Hey, Spring. Awakening and renewal, fresh starts, clean slates. Flowers in bloom. Romances not yet crushed under the weight of cold hard reality. All the baseball teams still hopeful. Allergies.
Music floating in the air like some Shakespearean nymph playing a damn lute. You’ll remember that sound, like it or not.
*****
Does anyone else divide up the stages of their lives according to the music they were listening to at the time? I can’t be alone in this, right? Pitchfork does a regular feature asking musicians to name the songs they were listening to at various ages, in five to ten year increments, so this concept isn’t altogether a novelty of my own invention, surely. Somehow, though, Pitchfork’s exploration of the concept doesn’t really hit the bullseye on what I’m aiming for, in that it’s a little confining; it demands to know what you were listening to at ages five, ten, twenty and so on when the most important musical associations, the ones that really burned themselves into your psyche, might have happened at six or twenty-three or seventy-nine. We’re complicated. Time and taste and emotional responses are messy, haphazard things.
If the story we create for ourselves is rarely an orderly series of peaks and valleys, music offers a way to map it out. Songs create a powerful mnemonic device, a way to inscribe the wayward paths and wandering hills and all of the things we encounter in these places into our psyche, and, more subtly, into our spirit.
Think, for instance, about the best times of your life. I mean, don’t you have a few days or weeks or months, or a handful of time passages that you recall with a kind of glow, a wonder that never seems to fade? Maybe it's childhood, maybe it's an early romance. Maybe it's when you were on tour or vacation or maybe it's just after you got married. Maybe it’s so much more mundane, like some stray afternoon that you lazed around the house doing nothing but watching reruns and staring out the window. Considering the void, laughing with it. Big days. Small days. Days that run into one another in a smear of brightness and calm, energy and noise. One of those, or some combination.
Think about the songs you were listening to during those times. Doesn’t it always seem that later in life when you hear them, those songs carry the flavor and energy of those times?
It’s a classic cliché that songs have the ability to transport you back to another time in your life. It’s an idea that’s been made to seem corny and redundant by song placements in TV and films that are lazily employed to evoke some supposedly fondly remembered bygone era. Or, if you’re a certain age, by repeated exposure to all those commercials for K-Tel or Time/Life golden oldies compilation albums. “Relive the glory of your faded youth with this fantastic collection of classic disco/hard rock/new wave hits!” It almost seems mundane to point out. Trite, too obvious.
But like so many clichés, it’s mostly pretty true. And besides, if it’s such a damn boring notion how come you have absolutely no control over the way you continue to get all misty-eyed or torn up inside or fired up and obnoxious whenever you hear “Livin’ on a Prayer” or “Tears of a Clown” or “Heat of the Moment” or “Ray of Light” or “Hey Ya” or whatever songs you might have been listening to on Prom Night or Graduation or that random night in early Summer 2007 when you and Casey were hanging out and you were a little high and you felt like maybe that was the night you were finally gonna get together but you ended up just driving or walking around, cracking nervous jokes and enjoying the slight breeze and looking at the stars and it was a totally magical night anyway?
No? C’mon.
Music takes the feeling of the moment and conveniently preserves it for you. It doesn’t have to work as nostalgia, that bane of the brain that so many smart and industriously efficient people disdain with such radical fervor. It can work in the same way a photograph preserves a moment, or the way a certain scent can stir up an emotion stored up from childhood. Think gingerbread or cigarette smoke. A simple means to a simple end.
The process can be tricky. The music is not the memory itself, but it can work the same way, in that it can be false or misleading. And it can carry a weight and impact that can be difficult to control, or measure.
Case in point:
The period I’ve always thought of as the best time of my life happened in 1987, when I was sixteen years old. I bought Hüsker Dü’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories in March of that year (from Sound Shop in the mall, the receipt is still in the album jacket, I was a trainspotting nerd even at sixteen) and it became the background and the bellwether, the guiding light and talisman for the whole subsequent year.
A power-punk trio from the 80’s musical hotbed of Minneapolis, Hüsker Dü consisted of guitarist Bob Mould and drummer Grant Hart, who each wrote and sang, alternating the lead on every other ferociously catchy track, while Greg Norton wielded the bass and the immaculately manicured moustache. They became the guidance counselors I never knew I needed, interpreters of heretofore unexplainable innermost feelings. Every Warehouse song - often an individual line, guitar riff, drum fill, mixed-down glockenspiel, half-heard background vocal - became a mirror to the tenor of the times. And the times were lively.
the days go floating by so slowly in a blur - Immediately Warehouse felt different. Up to that point my favorite music had been from previous eras, so I was starved for something new that spoke to me as powerfully and directly as any of the bands from the sixties and seventies. David Fricke had written a rave review in Rolling Stone that placed the 2-LP Warehouse in the same rarefied air as the White Album and Quadrophenia, so how was I going to resist? The Hüskers were not a throwback, though, they had a sound all their own - loud, buzzing, bursting at the seams. Like every previous Hüsker Dü album, all six of which had gone under my small-town radar, Warehouse is a noisy record, the signature sonic device being the matched high end of Bob Mould’s guitar fuzz and drummer Grant Hart’s nonstop cymbal splashes. Stuffed within that sonic blur are vocal melodies that sound indelible on first listen, hooks and riffs piled one on top of the next with color added in the form of bells and whistles and backwards tapes and haunted background voices, all of it delivered with a verve and energy that made the whole thing sound incredibly fresh and cohesive, belying the fact that it sadly turned out to be a last gasp for the band.
For me the real clincher was the lyrics, which addressed everyday living using everyday language in a way that few other artists at the time dared. They sang with pathos about real relationships between real people. They sang about vulnerability and strength and the thin, ever-dissolving line between those two things. They sang candidly about introspection in a way that mirrored the soul-searching and yearning that comes naturally to sixteen year-olds, always acknowledging the complexity involved in sorting through messy emotions, never giving in to cynicism or cheap sentimentality, never becoming overbearing. It was easy to trust them.
The first song on the record gave the orders. The stinging, stirring guitar figure that announces “These Important Years” is a properly authoritative herald for the treatise to come, in which Bob Mould instructs the presumably teenage listener to gut through the boring pleasantries and unrelenting drudgery of day to day life and learn to sift through the hesitations and revelations that will end up making you feel like YOU. The song begs the listener to roll with the right now and not take any of it for granted, no matter the exchange in tears or dashed expectations. I took it to heart. Fully and absolutely, no questions asked, no alternatives considered.
