meant to be purely frivolous. At the other end of this spectrum is another monstrosity that hit big right around the same time, Barry Manilow’s impossibly portentous "I Write The Songs". It was written by Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, who was perhaps inspired by Brian Wilson’s frequent musings on the power of music. Brian Wilson, however, surely never came up with anything as sodden and overwrought as “I Write the Songs”. The lugubrious, desperately dramatic piano and orchestral arrangement set the tone, and the words do the rest. Manilow sings from the point of view of the original inspirational spirit, the embodiment of music itself, no less than the author of the very first song. “I AM MUSIC / and I write the songs”. Oh brother. 

Even as a small child I thought the whole thing was an overblown embarrassment, though I definitely wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way or explain why. More likely I’d just squirm and grimace and wonder why the song made me feel the opposite way that “Pinball Wizard” did. The line that makes me shake my head even now is “I write the songs of love / and special things”. Seriously, what a terrible line. Special things? What a vague, weak, borderline nonsensical term. Argh. Again, though, this is just one irritating moment. History is filled with great songs with terrible, mediocre or meaningless lyrics. It’s the bad lyric combined with the dreary pomposity of the music that makes it lethal. Damn, I feel dreary and pompous even talking about it - see what I mean about hating stuff being unproductive?  

Millions of people loved these songs, and that has to count for plenty. And the artists in question surely meant no ill will. John Denver was by all accounts a thoroughly decent guy - kind, thoughtful, funny, dedicated to philanthropic causes like environmental conservation and animal welfare. Disliking his music feels like a betrayal of common decency. 

Yet there it is, a song that stirs up an almost indescribable malaise right at the core of my soul:  “Sunshine On My Shoulders”. Denver’s 1974 number one hit should stand in stark contrast to both the bounciness of “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the pomp of “I Write The Songs” in that it is a relatively modest tune - a gentle ode to the wonders of nature. However, it earns its spot in my own personal pantheon of Songs Barely Preferable to Water Torture via the same unwieldy sappiness that permeates both of those other Billboard hits. It even has the same soporific tone and sloppy emotionalism as the Manilow song. 

“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” Somehow this first line, and everything that followed, was more than just an irritant when I was younger. Maybe this goes back to what I said earlier about disliking a certain song because it hits a nerve that exposes some kind of deep-seated insecurity. But I like sunshine and happiness as much as the next guy, I swear! 

In any case, the song filled me with a kind of existential restlessness, a bland, hopeless feeling that I couldn’t begin to understand or explain, and can’t really now. Could a lousy but ultimately benign song really provoke that kind of feeling? What happens in our brains that music can sometimes inspire such an extreme reaction?  

I dunno, maybe I’m exaggerating the effect. Doesn’t feel like it though. This is a thing that music is also good for - it allows us to feel and process genuine feelings in a way that is more or less harmless to the world at large. More or less, I said. I mean, songs have provided some degree of inspiration or motivation for any number of people to do any number of things, but those actions are ultimately that person’s choice. Just as a famous for-instance, those Beatles songs that Manson and his followers unfortunately tapped as inspirations were innocent in and of themselves. 

“Sunshine On My Shoulders” eventually earned a measure of redemption in my world when in early adulthood I worked as a DJ at my hometown’s Country/AC radio station. We had the song on our playlist in its longer album version, one that stretched past the five minute mark. This meant when it was on I had time to run down to the bathroom or grab a soda, or talk mindlessly on the phone to my friends for a few extra minutes. So despite the weird unease it still inspired when I listened closely, it eventually served a function.   

The point is that taste is wildly, ridiculously, amazingly subjective. And subject to various shifty associations. Each of our own inner pantheons of favorite music is filled with artists and songs that other people loathe. In this day and age it’s so easy to find music to love and to avoid the music you don’t care for. Why not take joy where you find it, and ignore everything else?

PS, Carl Wilson (the critic, not the Beach Boy) wrote a whole book about the nature of taste for Bloomsbury’s 33 and 1/3rd series, using Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love as a jumping-off point. It’s way more than worth the time and it’ll tell you more about the vagaries of taste and subjectivity than I ever could.