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.

And It's Always 1975

What are the songs in your life that immediately trigger memories of joy, excitement, wonder? Aren’t the feelings these songs arouse so palpable as to be felt in a near-physical way? Music works like a damn time machine. My friend Mike G likes to tell the story of being at the community swimming pool as a kid in the mid seventies and hearing Wings’ “Listen to What the Man Said” on the radio, and how the blue waves and bright sun and wet concrete all combined with that song’s light, skipping tempo and warm-breeze chorus to create a whole new feeling beyond mere, momentary joy. It’s a feeling that might be indescribable except to say it’s the feeling that happened at the pool as a kid listening to “Listen What the Man Said”. It’s a feeling that still exists, accessible to him anytime because the song still exists. 

This effect doesn’t necessarily happen in an obvious, overwhelming way. The endless parade of radio hits that filtered into my consciousness beginning in the mid-seventies often cast small spells via small means. A single turn of phrase delivered with a certain style could do it, like, say, Linda Ronstadt in the measured, slow-burning intensity she brings to the build-up to the chorus of “You’re No Good”. Or maybe it could happen with an evocative mood or atmosphere, like the mysterious hint of backwoods voodoo rippling through the first half of The Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water”. These songs aren’t particularly personal favorites, though I like them well enough. Doesn’t matter, they implanted themselves in my brain and soul at a very impressionable age, and these moments within the songs still produce at the very least some tiny measure of simple pleasure or joy, and you take that kind of stuff where you find it.  

You might find it in small and large ways within the same song. Any or all of the musical hooks studded throughout David Bowie’s “Fame” - the chicken-scratch rhythm, the title repeated in a half-dozen different ways, that fuzz guitar lick that punctuates each line of the verse - may conspire to summon flashbacks of the environment I existed in at four years old, in that tiny four-bedroom house with the dark red carpet and day-glo curtains, and the accompanying strange sensation of everyday newness, in which a simple trip to Grandma’s or the grocery store may as well have been a voyage to the other side of the world. Through the years that song has roused these sensations. Except when it hasn’t. Sometimes I just enjoy the song for what it is, outside of any of the associations I’ve assigned to it. Either way, as when I was four, I still find myself waiting for that weird high-pitched voice near the end that repeats the title over and over as it floats from one speaker to the other, descending in pitch on the way down to a low, robotic moan. Again, “Fame” isn’t necessarily a favorite, even (or especially) in Bowie’s catalog, but it is dependably evocative. Weirdly elastic, both earthly and alien, it can withstand repetition.

Repetition can warp perceptions. How many times have you heard “Born to Run”? Bruce Springsteen’s signature song now seems so much a ‘signature song’ - a treatise, a summation, a big statement - that its original impact may have been blunted. We risk not hearing what’s actually there in the music because our minds are too busy responding to the associations we’ve accumulated over time. However we feel about Springsteen and his music, the temptation might be to boil it all down to a cartoon caricature. Here, for instance, he’s the shaggy street poet, the rebellious everyman singing an anthem of unbridled romanticism. Love it or hate it, we risk missing the substance of the song altogether. I remember hearing it in 1975, though, when none of these things made any difference and I was too young to understand what the difference might be anyway. Riding around in the back seat of the car - my father driving, one of his buddies in the passenger seat, conversation some kind of secret language I felt I probably ought to be learning, heavy cigarette smoke not a nuisance but an accepted given - so when the song burst out of the radio as background to all this it seemed vaguely scary, maybe a little sad, what with all that stuff about broken heroes and last chances and that whole widescreen, windswept quality that implied that everything might just explode or disappear any minute now. The song seemed very adult. In many ways, it is. If you wanna hear it that way. 

When I heard Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles” I had to hear it in whatever way I wanted, not being old enough to grasp the overtly erotic subject matter. Like Springsteen’s song it seemed very ‘adult’ as well, though I wasn’t sure in what way. All I could really grasp was that amazingly gorgeous chorus melody that rises and falls and sways and shifts, stretching the word “by” into roughly six syllables. Background vocals encouraging the lead, chattering like distractible ghosts. The whole languid atmosphere carried along by a sleazy, spaced-out keyboard sound, a dominant feature of so many early/mid-seventies songs. The melodic sensibility at work in Marty Balin’s vocal is the central magnetic pull, though, and it cast such a strong spell that it’s little wonder it took me so many years to notice the lyric that explicitly references cunnilingus.  

Misapprehension might be the defining factor in 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”. The song is almost all atmosphere - languorous, hazy, floating, threatening to disappear altogether. The lyrical approach plays with an old songwriting trope - saying one thing and meaning another. The singer repeats the title phrase like he’s trying to convince himself, while it’s obvious to the listener that he protests too much. Meanwhile we’re swept up by the mood, all the gauzy production touches that slip the song into an ethereal realm. The weirdest and most compelling touch when I was four was the disembodied voice that appears in the song’s interlude, whispering “big boys don’t cry” again and again like a mantra. I didn’t understand what that meant, the whole segment seemed out of place in the song somehow. Plus I misheard the phrase anyway - I thought he was saying the very nonsensical “keep poison quiet”. I wanted so badly to know what that meant. I thought it might be some kind of occult thing, an incantation or something, not that I would have been able to articulate it that way. That one misheard phrase affected the way I would hear the song altogether, so the whole thing seemed like something witchy. I still hear it that way. Stage whispers still freak me out.

All these songs just happened to be there, they were in the air when me and Mike G and maybe you just happened to be there, doing whatever we were doing. Maybe we would have liked the songs in any circumstance or maybe we wouldn’t have, either way they appeared and they mixed with our lives and created associations that linger way beyond the initial hearing. 

1975 happened, but it’s still happening, and we can make it happen again.