The record stayed on my turntable for weeks. The colorful, kaleidoscopic images from the front and back cover appeared in my vision everywhere I went, like hallucinations. The liner notes - all about making adjustments amid trying circumstances - inscribed themselves on my brain like sacred text. “Revolution begins at home, preferably in the bathroom mirror.”
The days started to blend together with the songs and vice versa, a different song for whatever the emotional tone of the day demanded. Sometimes the songs themselves set the tone; “Ice Cold Ice” evoking chaos and apocalyptic dread, “Bed of Nails” the grin-and-bear-it courage of facing some scary situation. Mould’s breathless celebration of new romance in “Could You Be The One”, the pure power-pop thrill of that song leading into Hart’s ramshackle “Too Much Spice” with its warning to slow down and take it easy. Sometimes the joy was purely musical, a motif that gets stuck in the brain, as in the clipped, stuttering riff of “It’s Not Peculiar” or the roiling tension and release of “Tell You Why Tomorrow”, with those drum rolls between verses containing multitudes.
Crucially, this album happened to happen simultaneously with a good deal of groundbreaking and newness in my teenage life: first love, first close friends, all of us leaning into the buzz of getting to know each other, performing publicly, exploring, learning to enjoy the parties and driving around and goofy antics that we’d only seen in movies prior to these times. Warehouse was the soundtrack to it all, in and out, background and foreground. It made navigating the terrain so much easier.
*****
No matter how cursed or charmed one’s life might be, we spend most of our days in an emotional limbo. The switch from the mundane to the sublime is rarely marked by some grand occasion, it happens gradually, almost subliminally. There’s no abrupt beginning, no moment when the light switches on. One day you look around and realize that a period of consecutive days or weeks now sparkles in the memory like some ridiculous jewel.
If writing is a means of trying to work out some kind of question, solve some kind of problem, then this is my exercise in that kind of emotional detective work. The MacGuffin is 1987, glimmering like a question mark in my mind’s eye, with so many moments, days, occasions, all of them lingering so obtrusively in the mind that it seems something must be done with them. This is at least partially a result of the music that soundtracked the time, each song so inextricably linked with a particular moment that I can’t consider one without considering both.
The symbiosis (some might call it confusion) between songs and reality has always been a fundamental facet of my experience on Planet Earth, but it reached a kind of apotheosis during this time. Bob Mould sang “These are your important years / you better make them last” and I wonder if it was my unwavering willingness to adhere to that command that made the memory of the following months glow so vividly for so long.
A few for-instances:
and if it’s so bad then it should be alright by now - As so many things do, it starts with one person in a bedroom, dreaming of the outside world. One conduit to that world was radio, particularly the local college station that functioned as our little town’s alternative to the commercial stations that otherwise dominated. We all listened to it regularly. I liked a show called “Altered States” that aired at nine each Thursday. I would record chunks of this show on cassette. At the time, the DJ’s sounded so knowledgeable, so worldly and wise, like Professors of Cool, but when I re-listened to these tapes many years later I was amused to find that they sounded more like smartass kids. I’m glad they did what they did, though. These shows were the only way to hear all of the bands I’d been reading about; Siouxsie and the Banshees, Dead Kennedys, Sonic Youth, so many others. I didn’t love all of it, but even the stuff I didn’t like sounded fresh, out of the ordinary, and that was enough to go on. One song I caught on tape was The Mighty Lemon Drops’ “My Biggest Thrill”, the sound of which was not really so unique, in fact it’s a pretty standard example of what was then called “college rock” - jangly, hooky, propulsive, just enough edge to keep it off commercial radio. Ebullient on the surface, but lovelorn at its core, I was a perfect mark for the sound and sentiment. “I can’t understand why I’m sad about you”, sung dejectedly but forcefully, all rushing along on the kind of buoyant, chiming riff that can carry your otherwise listless spirit into some more hallowed emotional ground, or at least through the hallways on the way from class to class. It was like a kind of armor or escape hatch. Necessary in a way you can’t know until you’re remembering it decades later.
a thousand dreams that would awake me - The way friend groups fall together is a curious thing. There’s a kind of random quality to it, but the randomness morphs into synergy - a couple of friends meet up with a couple other friends and discover a sense of belonging, an unexpected chemistry that everyone wants more of. It’s almost like the process of falling in love, only a collective version of it. In cars and buses and classrooms and restaurants my little friend group came together, the conversation swirling and flowing with music ever-present, always. We were part of our high school's Speech and Drama team, and the tournaments we regularly attended constituted the most excitement most of us had known up to that point. Always with R.E.M. or the Violent Femmes or The Clash or Hüsker Dü in the background of the chatter and movement. Sometimes the tone of the music was altogether incongruous with the situation at hand; at the State tournament after a long day of performing our teenage hearts out, relaxing in the van while waiting for the finals participants to be announced, four or five of us sharing stories about our day, joking around. Time dissolving, dreams awakening. It’s sunny. And playing on the tape deck in the midst of all this blooming affection is “Venus in Furs”, The Velvet Underground’s black-hearted paean to sadomasochism. John Cale’s viola breathing sinister life into Lou Reed’s blank-toned invitation to taste the whip and bleed. I woulda settled for some hand-holding, maybe some light making out, but that music sounded so right in that moment.
Sad eyes crooked crosses - I was falling hard for Maggie, my partner in duet acting, and around this time we entered into what would be my first fumbling romantic relationship. U2’s The Joshua Tree had just been released, so all of those songs were everywhere, and are therefore now inextricably linked with those days. It’s almost too perfect, like it happened in some sappy eighties coming-of-age movie - our first kiss happened while “With or Without You” was literally playing in the background, as if some multi-dimensional Music Supervisor had put it there on purpose. But it was unavoidable, really. Lost in the subsequent decades of canonization is the fact that Joshua Tree so instantly arrived into the cultural firmament as a ready-made classic. Rolling Stone had run a rave review prior to its release, and given the build-up - U2 made one of the more impactful appearances at Live Aid in 1985, and it had been nearly three years since their last studio album, a really long time back then - the world was eager for it. The world was also beset by a kind of spiritual exhaustion (cocaine and greed do wear down the soul) and on the lookout for something suitably serious and yearning. And if anyone knows about seriousness and yearning, it’s teenagers. My little clan couldn’t wait for The Joshua Tree and on the day of release we feverishly communicated our enthusiasm via a series of telephone calls to each other. Max liked “Trip Through Your Wires”, which all of us for whatever reason thought sounded like R.E.M. Elliot loved “Exit” and the way it pulsed and vibrated so tensely before leading into the quiet fadeaway of “Mothers of the Disappeared”. I loved the first three tracks, the singles, each of them slathered in the kind of drama and grandeur that makes people love or loathe U2. I was so unmoved by “Bullet the Blue Sky”, however, that when I made a tape of the album for Maggie I left that song off of it in order to fit the whole thing onto one side of a forty-five minute cassette. She heard it a year later on the soundtrack to Rattle and Hum and thought it was a new song. Her favorite song on the album was “Running to Stand Still”, which she taught herself to play on the old piano that resided in the downstairs den of her house. So now of course whenever I hear that song it calls up the scent of that room. It smells of old books and pheromones.
