Song Memories

"I first met you at Modell's sister's high school graduation party. 1955. 'Ain't That a Shame' was playing as I walked in the door."
  —Shrevie (from the movie Diner)

Crazy what certain sense memories bring back. Smells are incredibly powerful for me — from that of my elementary school cafeteria pizza to burning wood and drying wool. But nothing beats music for wistful melancholy or outright glee.

• "Thunder Road" — Bruce Springsteen
  My dad gets the album Born to Run as a record club selection of the month. He normally returns these automatic selections instead of being billed for them. We're not suckers. But something about the cover grabs us and this one we keep, without knowing much about it. When the needle drops on the vinyl, "Thunder Road" happens.
  
  I don't entirely get the lyrics until I become a teenager, and I learn later that in fact I did not get them even then. But the urgency and lyrical nature of the music grabs me and forces me to feel. I listen to the song and the album within the confines of my parents' house, in a room we call the "den," on an old but clear mono speaker.
  
  It is arguably the greatest first song on any album ever recorded. The first two lines alone ("The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways / like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays") give me shivers to this day. And to this day, Born to Run is one of the few pieces of vinyl I have ever worn out.


• "I Can See Clearly Now" — Johnny Nash
  1984: I am in the middle of logging country in northern Maine (when I say northern Maine, I don't just mean north of Augusta, I mean north of Millinocket), canoeing the length of the remote, north-flowing Allagash. There's a campsite one night with a worn picnic table. On it sits a crackling AM radio, a deli loaf of sliced American cheese, and a head of iceberg lettuce. As I'm prepping dinner, I eat slice after slice of cheese wrapped in iceberg lettuce leaves. It is delicious. The song on the radio is "I Can See Clearly Now."
  
  After dinner, youth clouds my vision and I hop from one fallen tree trunk to the next, several feet above the river at the top of a high falls. I manage to not fall in — meaning, I survive — but I can see clearly how it's a bad idea even as I'm doing it.


• "Tuesday's Gone" — Lynyrd Skynyrd
  (The details are fuzzy, but the feeling is not.) First real slow dance. It feels like sex.


• "Bastards of the Young" — The Replacements
  I am in high school, on the bus to an away hockey game. It is night and I have the seat to myself. I look out the window and think about playing and about girls. Hockey smells like like this and feels like this.
  
  Physically, I am on the short side, and I don't keep my head up enough on the ice. Still, I like to hit and even to be hit. My focus isn't entirely there until I've been hit hard. In lieu of caffeine or Sudafed (or, this being the early-'80s, cocaine), I gear up listening to The Mats, loud.  By the time we pile into the cold rink, "Bastards of the Young" has me sufficiently, if not finely, tweaked.


• "Radio Free Europe" — R.E.M. / "In Between Days" — The Cure
  Fall 1986. I am in a horrible bar that I will return to every week for the remainder of the year. I am drinking cheap beer with Frank Sinatra's niece, dancing with hot, drunken women, and feeling the bass in my gut. There are seemingly only two songs played in this bar, and they are "Radio Free Europe" and "In Between Days."


• "Pale Shelter" — Tears for Fears
  It is my sophomore year in college. My grandmother has just died. I had been expecting the phone call, but still it is jarring. Once I hang up, I turn up my stereo. Partly out of affectation (I feel life is offering only pale shelter), partly out of affection and loss, I play the CD loud enough to be heard throughout the dorm. The next day, I drive home much, much too fast.


• "Up to Me" — Bob Dylan
  A lot of Dylan's songs tell a story. This song tells the story of a recent college graduate prone to melancholy, traveling alone through Europe by train and foot. This song speaks to me every single day, as I become a student of life, and I become the song.
  
  If pressed for a top ten list, this song remains at or near the top.


• "Ramblin' Man" — The Allman Brothers
  Post-college, post-midnight revelry. After beers with the boys, we hit a raucous diner for late-night breakfast. Kings of the world, we burst through the doors in perfect time with that crisp Dickie Betts guitar and I belt out the lyrics, strolling to our table.


• Living with the Law — Chris Whitley
  I am writing my graduate school thesis — a full-length play — in a cold house in Brighton, MA, during the fall of '94. Early on in the process, I decide on a few core CDs that will be my writing soundtrack. The play is about a dream Montana of the mind, and it demands a soundtrack; the language has a rhythm to it, a musical cadence that I need to keep in my head. I keep that cadence in my head with the twangy steel of Chris Whitley's stripped-down album Living with the Law, which to this day puts me in the mood to write.

The Replacements — Bastards of the Young
Bob Dylan — Up to Me
Chris Whitley — Big Sky Country

Comments

[Susan Tropeano]

Between this post and the one above (foods) I see that we have a lot in common BK.

[Anitliassathy]

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