All it takes is a maudlin "love theme from" soundtrack song to shoot me back to not the feeling that it first prompted, but nostalgia for that feeling.
Or, maybe it's feeling the gap where my longing little heart once was. What is there to long for now, except the longing back then?
It's funny: the words that are embroidered all over this feeling, that I keep hearing, are ones introduced to me at the start of this era, in first semester freshman English (which, I discovered, you can procure on a welcome mat).
I'm standing backstage at whatever that space was called in the hulking white warehouse at the foot of I-794 and edge of the Third Ward. Waiting for my cue, which I believe was the first of the longer guitar chords, the ones that go dun duuuun, dah duuun. (I really should figure out what those are) in this one.
And every time I hear it, I'm there again. What I was wearing, my character's name, god, even the name of the play, I'm not sure any more without thinking harder.
But I do remember the feeling of waiting to begin something, to cross from the dimly-lit real backstage into the hot and harsh and exciting unreal.
I'm waiting to get there again, but, damn, it's a long wait, and it's filled with doing a lot of other shit that is grayscale, unending, requires brain parts that are already exhausted, too full of nitpicky details.
I'm not even sure I want to go back there, but I do know I can't stay here. As the wise man said, You don't have to go home but...
Some might think (or just the animal in my head does) that every opportunity to make something outta this blog and its/my online, er, presence, was missed, from the first blog revolution to being deemed "comedy cognoscenti" by all the Twits to doing I-don't-know-what-the-hell on TickTock or whatever, has been missed.
Here is when my bike ride to the lake would time out exactly for me to fly down the hill at the northern end of Lincoln Memorial with this song on the tape player. The water-sky line, the sun, the wind, the speed, the water on the rocks, cars climbing toward Kenwood Avenue, all of it, mine and mine forever.
Wow, this isn't as old as I thought it was. Certainly this was heard in the backseat of the car, flying down a country road--but no, that was this one, similarly a delicious R&B groove. No, this was heard when I was in fifth grade, and things were getting harder. I flunked a science test during the third or fourth week of school because, up to that point, I hadn't needed to study, do homework, think about school once I was home with Nancy Drew and Barbie and Mork and Mindy and the Bosom Buddies. What the hell? I dimly remember a big red number below 70 scrawled at the top of the test by Mr. Enoch, who we inexplicably gave a ridiculous and very late 20th century small-minded nickname involving moles (predating Austin Powers by two decades). The feel-good fourth grade was over. Nothing but homework and headaches while I strained to see the blackboard all year and then, finally, in May of fifth grade, glasses.
Maybe this gave me short-term nostalgia for a few years earlier, when life was easier.
Change is the only thing, though it hasn't been in quite some time. The contours of daily life got crushed like spaghetti going into a boiling pot, softened, and became a meal you had to eat every night for a year-plus.
Now I'm given a plate of lasagne every few days, and I'm not sure whether it's going to hold up or slide all over my plate.
I can't set the structure and choose my pasta, but, boy, I gotta try to find a way to enjoy it.
Maybe it's true what they say about it
Maybe we can't make the ends meet Maybe we'll all have to do without it Maybe this world's just incomplete
Still we all look for the truth in our lives Searching from different sides So hard living in a desperate world But we all do the best that we can
Some people see a change Some will remain the same But all of them live their lives under the gun Some see the road as clear Some say the end is here They say it's a hopeless fight, well I say I gotta try
Maybe there's too much to think about it Maybe there ain't nothin' left to say But if our time's really runnin' out Then this is no time to run away
'Cause we're destined to look for the truth in this life Blinded by tearful eyes If it's no use tryin' in a desperate world Then tell me why was I born
Some people see a change Some will remain the same But all of them live their lives under the gun Some see the road as clear Some say the end is here They say it's a hopeless fight, but I say I gotta try
Lonely-living too lonely Is it too late To turn it all around
Some people see a change Some will remain the same But all of them live their lives under the gun Some see the road as clear Some say the end is here They say it's a hopeless fight, but I say I gotta try
Someone's tryin' Someone's cryin' out While we live under the gun Someone's livin' Someone's givin' up
I'm reading Macca's 2016 biography right now, pushing to finish it (not too hard a task) before a long trip, so, of course, I'm kind of tipping on the edge of a rabbit hole with this video. The audio in the song must be the single cut, and it must have been speeded up, because he sound positively squeaky compared to the Wings at the Speed of Sound remaster from 2013 (or 14?) version that I keep coming back to.