you’re funny and you don’t know why - Max’s house was large, roomy, with creaky wood floors and jagged shadows stretching across empty halls that connected rooms like in some labyrinthine old hotel. If there were no hidden passageways there should have been. That place was home base for the next several months, and we had a series of parties there. My favorite was the one where Marvin was showing new arrival Kristin Carter around and he stopped to make fun of Bob Higgins, who had gotten drunk and passed out on the couch. By way of introduction Marvin declared “That’s Bob Higgins, he got drunk and passed out on the couch.” To which Bob responded by wearily lifting his head, shouting “Shut up, Marvin” and spitting forcefully in Marvin’s direction, the glob arcing through the air and landing directly on Kristin’s shoes. Really our parties tended to be relatively innocent affairs, tame especially compared to the ragers we heard about or fantasized about having. Seldom did things get messy with alcohol or drugs or over-the-topness, and the thing I remember most is whatever music was happening. One morning after an extended late-night excursion we woke up strangely early (and is there any more surreal feeling than being awake and in public early after an all-night event?) and went immediately to the mall where Max and I each bought a cassette, this in the days when the mere act of buying an album could feel like a watershed occasion, no matter the response to said album. R.E.M.’s Dead Letter Office was released that week and the first track was their cover of “Crazy”, a song by R.E.M.’s fellow Athenians Pylon. Spooky and spiraling, guitars and slurred voices meshing like cobwebs. Shaking heads and shaking arms and nothing can hurt you. Pylon were also represented on the tape that Max got, the soundtrack to Athens, GA/Inside Out, a documentary about a music scene that seemed so far away from us in every way despite having been filmed only a couple hours away from where we lived, only a year or two prior. The Squalls’ “Na Na Na Na” is the lead track - an insistent, garagey guitar riff and spectral organ giving a melancholy undercurrent to a simple, almost bouncy song about taking a chance on asking the girl to dance. It broods and flows and it demands action, all while flailing about gently, laughing at itself. It’s aural innocence, and it threw a kind of umbrella over me and all of the people around me, protecting us from any and all danger. These albums didn’t become staples or classics like some of the other records of the time, but those two leadoff tracks stand out in the memory as emblematic, lost theme songs, each track’s flurry of nonsense syllables and giddy momentum now like artifacts from some expedition into the ancient ruins of Max’s old house, with its empty rooms and echoey spaces ringing with the vaguely annoying if mildly amusing sound of smartass kids.
another way to count the things you haven’t got - Sometimes a particular cassette tape would get carried around like some kind of magical icon. In practical terms it functioned like a tool, there to be put to good use in the right situation, like a wrench or a tire iron. Often the tape itself came to feel symbolic of a specific emotion, or a whole set of emotions. Sometimes it could be used like medicine, as on Prom night, when Elliot’s copy of Warehouse came to the rescue of my wounded heart. Maggie was of course spending the evening with her supposedly former boyfriend and I was brooding as only a sullen teenager can brood. That night was like some teenage version of Long Day's Journey Into Night. Anticipation, gathering of friends, moods shifting, giddiness giving way to bad temper, music and shadows rising and falling, desperation, hilarity, exhaustion. With Maggie and her boy long gone from the premises, Elliot and I sat in a parked car, watching the sun rise, listening to Warehouse. Me clutching the cassette case like it was a lifeline, assurance that the world was not irreversibly tragic and unfair. That experience was a balm, a calming of the thunderstorm inside. I was wrecked and I needed it so badly. I’m still grateful for those few minutes.
praying by the weekend I can earn enough for us - As spring was subliminally dissolving into summer, Elliot helped me secure what would have been my first job, working at the same fast food place he did. (he was dating a girl named Tina, and Max and I had a running joke that we were at some point going to go through the drive-thru and shout “Two waters, please, and Tina’s pregnant!” We never did it.) No sooner had I been hired than I decided I wasn’t ready to succumb to the working world just yet. I never reported for duty. It’s a decision I didn’t come to regret, and in fact, several decades later I still feel a good deal of relief that I didn’t take that job. How many hours of driving around aimlessly listening to music might I have missed out on? From the mall to Burger King and back to Max’s house again, it’s the sounds of XTC and REM and the Velvets that connect the dots from place to place, between here and there. XTC’s Skylarking was especially perfect, being a concept album about being young, free, alive and in love, wrapped in the calm and newness of warm weather. Grass and umbrellas and fireflies and big days coming and going. Then “Earn Enough For Us” jumps out of the speakers with bright, unapologetic fanfare. It’s a song about a guy who’s willing to get two jobs to support his wife and unborn child, but it’s the big, swooping, undeniable melody that imbeds it in your soul, and now it’s the sound of movement, of glee, of relief that I’m not actually mopping up the men’s restroom or cleaning the fry vat.
carry roses, make promises by the hour - Max’s front yard loomed high over a pretty busy road in our little town. Often Elliot and I would stay over at his house and we’d find ourselves sitting on lawn chairs outside in the hours after midnight watching the cars go by. Once we saw our English teacher drive by at 4AM. Where the hell was she going at that hour? Summer job? Drug connection? Illicit affair? We’d been hanging out, listening to music, talking about it, talking about our lives, our favorite things, our insecurities, hopes, lusts, dreads. The grass in that yard - I’m realizing now how much of 1987 has layers of green on it - a verdance and vitality that didn’t seem to carry over to subsequent years. A mirage, maybe. I remember being out in that yard under the stars at some hour that probably can’t even be identified on a clock and I had Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” on the brain, relentless like soft rain beating at the glass, and I was sing-speaking the words out loud, accompanied by music that only I could hear. Statues made of matchsticks were tumbling into one another and a tangle of guitar figures was tracing the path through each blade of grass and the melody drifted like clouds down to the raven at the window with a broken wing. Elliot and Max were very taken by those lyrics and we were all Bob Dylan fans together that night and it was one of the first times I’d felt a sense of connecting more than superficially over music with people my own age. It’s all about connection, right? There was a giant tree in Max’s yard, old, with branches that curved down to the ground, heavy with dark, fuzz-covered leaves. It gave off a sense of being regal and wise, and I’d pretend I was communicating with it, communing with it, Elliot or Max supplying the voice of the tree, ordering me to take off my pants and run free or renounce my dedication to the Dodgers, who were floundering in the standings. Silly kid games maybe but these days when I drive through town while visiting I sometimes pass by that tree and it still radiates a sense that it knows more about living than I do.
