I've never participated in a blog meme before, but I really like this one from Notoriously Nice Mike:
List five songs that, when you hear them now, transport you back to a specific place and time. You can explain why, or not.
I could probably do a hundred, but I'll do the first five that come to mind and leave it at that:
1. Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen. I was 18, on a road trip with a governor's school buddy to see a third GS buddy, and we had just left a cheap-beer road house on the Albemarle County line in the middle of the night. I'd never heard the complete Born to Run album before that night, we were riding with people we'd never met before, and when that song came on the three of us looked at each other and had a big old drunken howl. I remember it because it still seems like the exact moment my adult life began.
2. Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty. Later that year (1981) I drove up to the mountains and dropped in on a girl I knew. She still lived with her parents, and her father was an enormous, blue-collar, squint-eyed, Bible-quoting Cherokee. She put City to City on the turntable in her room and every time it would finish the needle arm would reset and start over, prompting her father to bang on the door and demand to know what was going on. To this day, whenever I hear anything by Gerry Rafferty, I get turned on and terrified at the same time.
3. Should I Stay Or Should I Go, The Clash. During my sophomore year in college, I moved into a room with John Sloop and Robert Huffman, the central figures in a strange and wonderful collection of brilliant misfits who called themselves The Dead Lunetiks. All the Lunetiks were into punk and alternative music, and when Combat Rock came out, it became a group obsession. I remember walking into the room to find a bunch of them sitting around on the beds, listening to the album on John's stereo, and when it ended, they'd flip the disk and play it again. This literally went on FOR WEEKS, and the Combat Rock obsession became the subject of some contention. So now whenever I hear this wonderful old Clash song, I'm instantly transported back to that room, and I usually tune over to another radio station. It's kinda like being allergic to chocolate.
4. Low, Cracker. The only place I ever had that was really my own was the little apartment my son and I got after I left my first wife. We furnished it out of dumpsters and thrift stores and yard sales, and it was spare and simple and functional and I loved it. When I hear Low, or most any song off of Kerosene Hat, I'm back in that white-walled apartment, with its slanting afternoon sunlight cut into slices by miniblinds, in a place that was entirely mine, slowly unraveling the mystery that is Janet.
5. I Won't Back Down, Tom Petty. Elevator, The Post and Courier. In the days when working at the paper here felt like a daily psychic melee, with me at the center and completely outnumbered, I used to belt this out on my drive to the office and clench my jaw and silently mouth the words before the elevator doors opened. A word of advice: When you have to sing I Won't Back Down just to cope with a routine day, it's time to reconsider your career options.
Thanks.
Posted by: Mike | Friday, July 28, 2006 at 18:55
Dan,
Fun topic. I tried to narrow it down to those five that used to literally take my breath away. Unsurprisingly, the chronological sequence is rather compact.
1. “Bodies” (Sex Pistols), 1979. Like Daniel’s “Thunder Road” experience, this is when something in me felt more mature (laughable now). I was 16, riding around in a car with my cousin Neil, Jim Lunsford (a high school weirdo that I was just getting to know but who would become one of my best friends) and one of Jim’s friends, who never entered my life again after this. Anyway, we’re driving the streets of Asheville, NC, drinking a 12 pack, when Jim put the Pistols’ NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS on the cassette player. It was the first time I’d REALLY heard it (I mean, it was in my house at the time of its release when my brother bought it, but I never got it at the time). Semi-drunk and really enjoying the camaraderie, I was floored, emotionally overwhelmed when, during “Bodies,” the other three in the car simultaneously sang lyrics together. I wanted to be part of that, part of the energy. The rush of adrenaline is with me today. That night changed my life.
2. “Wild World” (Cat Stevens) 1986—In the Spring of my freshman year, I had gone through a religious experience (i.e., been ‘saved’), much to the chagrin of most of my dorm friends. My best friend at the time, Michael Glenn (affectionately known as Buddha) took me out one Friday afternoon to have a beer and see if he could figure out what was up with me. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, it was 10PM on a Friday night, we’d had two pitchers of beer and decided to hitchhike from Boone, NC to Chapel Hill, NC (a four hour car drive) starting that very moment. Stupid idea. We got a few piddly rides, ended up on the mountain highway, heading down toward North Wilkesboro when it began pouring rain. A couple of drunks picked us up, and they had “Tea for the Tillerman” on the stereo. I sat in the backset and almost cried. When I got back to Boone the next week, I bought almost every Cat Stevens album I could find.
3. “Tangled Up in Blue” (Bob Dylan) 1986-7??. Don’t know the exact dates. Weird phase of my life, when I was torn between too many girlfriends and didn’t know what I wanted. Dan Conover and one of my other favorite people in the world, a girl about whom I could not make up my mind (named Toast), listened to this a lot for a brief period of time. I was jealous of the time they spent listening to music together, so I should have hated this. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. Still can’t.
