I’m not one of those writers who has a lot of music in my books, although LIFE SENTENCES has a small section about some childhood friends forming a singing group during the Jackson 5 era.
But today, as the SO and I drove to Washington for a matinee (DOG IN THE MANGER, terrific), “Maggie May” came on and I could remember exactly where I was the first time I heard it. (In a car somewhere between Atlanta and Marietta, Georgia.) Then I began sorting through all the songs I could remember listening to while in the car, back before I was allowed to control the radio. “Don’t Sleep in the Subway, Darling.” (En route to art lessons at the Baltimore Museum of Art.) “Hello, It’s Me.” (One of our long, long trips to Atlanta.) “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” (Forest Park Avenue, a mile from home, hot summer day.)
I could find only one commonality: They are all narratives. Generally, slightly cryptic ones that make the listener fill in some of the blanks (with the exception of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”). Where does one sleep in the subway? On a bench, in the stairwell, on the cars themselves.? Isn’t it dangerous? This, after all, was the era of hyperconsciousness about New York’s street crime and The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, which is being remade, I’m sorry to say. (I think the original is near perfect.) So Maggie May is there and you’re leaving her, but it’s her fault because she just can’t love you enough? So on, and so forth. I like music and listen to a wide range, but I could never transcend my interest in the words/stories.
We all remember where we were when [fill in one of the big news stories of your youth]. But can you place yourself in time vis a vis a song on the radio? If so, why do you think the memory and the melody linger?
Hearing “Penny Lane” puts me right back in a red Buick station wagon with my sisters and brothers and we’re lost in New York trying to get back home to Jersey after some family gathering in the Bronx with the Chinese relatives. EVERY time I hear this song,to this day, without fail, I am suddenly 11 and the seat is sticky and the car windows steamy and we are actually IN “the pouring rain,” the water is just cascading down the windshield. And it IS “very strange.” I am feeling suddenly really depressed and bleak in a way that is new for me and is sort of nauseating and thrilling at the same time, because the Beatles have seemed to really understood my feeling. Other people feel this way! (The trip is over, the fun part’s done, it wasn’t THAT fun. Adults in the car are tense.)”Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.” This awful feeling is washing over me like that rain. It’s horrible! But hmm maybe all over the CoOUNTRY people feel this way! “There beneath the blue suburban skies.” Yeah it’s something about the times, the suburbs, the 60s, there’s a way out of this…. The Beatles know the way…..Any way, the right fictional moment to describe this hasn’t popped up for me yet, but you provided a nice free-floating one. Thanks Laura!
That’s a great story, Fern, and now I feel that I’m there.
For me, “Hey Jude” was on the car radio when I was carpooling to Hebrew School on a Sunday morning. The father of one of the other boys was driving, and I remember him shaking his head over the song. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “It starts off okay, you know, kind of pretty. Why’d they have to go and ruin it with all that shouting at the end?”
Looking at his sorrowful face (I was in the front passenger seat), I think I realized even then that he wasn’t just talking about the song.
Happens to me all the time. It’s like a sudden trip back into the past. For some people, smells do it. For Proust, it was that little taste of madeleine. But for me, music does it without fail.
Bill–me too. Music far more than smells or tastes.
Which makes it odd that I never seem to have my characters care much about music. I think it might be because I don’t want to compete with those writers who give their entire stories a soundtrack. Always feels like it’ll ring false if I do it.
There are a number of songs that are very vivid to me. When I looked up the years many of them were on the radio, the common theme was that they were popular when I was first noticing that girls were different from boys…
FIRSTS: Belafonte: “Day O!”In the car with my Dad at the vets. (Me: What IS that?) Kingston Trio: “Tom Dooley” in the kitchen 5 AM putting the Sunday Pgh Press together before delivering it. (So cool.) Barbra Streisand: “Happy Days are Here Again.” In the house my college buddies and I shared; one guy worked maintenance at the radio station and brought home an armful of demos. We listened inattentively while doing homework until Barbra (Who the heck is she?) Gillian Welch” “My Morphine.” Praerie Home Companion. (That’s the saddest song I ever heard.)
Joan Sutherland: something from Lucia on Met Saturday. (Holy Shit!)
There is a whole different list for songs that evoke a particular person, Recently Johnny Mathis came on, “This is a Wonderful Way to Spend an Evening.” (Snap, there was Kathy Lewis, my buddy Anthony’s girl, a great dancer.
Isn’t music wonderfully biographical?
“West Side Story”–ZOWIE!
CORRECTION: “Lovely Way to Spend an Evening”
PS. George Pelecanos’ characters carry soundtracks around in their heads.
I first heard “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers while I was making out with my first serious girlfriend, Debbie, in my father’s Mercury station wagon. It was late on a Friday or Saturday night and I had driven the car over to the local lover’s lane. It wasn’t much of a lane. It was actually the parking lot of a municipal ice skating rink in a wooded area at the edge of Boston. The spot would get pretty full on weekend nights, but it was amazingly quiet and peaceful. Just a lot of cars with fogged up windows. For an adolescent boy this experience was pretty close to heaven. There wan nothing like it, nonstop kissing and hugging and groping with the car engine turned off, but with the radio playing. Time would seem to stand still until we emerged from this bliss and returned to an upright sitting position and found that it was after midnight.
Somewhere around 1980, when I was about 19, I had a girlfriend who wanted to go to Milwaukee to see her brother, and we were driving through Chicago on the expressway at dusk (summertime – what? 8pm?)
Traffic wasn’t so bad, and Chicago’s city lights were glittering – and Michael Jackson was on the radio; Off the Wall. Memory project – I think I recall some riff about ‘life ain’t so bad – if you’re off the wall’…or something.
But it fit the moment so perfectly that it remains in my brain, and comes right back if I ever hear that song, or if we are ever motoring through a major city as night falls.
“Downtown” by Petula Clark. In the back seat of a station wagon; my mother smoking her cigarette and taping with her wedding band on the metal steering wheel, to the time of the music. This lasts with me because this was the first time that I thought of my mother as having a life outside of taking care of me; she was alive and vital and thinking about doing something for herself, like going downtown.
I agree, Dog in the Manger was terrific, Laura. There were many good laughs, the lead character is a strong woman, the lead comic actor is very, very good (apparently making his debut), and the modern translation seems to suit the subject matter without being offensive. It was very enjoyable. See you at Politics and Prose soon.
The Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go. Sixteen. My first summer job in New Hope, PA, sitting at the window of the tiny room I shared with a friend, waiting to start work as a waitress at The Crystal Palace on the Delaware River. I heard that song coming from of a car radio. Somehow it symbolized that summer for me. On my own for the first time. So free until September.
Happens to me all the time, too, with all kinds of music: pop, classical, jazz, traditional, whatever. Only once, though, did I have the rather spooky, opposite experience of hearing a song for the first time and knowing immediately that I would remember this moment forever and that whenever I heard the song everything about this moment would come back to me. It was a rainy November evening my freshman year of college, and I was sitting in George’s, a hamburger joint in Westminster, MD, with my group of new friends when “Those Were the Days” came on the jukebox . . . Talk about premature nostalgia!