observe the blood, the rose tattoo - In July a group of us traveled to the city to see Suzanne Vega perform. It was not the first concert I’d been to, but it was the first I’d been to that featured an artist I was enthusiastic about. Suzanne Vega arrived on our little music-loving scene glowing with inherent cool, having appeared on the soundtrack to Pretty In Pink the previous year. If you were anything close to a misfit in high school, you either owned or knew someone who owned that soundtrack, usually on cassette, and along with other classics by Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths and The Psychedelic Furs, Vega’s shifty, mysteriously catchy “Left of Center” became a highlight of every alternakid gathering. By 1987 Vega was promoting her second album, Solitude Standing, which had generated “Luka”, a song about child abuse that was getting lots of radio play. Almost immediately my friends and I took the first couplet, “My name is Luka / I live on the second floor” and, belying the ultra-serious subject matter, changed it to “My name is Puke-a / I just threw up on the floor”. Vega’s self-titled first album had floated from friend to friend and stereo to stereo within our group, and my favorite song on it was and still is “Marlena On The Wall”. A prismatic mini-drama of a song, with a crazy-quilt melody that unfolds and charges forward with little time for breath. It plays like a movie, with characters coming and going and emotions flaring and abating. Or at least I think it does. Back then and still today I get the characters and the plot and mood of the song mixed up with another song from the same album, “The Queen and the Soldier”. In that song a soldier approaches Her Highness and asks why she sends him and his compatriots off to battle, wondering, reasonably, if it might be simply for her own amusement. She responds by becoming emotionally overwhelmed, crying, breaking down, a moment of vulnerability that leads the listener to imagine that the two of them might hook up and run off together. Instead, she orders him to be killed. All of this might seem pretty overwrought, but let me assure you that my teenage brain was convinced it was an appropriate metaphor for any number of situations I found myself in, and I went to great lengths imagining myself, Maggie and any number of other friends in varying roles as queen and soldier, or as the person whose days are haunted by the watchful eyes of Marlena on the wall, fighting things they can’t see, worried about their destiny that keeps changing, or, as Vega sings it, insistently, with a loving, knowing lilt in her voice, “changing / changing / changing / changing / changing.” Change is a fundamental that would rear its alarming head in due time, as it always does, but for the time being we were in a van on the way to a concert and the road was filled with people we’d like to know, or be, or pretend to be. I don’t remember much about the show, other than she opened with “Tom’s Diner” sung acapella in pitch darkness so her voice resounded ghostlike around the room, and she played the hits, “Luka” and “Left of Center” and “Marlena on the Wall”. Then on the way back we ate Frosted Mini-Wheats. It was great.
I wish we were kids again, I’d ask you to come out and play - Walking, walking, always walking. Elliot and I did not have cars, so when we were hanging out together we had to walk wherever we went. It always felt like an adventure. Or a comedy. One day while our girlfriends were both out of town, Elliot and I were out walking somewhere near the college campus. We’d been listening to side 2 of the first Timbuk 3 album, the one with the hit: “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”. The song that lingered in the mind that day was a haunting little tune at the end of the album called “I Love You In the Strangest Way”. A simple, folky track with a languid, twilit mood, the husband and wife duo harmonizing about their strange attraction. “You’re so scary now / I love you in the strangest way.” Somewhere along the way Elliot and I came across a tennis court. We created an imaginary scenario in which Tina and Maggie appeared as spectral visions, in tennis regalia, exchanging slow motion lobs and volleys on the court, turning to us, beckoning, gleam in the eyes, whispering. “Join us, boys. Come on, Elliot. C’mon JB, join us.” I was surprised by how much I wished the vision was real.
come on with the rain - The Cinematic. Nothing in our little world was good enough unless we could imagine it being part of a movie. We were always going to the movies, renting movies, imagining movies, confusing real life with movies. We saw Mannequin and Blind Date and Dragnet, each utterly pointless in its own special way, each an agreeably worry-free way to waste an hour and a half together. We even saw Ishtar and liked it! We watched a VHS copy of Monty Python’s Meaning of Life so many times the tape must have become wafer-thin. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was more than a favorite, it was an ideal for living. Full Metal Jacket was in the theater and A Clockwork Orange was a frequent rental. The latter was such a point of fascination that one day Maggie came back from a vacation bearing as a gift the Clockwork Orange soundtrack LP. Paired with her copy of Switched-On Bach, Wendy Carlos’ ominous and adventurous electronic sounds became a feature of the rest of the summer as consistently as Hüsker Dü or XTC. If I’m making a playlist, the choice track is surely the eerie and unnerving “Timesteps (Excerpt)”. It’s a fairly frightening piece of music, a nightmare fantasia, apt given its place in the movie as background music to the brainwashing sequence in the film, as Alex is subjected to horrific images of rampaging Nazis and violent rape. Synths curve and weave around each other like shady figures stalking empty streets. Disembodied vo-codored voices float around like souls overheard in Hell. Midway through, the track abruptly shifts gears into a bizarre electro-dance sequence with a crazed machine gun rhythm that emerges and eventually fades back into ghostly atmospherics. Removed from the context of the movie these sounds became less an exercise in terror and more a psychedelic reverie, transporting you into a new place that was not necessarily scary and maybe even fun, like a haunted house or a roomful of mirrors. Every situation during this time felt a little scary and a little fun and it was often hard to tell the difference, and this music worked like a comfortable bus to transport you from one to the other with as little jostling as possible.
rivers of suggestion drive me away - The way the rain and the sunshine alternated in summer 1987 was uncanny - pouring, shining, rays upon waves, one after another, until it all intermingled and came to seem like some completely new strand of weather, uniquely vibrant. R.E.M.’s Reckoning was the background and foreground to this meteorological phenomenon. It accompanied us even through the sunny parts, though right there on the spine it says “file under water” and the record’s lyrics do seem preoccupied with rain and rivers and oceans. One day, home alone, I was playing Reckoning as a storm gathered force outside and I sat watching through the screen door. Guitars chimed and jangled and mixed with the rain and green outside, Michael Stipe’s voice and swirling melodies rose out of the pooling water to stretch the word “sorry” into a long distance plea, and the way the trees swayed in time to the tumble of harmonies in “Pretty Persuasion” made it all seem like a pre-planned, choreographed thing. Then it’s the sun out of nowhere again, a strange orange hue over everything, weeds and leaves dormant like nothing has happened, and Reckoning still playing, unsent letters and stuttering rhythms, second guessing and inside rooms, all still sounding appropriate and even poignant in the light and calm. The aftermath and the prelude, cars buzzing across asphalt kicking up faint warm mist. The smell of rain on pavement in summertime is surely one of the best things this life has to offer.