But the sweet pleading in the Wings video is as familiar as the sun--streaming through a backseat window, angling lower as the highway rolls by. Oh, indeed, this is one of those as indelible as the vinyl seat seemed to be on your bare legs below your shorts in the car back then, summer of 76, watching the world go by and thinking that it must hold as many good things as the tinny melodies wafting back suggested. Now, what I am pondering as I need to seek the early evening summer sun, is how Linda became a musician through fortune and sheer force of will. And how, exactly, do you keep becoming something when it's all on you, and fortune seems far?
This is one from the backseat of the car. It's also one that I will never tire of, that I stop everything and hop on for the whole ride, no matter if it's from the tinny Toyota radio or coming out of a sleek device. Is it the bass line, the loping stride of it, Carrack's buttery voice, that puts my head against the seat back, gaze out the window at nothing and everything. It wasn't the words; I wouldn't have understood the knifepoint of the lyrics. I do know now what I wouldn't understand back then: you'll have scenes breaking up over and over and over again.
Spontaneous welling-up upon really hearing--really listening to the lyrics of--this? I guess it means I really want to bring the wheels of time to stop. I still want to jump off, run past the wheels, and go back because back there, everything was so much easier, less living-in-the-head and more living.
And that I think the time that stretched before, um, the last year was better. And the time before that, too. Or, maybe now is still a bit too raw, like the air after a storm, and new.
Billy was giving me words for a far-away future, only I didn't know it when I was swaying to this over my chemistry textbook with the big curly-corded mid-70s headphones on, feeling every note, but not understanding every word. Like I do now.
Every half-week, I remember what beloved First Stage Theatre Academy Director Ron said to or in regard to a deflated theatre student who wouldn't be able to take classes that particular summer: "Sometimes doing Theatre Academy means not doing Theatre Academy."
Sometimes, your absence is action.
This one keeps making moves. It's all action, now, 37 years later, without the pleader and the leader of the song.
And, sometimes, writing here means not writing here, but going outside for a walk. I need that too.
But I went back to this place that's been the weighted blanket/plate of buttery mashed potatoes for me a solid year: Styx telling me "Babe, I love you," the Dan reminding me I don't have to "do the dirty work no more," and George reiterating that the sun, here it comes.
It's amazing how well you feel when you feel well. But when there's no rain or wind or location obligation making you push through, and you're just inside the house, mostly, then you're more finely attuned to the primary vessel you're living in. And I suggest--strongly--that you really feel what you're feeling, your "astounding nervous system," when most of your external inputs have gone pfft, or mainly emanate from a computer screen or a cat, and you're not dodging raindrops, traffic, stinky train cars, or people you don't want to speak to at or around the workplace.
Or, in short, do I feel it more when I feel like shit? I think so. And a salve, aside from sleep, is vibes.
I don't know exactly what it is about the sound, if it's some kind of binaural beat created from its vibrato effect, but vibraphone soothes, smooths, emulsifies all the competing mind/body war that has, whoa, seemed to happen almost every day around here.
So I thank the vibra-godz for leading me to Bobby Hutcherson, a one time "Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition" (aren't we all) who carried on into this century what Lionel Hampton started.
I'll let vibes drive the days when I need them to.
I listened to this today because, of course, Questlove posted all the shiz about the Street Songs album. But, okay, it's this 7-minute live version of a song I never liked that's not even Rick's stuff, but god, is it a jam.
Slick Levi and Lady T are exactly what I need when I get too into the work biz. Sheets? Who gives one? I don't.
(How do I write this without any working jargon? No "aligns" or "frameworks" or "meet?")
In the absence of feelings about the time this song emerged, or about its content (this is SUCH A WORK EMAIL RIGHT NOW), I am going to pull myself out of dutiful, scheduled, timebound thinking by wondering about the genesis of it.
That I admire the freedom of improvising, and understand viscerally how that freedom happens because improvising, though improvising, still has a...framework.
What the hell do you do when, suddenly, tomorrow is presenting itself to you as a reality? And you can be done with certain ways of being, thinking, and words (bubbledropletcasespreadrestrictionmandatory) at a time within reasonable expectation? When you can have expectations?