4. “Sitting Still” (REM) 1986-7. Throughout that year, REM was everything. I remember listening over and over and over to this song in particular, amazed at how damned cool it was, how there was finally something beyond the Pistols with this much magic. The debates over the lyrics, the hero worship, the multiple roads trips to watch them play in high school gyms and small auditoriums.
5. “Ruby My Dear” (Thelonius Monk) 1994. I love all solo Monk, but this one kills me. I first heard it during a desperate moment in my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my career, my marriage, my life. I wasn’t suicidal, but I was depressed and scared. I heard this song, and it sounded, especially with the dissonance of Monk’s chords, as if he were desperate too. I always imagined a dead person trying to say an “I love you” from the grave. It soothed me somehow. It’s the song I want played at my funeral.
Posted by: jmsloop | Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 19:38
Nice list. I remember that "Tangled Up In Blue" phase pretty well -- I guess I did have at least one good LP in my box after all.
Thing is, I think you've lost some time along the way. You're confusing 1981-83 with 1986-87. We were freshmen in 1981, and you graduated in 1985. After my tour of duty in Germany we visited you in Athens in 1987, and y'all took us on that great REM tour of the town. I remember we saw Buck carrying out his garbage.
You mentioned Monk: Not only did you introduce me to his stuff, but also to a lot of Miles Davis I hadn't heard before. I don't think I've thanked you sufficiently for that.
Now: Why is it that most of our intense musical time capsules are from our younger days? Is that feeling more or less universal? What is it about being that age that makes the connection to music so visceral?
Posted by: Daniel | Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 20:29
ARGGGGHHHI!!! signs of age. substract 4 years from numbers 2-4 (1 and 5 are right). i was calculating from when i finished college rather than when i finished high school. how creepy.
Posted by: jmsloop | Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 21:05
ARGGGGHHHI!!! signs of age. substract 4 years from numbers 2-4 (1 and 5 are right). i was calculating from when i finished college rather than when i finished high school. how creepy.
Posted by: jmsloop | Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 21:05
Man, this is fun. Let me try a few.
"Sunshine of Your Love," Cream, ca. 1992-1993. When I was in high school, I was kind of a straight arrow who sometimes got left out of the social loop. Then I met this really smart hippie/druggie guy named Tommie White who became a really good friend. There was this weird road between my neighborhood and the state hospital (another story altogether) that had a huge bump, and Tommie would hit it at 60 on the way home every day and we'd just fly. And all the while, Clapton's guitar was rattling the hell out of the speakers.
Funkytown, ca. 2003 - I don't remember the artist. But I was on a trip in rural northern Peru, in the Andes, and I'd decided to check out a major shamanism center. This Italian photographer and I caught a taxi up this muddy mountain road to the Maestro's house. We sat in on the all night ceremony, in which we were not allowed to participate, and in which there were hallucinogens made of a cactus. The next day, we rode donkeys through the Andes to these sacred lakes at like 13,000 feet. Beside the donkey walked its driver, carrying a huge boombox. It played "Funkytown" at high volume while we walked through the mist.
Every Rose Has it's Thorn, Poison - I once tried to write a long magazine feature, sans assignment, on a roadtrip to the biggest bingo parlor in the world, in Connecticut. My friend Ty, who once worked in a bingo parlor and gave me the idea, rode shotgun from Texas to Connecticut. We were both 25 and completely adrift. Ty had been to rehab like 4 times and was sort of drifting in our dead-end hometown in Texas. I had quit the Post and Courier, done a year in a volunteer program, and was trying to freelance with almost no success (I never sold the story either. It may bet appear on Xark). From Texas to Connecticut, we stopped at bingo parlors and heard stories from people who had one the lottery and people about to pawn the sterio. And every time we turned on the radio, we heard "Every Rose Has it's Thorn." When we got back, Ty bought the CD, which he burned for me. Then Poison came to our hometown (Wichita Falls, TX) and we went to the show. Cheesy, but fun.
¨
"If I Had a Million Dollars," Bare Naked Ladies, 1999: Senior week of college at Chapel Hill, nothing to do but drink beer and listen to music and worry about nothing at all. I had life figured out for about six months there, and this whimsical song summed the mood up perfectly.
"Send Me on My Way," Rusted Root, 2001-2002: I was a voluteer in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in South Texas, and six of us lived in this run down former convent in McAllen, Texas, on the Mexico border. By day, I fought slumlords for Texas Rural Legal Aid. On Friday evenings, we'd grill by the huge ant hill and prickly pear cactus in our dusty front yard, just under the neon green cross atop the church. I always played this song when we grilled. Runner up here: Tom Petty's "Time to Move On" (may not be the title), which I listened to non stop as that year wound down.
Posted by: Ben Brazil | Monday, July 31, 2006 at 19:18
"Everybody Wants To Rule The World," Tears for Fears. It's high school all over again every time I hear that song.
Posted by: Andy | Tuesday, August 01, 2006 at 13:23