ashtray floors, dirty clothes, filthy jokes - Max’s bedroom was lined with posters; Ferris Bueller with the Leisure Rules slogan in big red letters, The Cure in phosphorescent make-up, moody R.E.M. in front of a gray background, that one received directly from the official fan club. That room was the center of our summer world, it’s where we discovered music on a regular basis. Music news traveled so slowly in those days, especially in small towns. We’d heard about The Replacements well before we actually heard them. Roger and I discussed them regularly on our Sunday afternoon phone calls, just stray facts or rumors; that they would get really drunk and play nothing but covers of bad radio songs, that the guitarist wore skirts on stage, that there was a guy in the band not much older than we were, and that guy stayed in the band when they kicked his older brother, the unhinged skirt-wearing guitarist, out. This was rock’n’roll mythology that fired our minds up so that we almost didn’t care what the music sounded like. One day in late summer we finally got the chance when Max brought in Pleased to Meet Me. We accidentally listened to side 2 first. “Nevermind”, with Paul Westerberg yowling about absolution being out of the question. A sad song thematically, but with music that sweeps you up and carries you. A door opened and sun flooded into the room. I mean metaphysically, of course, but also literally - we had the door open and the sun was coming through, so, yeah. “Nevermind” is maybe the Big Starriest song in the ‘Mats catalog, a spiritual tribute to the power-pop avatars, but turn over the record and they’re called out directly in “Alex Chilton” and “I’m in love with that song” a principle I applied to pretty much every song on the album as it accompanied me to school in August, pissed off that I was still riding the bus even though I was of driving age, comforted somewhat by Westerberg’s idea that Jesus might be riding beside me, serene, divine maybe, but weirdly never buying any smokes. I could relate, 'cos I didn’t smoke either.
the stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap - Brand new cassette tapes were a small thrill back in the mid/late eighties. Those things smelled like candy. You pulled the cellophane off and it was a little like opening a Christmas gift or a pack of baseball cards, there was a moment of excitement wondering what you might find inside. And the cassettes themselves were aesthetically pleasing - at some point in the mid-eighties the record companies did away with plain white casings and started manufacturing tapes with clear outer shells, resulting in a sleek and shiny object that somehow emitted an energy that begged you to play it. I mean, CD’s were the latest technology and they sounded clear and clean but they were pretty expensive, you had to be pretty sure you were gonna really like what you were buying. Vinyl even then had that romantic thing about it, a record felt more like a lasting work of art than a disposable thing to be bought and sold. But records were also pretty pricey, and not particularly conducive to travel. Tapes were a convenient and useful alternative, then. Made to be carried around, no big deal if lost or broken, cheaper and thus more conducive to taking a chance on something unknown. One of the tapes of the summer was a Warren Zevon best-of that I carried around everywhere. We listened to it in the car, in the house, on a portable tape player in the yard, werewolves and headless mercenaries and drunk desperados following us around, shadowing every move, striking up the band, playing all night long. Some of these songs had novelty appeal, but the one that grabbed the soul and held onto it was the suitably cinematic “Desperados Under the Eaves”. A snapshot of a down-and-outer drinking his sorrows away in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, which was a place I’d never heard of, but damn it sounded so grim and romantic I felt like I wanted to go there and share a table with the narrator, both of us watching the sun set behind the palm trees, listening to the air conditioner hum. Later that summer I bought 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe. That lavender cover containing secrets beneath the cellophane. My favorite song was the floating, ethereal “Painted Desert”, with its dreamy flanged guitar and Natalie Merchant begging a lover to say how long til they can be together. It was a sentiment that resonated in a way that I did not want to acknowledge; within weeks Maggie would be leaving for college. That knowledge cast a shadow that reverberated through the elegiac “Verdi Cries”, the last song on the album. An elderly man spends his last days listening to opera, mournful piano carrying me back into Maggie’s basement den, her at the piano tentatively attempting to play U2’s “Running to Stand Still”, a sound that dovetails nicely with Warren Zevon gloomily looking away down Gower Avenue. All of it still somehow a not altogether joyless prospect, peel the cellophane, dig in a little, and there’s layers of some kind of excitement. Long nights were a fact of life and the stars and the piano and she’s about to move and you’re gonna have to let go and there’s a new school year coming and new things are gonna happen and you’re not ready for any of it and those slow sad piano notes and lalalas and running to stand still and you open up the cassette case and all of this spills out and trails off like laughter somewhere not too far away.
(here I’d like to pause and acknowledge the brief fragment of music that emerges out of nowhere at the end of R.E.M.’s Reckoning. An eerie, meandering sound, Stipe wordlessly moaning over a trail of instruments in wandering lockstep, stumbling away like restless spirits. It’s the sound of music playing the musicians rather than vice-versa. Haunted. Like my friend Taylor, who insists that Paul McCartney’s “Can You Take Me Back” improv right before “Revolution 9” on the White Album is her all-time favorite song, I sometimes believe that this fragment of sound might be my all-time favorite piece of music. At the very least, if I had to pick forty seconds of music that best exemplify the spirit of these times in my life it is this one. Carry on.)
here come the waves - All summer Maggie and I had a routine where I’d sneak in through the sliding door in the back of her house during the late night hours. This small act of rule-breaking felt thrilling, like we were pulling off some kind of covert operation. We were always highly aware of the possibility that her sleeping parents might be awakened by the slightest misstep, and it was risky enough that more than once we decided our nerves weren’t up to the task, and we’d have to find some other diversion. On one of those nights we went driving around and ended up in a parking lot somewhere in front of a strip mall. It was raining. We were listening to a cassette of The Velvet Underground, the song was "Ocean", Lou Reed singing about the sea and the waves crashing in, guitars imitating the shape of the water’s movement, languid & swirling. We sat listening and watching the water running down the windshield as if it was a movie. Light from the storefront shone through the cascading water, making blurry shapes and creating crazy refractions. Mo Tucker’s soft cymbal sounds mixed with the sound of the rain on the roof and everything was calm and alive and quiet and curious and we were glad that we’d taken the parking lot option.
who are you going to call for? - The end of summer and the new school year both loomed like an unwanted visit from that set of relatives you could never tolerate being around. We’d go walking around the track at the football field, sun fading, talking, planning, philosophizing. Already reminiscing, for God’s sake. Circles and more circles. “Good Advices” by R.E.M. was the goodbye song. The signature guitar chime, pretty and sad, Michael Stipe in wistful mode, voice rising with the melody, a slight ache, singing about the time that inevitably comes when there are no friends and no lovers. “Home is a long way away.” Yeah, it is.