Shit, there is real freedom in not expecting anything to happen. But when you're doing it for so long that, maybe, anything may not actually make you happy any more (if it did at all), what does make you happy?
What happens when you can't connect to that cellular-level feeling that, yup, something good is going to happen, I am going to go to X dance or walk by Y's locker and they or the events are going to respond in kind. The kind of feeling that makes someone say, I'm going to surprise you or be surprised by what happens, but I will like it?
Around 86, it was always all about longing for the Big Moments. And they happened. And if they didn't, you at least had the longing to caress and nurture with the wails of multi-tracked guitars and gooey lyrics, until another song or Y to long for replaced it.
But now is now, and there are no lockers to linger-while-you're-walking by, and you can't conceive of events because you've been in an event horizon for months. Is tomorrow too late?
This is a recycled post. This date comes up every year. Someone I never knew but who loomed over a short but significant time of my life end it on this day. I was sitting at a desk, as I have, ad infinitum, when I found out from my older-but-not-that-much-that-he-didn't-know-Nirvana boss that, yep, that was it. Or someone called me, because that's how you found out anything then, someone made a real effort of physical movement to a phone or your location to utter words to tell you. I guess someone could have mailed me a letter, but that's even more work, for chrissakes.
What I would like to repeat is this song, a perfect marriage of sound and meaning, and what I said 9 years ago about it:
I like Kurt most of all because he was a keen observer of human behavior, and I think that skill is simply visceral in this song.
Last week, I heard this in Jewel--the nice, big one on Western, where you'd expect more of an elevated, er, moment, as they say now. I finally get it, this song.
I overlooked it, the first song on The Joshua Tree, all this time, fast-forwarding my tape purchased at Rose Records on Michigan AvenueRock Records/Rolling Stones Records on Washington [edit: I think I've misremembered where and what the records store was. I was sure it was across from a Bennigans on the east side of Michigan Ave, but who can reconstruct chronology and geography from 33 years ago?] in the fall of 1987 to deeper cuts and deeper meanings. "Bullet the Blue Sky" fit my unending teen rage, "With or Without You" to whine and feel longing, and, later, "Red Hill Mining Town" and "One Tree Hill" squeezed my heart tight.
Sure, it sounds like winding through the curves of Jackson County, Kentucky, or coasting down the foothills of Virginia to sea level. This was a road-trip album.
But now, now, this song feels like freedom to me. And I don't mean the freedom to move about afforded by the bigger-footprinted, latest version of Jewel, retooled for the 2020s for the yups or whatever you'd call them now of Roscoe Village. Bigger aisles, more shelves to scan, less dust, less grumpiness.
No, it's the freedom I am going to feel so soon I don't want to even let myself think about it. Keep head down, keep in the game of working and preparing meals, keep making headway through tv episodes.
A thought, that has arrived as suddenly as there seem to be buds and sprouts on the ends of the limbs outside, lodged as I typed the wrong decade in a date: will I still be doing this in that wrong decade?
Just as I thought a decade ago?
Funny thing is, I returned to a self-designed workout I used to do alone in the group fitness room at the old gym, when it was Ballys, in a steady and clean-ish place that preceded the steep decline when LA Fitness took over, with all decisions about things like cleanliness, staffing, and classes "going through Corporate." Yes, I returned to this workout that I do on top of a BOSU, bouncing and struggling to stay steady and manipulate some weights.
But, my god, was there relief in putting my body through moves it remembers from 13-14 years ago! We can do this, it said, we can do it, captain!
I can helm my little BOSU boat, doing rows (sorry) and squats, released from what's become a ponderous and trying prison of screechy YouTube videos. Those appealed at first, and felt like being part of a class. But I was half with them, half inside myself.
On my BOSU, I'm all there, in the moment.
This all has nothing to do with Michael Franks, except that maybe he will be all I can tolerate when I am working at the computer in the ...thirties.
God, I used to love to dance to this song when it came on at the Mad Planet on Friday nights. In fact, I just typed "dance with this song," which is, indeed, what was going on. I'd fling whatever I was drinking (Leinie, and for a time Cape Codders, gah) down and, shoving aside whoever I needed to, make my way to the black square with the one-step-up stage to get busy.
Was it the 12-inch they played? I somehow think not, because I remember having to, you know, really get out there to absorb as much of the three-minutes-something I could, and I think the "sci-ii-ii-ence!" mixing would have become a drag.