*****
Only a few short months, glimmering like a palmful of gold dust. Nothing much, really. But yeah, it all hangs in the psyche, like an entity, a loud ghost demanding to be dealt with.
The perception in my brain, real or imagined, is that those days had a unique quality, an unrepeatable atmosphere. It’s as though the very air was somehow different then. And if that’s a trick of the memory, which I’m sure it is, it’s still a neat trick.
“You can never escape the past,” they say, implying that we carry the history of our lives around like tattoos on our soul. Usually this is said in regard to some kind of upheaval or trauma, some period during which the wires of our expectations or desires were irreversibly crossed. But it could just as easily apply to all your favorite days. You can’t get rid of them.
In any event it also seems that the past is never quite the way that we remember it, is it? If scores of time travel stories across generations of sci-fi tv, movies, and literature have taught us anything, it is that our memory banks organize events according to whatever story we want to tell for ourselves. We accentuate the things we want to be part of our narrative and disregard the things we don’t. Things are never as good or bad as we think they were, supposedly.
Another thing they say, also always in relation to those supposedly great days, is that you can’t go back again. Jay Gatsby be damned. Concentrate on now, plan for the future. For heaven's sake, focus.
You can’t go back there. You wouldn’t even if you could, right?
Right? Forget it, it’s long gone.
It might be long gone, but you’re still here. And those songs, they’re all still around, too.
If you can’t escape it, and you can’t go back to it either, how does one deal with the past at all?
*****
“They don’t make music like that anymore.” That’s a thing people say sometimes. They think it’s true when they’re saying it, and it might be true to a certain degree. But it isn’t really that they don’t make music like that anymore, it’s just that you’re not sixteen years old anymore. Your emotional make-up has evolved. The circumstances that existed when that music entered your life have changed.
We keep looking for the same kind of thrill or buzz that we got the first time around, the first few times around, and when it isn’t there we blame everything under the sun except the natural progression of time. We’re not haunted by the past, the past is haunted by our present.
“Poor bird flies up in the air / never getting anywhere,” Bob Mould sang, deep into side 4 of Warehouse. Through thirty-odd years since the album was the sensurround sound of my existence, the meaning in those lyrics, all of those songs, has gone through several changes. But that evolution is always haunted by that initial experience of hearing it and having my life altered by it.
Listening to Warehouse now can be tricky. I try not to listen with nostalgia, but it’s just about impossible. Much of the time I can take it at face value, hearing it as a collection of great songs played well, with passion. Other times, even though it still sounds great, at some point I’ll feel a tinge of 1987 start to creep in, like a slight, not unpleasant gnawing at the guts of my soul. And if I give in completely to the nostalgia the album starts to sound a little flat, like it isn’t simply an album of great music so much as a quaint relic from my past. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein with no electric power, trying to reanimate a corpse by sheer force of will.
Still other times the past fits more neatly into the present than I ever would have guessed it might, and the conundrums of past and present and nostalgia and newness become meaningless. Just as a for-instance, we listened to R.E.M. 's Reckoning more than anything else during summer of 1987, and in the years since then I’ve never stopped listening to that album with some degree of regularity. Rarely do more than a few months pass that I don’t throw it on. And it’s not because I’m going on some wistful trip down memory lane, I listen because I love those songs and that sound. If I want, it can surely take me to 1987, but the fact is it’s mostly because to me it still sounds fresh, like a living breathing thing.
That kind of listening is an end in itself. Music ages and so do we, but the way we listen evolves. And sometimes it can happen that songs both retain nostalgic value and continue speaking to you in new ways, telling you new things.
Also, the future is always now. New music still comes along that can inform, reflect and deepen the days. Early in 2022 Big Thief released Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, a double album of twenty songs, just like Warehouse: Songs and Stories. Unlike Warehouse, which has a uniformity of sound and a focused concentration of feeling, Dragon is all over the place; quiet folk rock, wild and keening fiddles, wild and weaving certainty, people who talk to snakes, weird tin can percussion, time escaping, general sonic experimentation. Drunken elegies, blue lightning, love love love. A lot of stuff, a world in four sides. It can absolutely fit into a person’s experience of everyday living today in exactly the way that Warehouse did in mine in 1987. It’s a small unassuming thing, and it’s an extraordinary thing.
It’s likely that in three decades time the Big Thief album will sound just as strong as it does now, even as, for some, it carries with it some kind of nostalgia for days long gone. In other words, somewhere right now there’s a sixteen-year-old person who just bought that record, and the cycle is going to repeat.
Could the Big Thief record fit into my own life now the way Warehouse did back then? Maybe. To a certain degree, under the right circumstances. I’m not experiencing any of the same things I did back then, certainly not with the same sense of wide-eyed, raw newness. But is what I’m experiencing now any less interesting, any less potentially transformative?
*****
We’re constantly being told it's dangerous to stop learning and stop growing. The reason we’re constantly being told that is because the daily grind can wear down the desire to learn new things that comes so naturally to youth. It’s so easy to forget, to lose track of the knack, or the desire, to explore, to venture outside our self-imposed boxes. We want comfort. And that desire for comfort can be inordinately powerful. It takes a strong will to resist.
But how forcefully do we really need to resist?
In the classic Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance”, Gig Young, disheveled and worn-down from the rigors of adult life, goes for a walk and accidentally re-enters the world of his childhood, a carefree, idyllic place full of milkshakes and manicured lawns and merry-go-rounds. But he discovers that he’s out-of-place, an intrusion on the sanctity of his own memories. He’s told by an acquaintance from the past that our shining moments in time are brief and we have to honor them by leaving them there in the past. “One summer per customer,” he says. To insist on more is to belabor the point. It diminishes everything.
But you know, maybe Gig Young didn’t need to go all the way back in the first place, maybe he could’ve just had a milkshake every now and again and simply enjoyed that moment for what it is. How damn hard is that?
The trouble comes when we want more. Moderation’s just not our thing, you know, especially here in America, we always want more, faster, now. And we always crave multiple trips back to the well, especially when the well keeps pulling up buckets of intoxicating youthful joy.
Sometimes I feel like I could easily slip back into that moment sitting with Maggie in her car listening to “Ocean” while watching the rainwater ebb and flow like a blurry movie across the windshield. Not only do I feel like I could go back to it, but I also feel I could maybe stick around, put the moment on repeat and just live there for a while.
Another Twilight Zone episode comes to mind here - the one where the criminal dies and thinks he’s in Heaven. It’s a lot like Earth, only all of his wishes keep coming true and he gets to do whatever he wants to do all the time. But at a certain point he realizes how boring it all is - no surprises, no bad luck, no chance that everything is going to suddenly take a turn for the worse. And therefore it’s all completely pointless. Stultifying, dull. That’s when he realizes he’s actually in Hell. Damn if Twilight Zone didn’t have a parable for every last human dream and desire.
So do you really wanna go to that moment and stay? Do you really wanna repeat it over and over again? Prince said there’s joy in repetition and I believe him, it's true, but this probably isn’t what he was talking about, his thoughts were more likely carnal in nature. But truthfully so are these, in many ways, and in any case reliving them all over and over would absolutely get stale.
Still, the fact that some memories stand out so vividly presents another problem. That night in the car in the rain with the Velvets music playing - the way it beguiles and glows, the way it shimmers in the memory - it leaves a sense of dissatisfaction, and the only way to ease that feeling seems to be by dwelling on it. Like it might stop existing or never existed at all if I don’t somehow get it validated like a parking pass. That memory, it’s my own, it belongs to me, but doggone it all, it insists on being shared, so here, you take it! I demand it. It has to be understood or I will just give up and disappear. If this memory or that memory are not properly acknowledged and Certified then everything I stand for will wither, all those days will collapse into each other and float into some netherworld. All the summers will stop coming, forever.
That’s only fear of death talking, right? Fear that our imprint isn’t so permanent, all of the emotional expenditure for naught. A legitimate fear. But it’s another ruse of the brain. Even if it all fades, and it does, we still get our claim - hopefully, if we're lucky - to a few favorite days, modest or plentiful. It’s almost built-in to society, like taxes. As the Man said, one summer per customer.
*****
One summer, or several.
Why do we shame ourselves for wanting to re-feel some element of our past? Is nostalgia really some kind of vicious disease? Maybe it’s okay to travel back in time every now and again, so long as you don’t get stuck there. Even if it isn’t really the way it’s been remembered, even if (especially if?) raw reality has been turned into an ideal, the joys accentuated and the lows eliminated until it’s all one smooth, gleaming thing.
Maybe I just wanna get a momentary taste of that gleaming thing every now and again. Brush up against it a little. Catch the scent of the den downstairs at Maggie’s house, take in the disheveled, pop-culture-saturated state of Max’s bedroom. Drive around and listen to Reckoning.
It’s only a few damn memories, a few dozen songs, how harmful can it really be if you even wanna overdo it a little? It might be unhealthy, but caramel sundaes aren’t healthy either, and I still like to eat one every so often. Can shooting the past into your veins like it’s heroin result in anything worse than a little melancholy? Anybody can handle a little melancholy.
I mean, unless maybe you start to dissolve in it. Maybe too much past leads to a kind of dissipation of the now. A dispersing of all your phases and stages until you start to unravel and you can’t make any sense out of any of it. Small specks of dust spread throughout vast eternity!
Yeah. But maybe eternity is right here on this plane of existence, and all parts of it are equal.
Time, experience, perception, it’s all made up of the same stuff. Maaan. Said the slumped, aging stoned guy in the corner. Only he was completely sober (jacked up on caffeine, really) and standing up straight and just looking for some kind of way to sort through the layers of music and memory. Give him a break.
No? Okay, sheez, time is probably just fucking linear! At least that’s the way we perceive it, so it may as well be. And that’s okay, too. There, are you satisfied, left brain?
*****
It’s part of the human condition that we want to assign categories to the timeflow of our existence; Past - not worth looking back on, learn from it and move on, Present - live in it now, savor it, it'll be over soon!, Future - better days can be in store, make sure and plan accordingly.
But maybe there's real danger in assigning too much attention to any one of these categories. We spend so much time planning for the future that we forget to live in the now, we concentrate so intensely on being here now that we neglect the lessons of the past, and/or we misread the power of that past, assigning meaning to it that may or may not be accurate.
Maybe the trick is balancing all of these temporal perceptions, allowing them to exist as they wish, or applying the lessons when necessary or planning just enough so that the plan doesn't become hopelessly confused with irrational dreams or dread.
That seems nearly possible.
And yet and yet and yet. Still.
The timeflow wants to unravel, doesn’t it?
*****
Listening to the songs that soundtracked those days in 1987 can so often feel like a dissociative exercise. It’s got to be more than some kind of shallow exercise in nostalgia, some weird means of wallowing in moments long since forgotten or misremembered. It’s more akin to home movies in which you get not only the images and sounds but also the scents and sensations of the time. Or a séance in which the spirits contacted are not those of dearly departed human beings but a set of impressions, ideas, fleeting feelings.
No, for real, it’s more than even all that. Listening to those songs…
Listening to those songs can literally reverse time and put you into those moments again!
I mean, it can, right? How else to explain the number of hours I’ve spent culling songs from the memory banks, drawing on those long golden days spent driving around with Max and Elliot, hanging out at the mall, watching movies over at Maggie’s, walking, waiting, grossing each other out, discussing dreams and phobias and fantasies into the dusky early morning hours. Eating frosted mini-wheats. All those songs carry and contain all those moments. Listening to them all together could be a means of re-accessing that timeflow. Maybe.
I mean, it’s gotta be more than some kind of fond longing for long-gone lost youth. Constructing the right playlist can be a transportive act too, can’t it?
It’s gotta be a matter of sequencing, surely. And here the breath gets quicker.
By putting the right R.E.M. song just behind or just before the right XTC or Velvet Underground song, careful to observe the way each song’s mood reflects and refracts off of the one that comes next, unerring in the flow of mood from Dylan folk-rock to Hüsker Dü noisefest, throwing in favorites from each friend of the time - Max liked Talking Heads, Marvin U2, Claire The Smiths, Sandra had that Vangelis tape that you actually grew to quite like despite your having previously only associated Vangelis with that annoyingly way-overplayed “Chariots of Fire” theme - and careful to note the change of each season because just as a for-instance 10,000 Maniacs’ “The Painted Desert” feels autumnal even though it calls out summer right there in the chorus while the Hüskers’ “Celebrated Summer” is such an autumn song despite the title, if I can just get all of these nuances down, nail the sequence, paint the corners, cover the range of moods, then maybe I can finally snap in the final piece of the key and unlock the secrets of timeflow and temporal reality.