No, this is better as a tight three, not with its angles and "tubes and wires" exposed and broken down and out and hiccuping (along with the vocal hiccuping) over you on that floor.
Plus, it's how Dolby imagined it: he conceived the video before he wrote the song. "Dolby saw music videos with story lines as 'short silent films with a soundtrack'." Oh, come to mama! Exactly!
Back at the Mad Planet, though: I asked then, and still do now, how could something so...mechanical be so funky?
I didn't know the bright plastic soul-y sound out of mid-80s to early 90s was a genre until the almighty algorithm served it to me. (Do I classify that delivery/discovery as random also? Stay tuned to find out. I gotta think about that one.)
Sophistipop was just a moment, but god, it was a delicious champagne punch that rose from the we-can't-play-and-we-don't-care, cynically jangly, darkly synthy, New Romantic-ruffled, and, reaching further back, blue-eyed soul ethos of 70s and 80s British pop. Maybe it emerged because the rich got richer and yuppies ran the joint in Thatcher's England, and they needed a soundtrack at their drinks parties.
Or, and this is what I think, they needed some purposely well-made and goddammit, happier music. Like we (I mean, me) do now.
This is frankly a low-ranking sophistipop entry, but I'll take it all these days. All of it. I want to feel better, and this is the power suited, spandexed elixir to get me there.
***
God, I just realized that I posted their other Big Hit a week ago. I completely forgot.
That's how it goes when most of your week is spent in here.
Even at 10, could I tell this was something from the underground? There was nothing else like it before, or after, really.
Mostly, I was enraptured (how could I not?) by the sillier lyrics, the interlude about ending up in the Man from Mars, and eating all manner of domestic and imported autos.
The future, past, and present musical tenses all linked, now I see, in this part:
Don't strain your brain, paint a train
You'll be singin' in the rain
Said don't stop to punk rock
This explains it all better than I can right now. It's hard to hear something new you heard with young ears with old(er) ears to make it new again, when you know it by heart, and now, know what it all meant.
How lucky we were then to even have an underground to surface in oh-so-delicious ways above-ground, here and here and here (again).
A new series: Songs I Associate with Landsdowne Drive.
The bow-shaped sound of Meisner's bass fit just right with looping over the hills of Landsdowne Drive. We often drove that way to get to Fayette Mall from my grandmother's house.
And it was right here where these twin apartment buildings on either side of Landsdowne, at the top of (what seemed to be) a huge hill, each with swimming pools. To my five year-old mind, these were the height of luxury. A pool! At your home! I lived in a duplex at the time so I understood rental living. (Little did I know renting and I would have what feels like a lifelong relationship.)
But with a POOL! You could run out of your door and jump into it in time with the little diddle-dit-doo-doo guitar thing in the verse after Felder's guitar solo!
These were the goals: living in the sun-soaked "new" part of town, playing in the pool with the big, bright sky arching overhead, letting One of These Nights just happen to you.
... one day that's plagued by neck/head/nose aches, has blood drawn during it, and features internet searches for things like theracanes (look it up) and three-figure side-sleeper pillows. While shedding these dollar bills, I feel my shoulderblades pinched up and together, and if I could just loosen these guys after what could be a full life lived in front of a computer.
Not something I pictured in 85, starting a new school year while pledging to follow HoJo's plain and placid advice.
Oh, now we're getting into some good stuff. March, April 86? I was asking Why Can't This Be Love (and can we hold up a minute and acknowledge it only took two or less years for VH to assemble a new lead singer and a power ballad? Diamond Dave was sorely missed--and pissed. Could the "woo" at the end of the verses be any more bland, especially when you compare it? You [don't] got charazma!)
But that's not what I came here for today, or what I mooned around the radio for then.
It was this sweet, longing one, an early-ish outing written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and among a hip-hop firmament on the soundtrack of a movie I never saw (but really want to, now that I'm still reeling from Hip-Hop Evolution).
It's kind of brilliant--no percussion, minimal rhythm, essentially a cappella. They are really singing it to you, for you.
Saying it for me in how it felt, as usual, somehow evoking early spring, the tendrils showing up, the opportunity in the air.
No memory associated with this one, though in February of 85, it would have been a cool older brother of this song, less dissonant, though, and not as troubling since Arcadia signaled trouble in DD paradise.
Also, you didn't hear me say this, but Peter Cox might just have a naturally "better" voice than Simon. Though GW certainly didn't nab a Grace Jones vocal bridge.
Maybe this is something I should scrutinize. Might as well, since I am all about rabbit, mouse, mole, and info-infinity holes these days at the expense of all else.
God, these days it's like having to drag myself to ... anything I have had to drag myself to to get here and get posting. Instead of fretting over the shift from shimmering efficiency and inspiration to slug, I'll instead list things I used to drag myself to:
the shower
the dentist
work meetings
work
bed if I fell asleep on the couch ca. 2006-09 (I blame the 11:00 pm Oprah show, going out, and Second City)
memories of what this song used to mean
the litterbox (to change it)
I guess the last one is the only one I still drag to. And work, even though "dragging oneself" is plugging in some shit and cracking open a computer. Duh.
I'm not going to the second-to-last one. When the you that once was you isn't you any more, why?
Unless it is still you. Not going to fret about that one, either.
I only have it in me to recycle today. But I did stumble across this randomly, which may be/can be/okay, I'm just remembering is a principle of this blog. This week, having my act together means barely feeding/clothing/cleaning self and staying focused. Is it the persistent sameness of each week/day/month(!!!) inside my head, inside these walls, inside the boundaries of Bryn Mawr, Ainslie, Western and the river? Lack of stimuli? Lack of scenery? Lack of--oh my god, I've lived in the landscape inside my mind for how long?
But it's changing. Outdoors is waking up, shaking off two feet of dingy snow, squinting up to the ever-higher-each-day sun to say, oh, YES, babe, we're here, we're ready, it's on, donkey kong, and kick February's glum backside. Hell, it's kicking more backsides than you'd see in an Underalls commercial.
Raw, dangerous to the shoes, and full of surprises for uncovered extremities, shouting in birdsong, and unfailingly unpredictable. But Jobim can describe it better:
Waters of March
A stick, a stone, It's the end of the road, It's the rest of a stump, It's a little alone
It's a sliver of glass, It is life, it's the sun, It is night, it is death, It's a trap, it's a gun
The oak when it blooms, A fox in the brush, A knot in the wood, The song of a thrush
The wood of the wind, A cliff, a fall, A scratch, a lump, It is nothing at all
It's the wind blowing free, It's the end of the slope, It's a beam, it's a void, It's a hunch, it's a hope
And the river bank talks of the waters of March, It's the end of the strain, The joy in your heart
The foot, the ground, The flesh and the bone, The beat of the road, A slingshot's stone
A fish, a flash, A silvery glow, A fight, a bet, The range of a bow
The bed of the well, The end of the line, The dismay in the face, It's a loss, it's a find
A spear, a spike, A point, a nail, A drip, a drop, The end of the tale
A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light, The shot of a gun in the dead of the night
A mile, a must, A thrust, a bump, It's a girl, it's a rhyme, It's a cold, it's the mumps
The plan of the house, The body in bed, And the car that got stuck, It's the mud, it's the mud
Afloat, adrift, A flight, a wing, A hawk, a quail, The promise of spring
And the riverbank talks of the waters of March, It's the promise of life It's the joy in your heart
A stick, a stone, It's the end of the road It's the rest of a stump, It's a little alone
A snake, a stick, It is John, it is Joe, It's a thorn in your hand and a cut in your toe
A point, a grain, A bee, a bite, A blink, a buzzard, A sudden stroke of night
A pin, a needle, A sting, a pain, A snail, a riddle, A wasp, a stain
A pass in the mountains, A horse and a mule, In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue
And the riverbank talks of the waters of March, It's the promise of life in your heart, in your heart
A stick, a stone, The end of the road, The rest of a stump, A lonesome road
A sliver of glass, A life, the sun, A knife, a death, The end of the run
And the riverbank talks of the waters of March, It's the end of all strain, It's the joy in your heart.
I was slapping my forehead while the kitchen radio (you always gotta have one there) blared this one over the half-unpacked groceries.
If you want to know why I am what I am, and why I feel what I feel, listen. Just replace "every Sha-la-la-la/every Wo-o-wo-o" with "Hey now, woo! Look at that!"
Lookin' back on how it was In years gone by And the good times that I had Makes today seem rather sad So much has changed.