If I can put all of these songs in exactly the right order I can surely unspool the thread of decades and rewind it so that it might ACTUALLY BE 1987 AGAIN.
I’ll commune with that tree, I’ll sneak in through the side door, I’ll hear Warehouse as a brand new thing.
Assuredly. No doubt. Yeah…
And when this playlist-induced fever falls over me, as it so often does, I call upon the Old Gods. The Anygods, the Everygods. The Only Gods that exist invisibly, anywhere, always. These beings work like sirens or muses, spinning dreams out of our otherwise mundane existence, and leaving us to make of it what we will. They stay hidden. They’re very real and I just made them up. They arrive in the form of a single figure, inasmuch as they can be measured in numbers, as they are without number, or, for that matter, gender or race or creed or code.
And I ask ‘em about all this nonsense. Why do these memories glow so brightly that it hurts the eyes? Why do I keep mixing up music and reality til I can’t tell the difference between the two? Back then the hours shone like silver, every word we spoke carried some kind of promise. Even the filthy jokes. The sun in the ever-blue sky was made of gorgeous shadow, my friends and I were made of mist and smoke. I think. But these days everything seems to be some dull series of minor inconveniences. Slow motion, fast motion, never any in between. Why do I feel like I no longer speak the same language as everyone else? Why can I no longer even turn over in bed without pulling a muscle in my leg? Don’t all these songs contain some kind of clue?
The Gods pause for a moment, and I get the feeling they’re a little taken aback that I even asked, like it’s obviously some kind of affront to their sensibilities. I can sense the myriad god-spirits within exchanging signals of mild irritation, there’s some shrugging and eye-rolling. But after a bit they respond.
And they say, “Lighten up, kid.”
I mean, I think the use of the word “kid” is unnecessarily demeaning, but I’ll be forgiving, this is, after all, an entity from Absolute Elsewhere, probably not familiar with the modern lingual politesse in our realm of existence.
Then they say some stuff I don’t really understand about timestreams and multiplicity of perspective and how I’m only seeing a tiny sliver of what I gather must be some bigger picture.
“It’ll all come out in the wash, you’ll see.”
Again, vaguely condescending, but point taken.
Then they disappear, a split-second wisp of bright orange and gold, spiraling away into the sky. Only embers left behind, as if to say “Choke on that!”
So I do.
And I gnaw on it, reflect on it, turn it over and examine it repeatedly like only an assuredly obsessive-compulsive and potentially mentally unbalanced person can.
And for better or worse, here’s what I’ve come up with:
Maybe there is no balancing any of it. I suspect that time is as hopelessly uncontrollable as the weather. Our past is neither as idyllic or horrific as we pretend, our present only as calm or chaotic as the whims of fortune or brain chemistry, our future a jumble of hopes and fears, false or fully-realized, usually turning out to be off-base in some drastic capacity. Our attempts at molding all of it to do our bidding represent one more facet of the human brain's in-built need to make sense of our consciousness so that our bodies might simply SURVIVE.
Sometimes it’s easy to falter in that attempt.
But art and life and music and emotion don’t have to be orderly, neat things. It’s practically a requirement that they don’t, actually. I mean, if you want to experience life with any degree of lust or zeal or romance, any sense of the surreal or the sublime.
If our brains have to make everything go in a specific sequence, why not have fun with it? Play around with the sequence a little, like a mixtape. Put this song in front of that one, create jarring transitions. Flow smoothly from one to the next. Delete the parts you don’t like.
Seriously, make a fucking playlist if you want, and enjoy it. Enjoy the hell out of it. Listen to some new music and enjoy that, too. Revel in it. Go deep.
Treasure some memory of being outside, walking around with your Only True Love, all your friends around, summer sky ordaining the whole scene as something close to holy. Then recognize that the weather outside right now is exactly the same as it was back then. Go walk in it, breathe it in. Exhale.
And if any of it doesn’t work, stop and move on to something else. Or just take a walk and come back to it all later. It’ll still be there, unless you decide to get rid of it on purpose. You can do that too.
Like right now I’m gonna go listen to Hüsker Dü, then after that I’m going to listen to the new Big Thief, and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of both of them. Nostalgia or newness be damned. Tomorrow I might sell those records, give up music altogether, get into motorcycles or archery.
You do what you have to.
I mean, I’m probably not gonna give up on music. I just wanna make sure every now and again to remind myself these few things…
*****
“They don’t make music like that anymore.” Wrong. Good Lord, wrong. They still make music like that, all the time, every day. What’s missing for you is some element of your past that you have trouble reconnecting to, except maybe when some stray guitar riff calls it up for you so vividly that it breathes again and for a moment you can reconnect to whatever sense of excitement or possibility existed at the time you first heard it.
And that’s the point, really, because what is all of this music, and the time in which we are listening to it, other than an exploration of potential, a consideration of possibilities? Patti Smith sang about the ‘sea of possibilities’. She was in her mid-twenties at the time but I like to imagine she was singing about teenagers. Or the teenage mindset. Even if we feel trapped in a dead-end situation - small town, dysfunctional family - we kick against it because we feel the clarion call of potential. It is a built-in feature of youth - the sense of limitless possibility. Stretching out, clarifying and receding in waves. No wonder we romanticize it.
But is it only about youth? It’s probably true that as we get older the range of possibilities diminishes. But there’s no reason to lament the loss. You can laugh about it too. Trite but true, attitude counts for the better portion of our experience, and one possibility extinguished is another born, even if you have to look hard for it. Perceptions are mutable. Music helps. Old music, new music, some combination.
Decades later, Patti Smith is still singing about the ‘sea of possibilities’. Seems to still work for her.
Being young can be advantageous, and sure, you better make it last. But maybe with a little luck and fortitude, you can carry that sense of boundless possibility around with you, right up to wherever and whatever the end is. Even that might be another set of possibilities. And if it isn’t we can pretend it is. We’ve been doing it for centuries.
Don’t worry about whether you’re a romantic sop or an acid casualty or an obsessive-compulsive oddball. Listen to those songs from all those years ago and laugh about it or cry about it or forget about it, then remember it later. Listen to something brand new, or whatever you happen to be into right now and look out the window at the rain or the trees or the traffic or the stars. Consider the ridiculous unlikelihood, the mayhem, the gorgeousness and guile of it all.
Dream on that for a while.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