Or, in a word: Never Over Stuff That Always Leaves Great Attachment.
Of course, I can't even go into how embedded her voice is in my neural grooves, how it makes me feel like I am two or three or four, and being lovingly mothered, I am safe, I am home, I am clothed head to toe in polyester and all is well with the world. That cig smoke-tinged, beige, everyone shaggy, green grass and metal playthings, Ore Ida and Sesame Street world.
Was this now-clunky, then-spectacular alarm clock radio the source? I think it had been handed down to me by then, and I sure didn't get a boombox until a few years later. It was this beauty
Before it served as an alarm clock in my adulthood, waking me first with Double Q, then with KLH, and then with XRT, the alarm clock radio was a day-and-night companion, telling time, connecting me to the world outside of my bedroom, making that sanctuary feel super doubly safer, especially when down-list latter-day charters by synth pioneers played.
It's not the same, coming from the flatness of the internet. Give me the tinny speaker of the morning squawk box, sending, ethereally, a voice from another time right to me in my insomnia or sadness, dreams or waking up.
I can't stop talking about Sting sometimes--though apparently I have for the last 7 years.
Do you know how you're pulling yourself out of and/or away from one way of being and surging, imperceptibly, toward another?
Sure, this takes me back, way back, to MQ and Jennifer's room in Tower Hall, where one of them had this CD or tape, and I distinctly recall hearing half or most of the album in one sitting in their room, which overlooked the always-moaning Marquette Interchange to the south.
But since then, it's about the surging uncertainty in it. Positively tensed, and ready.
I never liked dystopian stuff. I always found it scary and, under the outright fear, too possible.
What do you do when you suspect you have been living in it? Skim the surface of it all. Look at the bloody sky and trees even if they are barren. Find birdsong where ever you can. Roll back or ahead with something like this. The best song ever written?
I think I bought this full CD sometime around 99 so I could get hold of this song. It's deeply tied to being here, so that's probably why. Or I took it off of the hands my roommate or someone* who didn't want it.
No, I acquired it likely all the walking around I did, especially on those three arteries, starting to understand the city through my feet.
Now, I'm stranded, limited to a tight grid of bungalows and brick flats and bland developer cash cows. But I can go back, if I can't walk forward right now.
I want to say more about this, but I have a headache. I have to balance hydration with the constant plume of hot air churning at me to combat the cold (which makes me pinch in my shoulders) from a space heater. Which makes me squint. Which makes a headache. And if there isn't the right volume of water to match the volume of air divided by movement out-of-doors times if there was protein for lunch: headache to the nth power.
Losing your freedom to move may result in acute nostalgia. Ask your doctor (self). Symptoms may include shopping for t-shirts that you can cut the neck out of, air drumming bongos, requesting that your friends play songs for you on the radio, and wanting to feel like you felt before when you felt/heard/saw things that you didn’t fully understand but knew were unconventional enough to make you, maybe, unconventional, too.
Causes may be Side B deep cuts that never became singles that you can repeatedly listen to that begin with the sound of a cigarette lighter (probably Silk Cut because that just sounds like what they would smoke) and include vibraphone and make you feel like palm trees are rustling overhead and you’re wearing something gauzy that looks like this.
I have this exact 12-inch, and based on when I bought it, where I bought it (most assuredly Record Bar in Turfland Mall), and where it’s from (UK import), I probably spent a lot of allowance on it. I had to be deliberate in my purchases before that next summer, when I was earning my own money, after having trudged back to the mall not to shop but to find a job, which, luckily, was within 100 feet of Record Bar.
Then, inexplicably, I heard it again while sitting in the hair salon chair, probably delivered to someone’s phone app by an algorithm seeking synthy 80s.
But algorithms can’t identify the juxtaposition of word and sound that sounds like the longing you had at the same time as leaves whipped off of trees outside of your window while you were supposed to be doing homework.
Alright, I've already written about this over twelve years ago (!), so maybe my concerns have not changed in over a decade, okay. Maybe I'm trying to get back to feeling like myself while living solely and literally (forgive me) within four building walls and a 10-block area for the last year (!).
But Starburst was the first non-child's, non-Disney record given to me in June 1978 (accompanied by the Grease soundtrack, as I noted a dozen ! years ago)--so it's also the first non-soundtrack record I had.
In other words, this was the first grown-up, adult, on-the-radio music that was solely in my possession, to play as often as I liked and damage as quickly as my small fingers could with the plastic arm of my own plastic-carry-case record player.
God! Thank you for giving me these things! A record player and records! Had I shown interest? Did other kids have these things? My friend Eva down the street did, I think Rosemary did and Ruth, of course, had her brothers playing records and getting her quickly up to speed on Bowie and Warren Zevon at a tender age.
Thank you, whoever gave me Starburst! Two lps of disco, AM pop, funk, a little bit of rock, and...Meat Loaf. Well, let the man tell you what's on it:
This is pre-might as well face it, you're addicted, slick-suited Robert Palmer, coming off of several albums with covers featuring or suggesting women undressed (so maybe there is a theme, okay). Funky, chunky, and heartwarming, though, this one is. Palmer didn't write this track; instead, it was Andy Fraser, who also wrote this song by Free, which I have thought for time immemorial was Bad Company. But then it was the same singer, so same diff. Lord above!
What? Starburst. Being introduced to the idea of "every kinda people" before third grade struck me, and stayed with me. It will pop into mind when surveying some kind of panoply of humanity, the airport, the beach, the L, or someplace that's not these four walls/ten blocks. (The slightly terrifying view of a street-sized tent of white people dining out in the suburbs this summer doesn't count.)
Actually, I've thought a lot how "each and every man's the same inside" over the last year, forcing myself to return to this fact of biology and humanity as both are ravaged by nature and nurture.
There was a lot of good music in 73, not that I'd really remember. But when I hear this one, what I remember is this:
This scene, that is, and the joys of weekly, communal destination TV viewing. As with just about everything, I need a routine and a schedule to keep up with the teevee, having lived "I have rehearsal" a good portion of my younger and adult life, and I don't find myself rushing to compare notes the moment I've finished an episode of The Crown. Though did you see that last season and whoa, what use of music throughout. Just like this scene.
I'll talk about that, or how distressingly awful Thatcher was, or even what I can remember of Lost beyond this scene. You can have the Smoke Monster, I love the sunnier stuff anyway.
You used to not run from the winter blues, scanning bright screens all the livelong day, watching TV show after TV show at your leisure and not that of the head of A/N/BC/CBS.
No, you got right down IN it, trudging through it. But a haunting soundtrack, synth songs without resolution got you through it.
Doldrums of February 86, good grief, what moody, white-sky, lachrymose glories! Nos. 15-18 alone could wrap you in pensive cashmere as you trudge, snow bits pricking your face between the tears. February 86, the shoulder-padded and Roland-ed evolutionary phase of rock bands that had once straddled, stages with guitars--Erectus. 86: Big Neanderthalic sounds, hair, sadness!
This is where I am right now. I profoundly need no words, a time with no pecking, typing, seeking a word to express what I am doing and especially to define what I am thinking. I'm talking about (though I don't want to talk) some chill out music. These guys are especially good at it.
That's where the hell this beautiful above-tropical beach is and these people mingling--oh, so mingling!--are. I didn't know Germany had relaxing-escape islands on the North Sea coast.
These dudes have the right idea. Bring everyone together someplace so untroubled and sacramental, no words are needed.
Is it the cadence, the creepy guitar? More likely, the video, this huge, angular man haunting a comfortable house, the comic tableaux of the band playing on the couch, in the dining room, the kitchen, the anthropomorphic appliances and shoes--oh, yeah, the shoes! I would have dug those white booties with the ruffle and big buttons, and the hint-of-the-70s dressy platform sandals.
I probably did. This one's pretty burned into the back of my eyeballs, so far back there that all I can do is just play over. And over. And over.
I wish it was February 1985 instead of February 2021, because then we'd all be looking at MTV and Space Shuttle launches and returns, and wondering "Where's the beef?" instead of preening and pissing on the internet constantly. Which is what I am doing right now, but that's not important right now.
I'm sure I'd feel much lighter and connected--to physical things, like papers, pens, desks carved by dozens of bored teenage hands, mildewy girls' restroom corners, cig smoke undulating out of the Faculty Lounge (and sometimes the girls' restroom corners), mimeographed exams, formaldehyde in the bio classroom, Giorgio Beverly Hills and Drakkar Noir drifting down the halls. Or like cold, glassy tv screens, permanently leaden November-March Kentucky skies, the pops of color in everyone's clothes, pops of their collars, the nubby acrylic of my sweaters from McAlpins or Jean Nicole or Deb (did I shop there?), a needle on a record, pencil lead dust on the edge of a ruler after making one third of an isosceles triangle. Baked potatoes and Pop Tarts. The wondrous web of hair spray in another girl's curls.
My heart lurching under my Oxford-cloth button down and sweater when I saw him down the hall.
You can have your “Don’t Stop,” I’ll take this sadder-than-sad I did stop believin’ tune any day of the week. Only made it to Number 23, okay with me.
Does the guitar at the end arc like crying? I think so. I didn’t in the fall of ‘83, when this was out there and unwinding from my radio and the car and the speakers at Champs during couples-skate (“Couples only”). It just sounded—and still does—like fallen leaves dusting around the ground in the wind, leaden skies overhead.
It’s been matte white or gray overhead here practically daily for the last two weeks. A plane decelerating in that opacity above is there, but you can’t see it. Sometimes its lights cut through the bank.
I’ve had a few dreams about a few people from my past recently—every other day, almost. I guess even if you have left all of the physical spaces and your heart has pragmatically been emptied of a person, something is still there, in the stratus nebulosus of your mind.
All week I've been thinking, "we are stardust." All of us, even if we don't want to be, or wish others weren't. We are, as Joni says, "billion-year-old carbon."
Considering this perspective, time means nothing. A day, a few hours, are meaningless when it comes to galactic evolution and the point in the formations and mergers and deaths that we were spit out of the elements.
No one told me about Bruce. It sounds dumb, but I didn’t understand fully how deep he is, how troubled, how truly bardic. See, he was the loquacious songs on the radio, the chronicler of “real” America guy of Born in the USA and “Born to Run,” and, between ‘83 and ‘84, the perpetrator of a long-ass video I had to sit through time and again waiting for “Rio” or “Union of the Snake” to show up on MTV. I’m on limited time, JJ and Alan, and, now that I think about it, what the hell were they doing playing this song from 1973 and video of a 1978 concert? At over 7 minutes, my guess is filling dead air.
Speaking of MTV, this one’s straight from his prime time there, though I experienced it mainly through the radio, having become occupied with things other than sneaking as much MTV as I could in drips and drops and when babysitting.
I finished his autobiography today. Now that I’m not, I can say I was inside the man’s mind for a good portion, if not all, of that book, to the point that reading it at bedtime resulted in insomnia.
Too much to digest, and too much to discuss (yet).
I have a no Carole King rule. I lunge to switch the radio to another station or skip the track, whether in a car, boat, plane, or my own home. But I’m letting myself listen to this one because the internet radio is showing the Tapestry album cover—and this track doesn’t whine and depress like some of the othersdo. This one is upbeat, but the subject is still a huge bummer.
No, it’s still the cover that draws me. I used to linger over it when I would review all of the albums in the cabinet or that were spinning on the turntable around ages 7, 8, 9 or 10–whenever I could handle the stereo and its components undisturbed. I must have been shown how to put the records on without damaging them, as I’d done to basically all of my Disney records on my own plastic in-its-own-carrying-case turntable. Slide it down the spindle, gently lift the arm, apply some—not a lot!—pressure to grasp the handle on the head shell, and whatever you do, DON’T DROP IT ON THE RECORD.
I remember studying album covers more than those tutorials. And Tapestry’s struck me A woman, alone, and...barefoot? I couldn’t understand it. Women on the other record covers in the cabinet, like Marilyn McCoo on a 5th Dimension record, wore fancy outfits, coordinated with the background or others, and were posed carefully. Here was a woman in her house, sitting in the window with a cat, and who can’t be bothered to put on shoes.
What kind of crystal ball was this record that I wholly do not like?
This one comes from somewhere between convention and instinct. Marking the start of a new time, though if you ask the birds and the trees being smothered by snow outside right now, they don’t care, don’t know, don’t need it. They just need to stay warm and alive, and they have been preparing for this fallow time a while ago, driven by the almighty instinct.
Me, too? I guess I have been applying that guide inside (forgive the PSA and/or morning drive radio speak), preparing for winter’s starkness and solemnity. Somewhere behind it are outrageous colors, ease in the air...and the purple banana?
