And It’s Always 1975
What are the songs in your life that immediately trigger memories of joy, excitement, wonder? Aren’t the feelings these songs arouse so palpable as to be felt in a near-physical way? Music works like a damn time machine. My friend Mike G likes to tell the story of being at the community swimming pool as a kid in the mid seventies and hearing Wings’ “Listen to What the Man Said” on the radio, and how the blue waves and bright sun and wet concrete all combined with that song’s light, skipping tempo and warm-breeze chorus to create a whole new feeling beyond mere, momentary joy. It’s a feeling that might be indescribable except to say it’s the feeling that happened at the pool as a kid listening to “Listen What the Man Said”. It’s a feeling that still exists, accessible to him anytime because the song still exists.
This effect doesn’t necessarily happen in an obvious, overwhelming way. The endless parade of radio hits that filtered into my consciousness beginning in the mid-seventies often cast small spells via small means. A single turn of phrase delivered with a certain style could do it, like, say, Linda Ronstadt in the measured, slow-burning intensity she brings to the build-up to the chorus of “You’re No Good”. Or maybe it could happen with an evocative mood or atmosphere, like the mysterious hint of backwoods voodoo rippling through the first half of The Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water”. These songs aren’t particularly personal favorites, though I like them well enough. Doesn’t matter, they implanted themselves in my brain and soul at a very impressionable age, and these moments within the songs still produce at the very least some tiny measure of simple pleasure or joy, and you take that kind of stuff where you find it.
You might find it in small and large ways within the same song. Any or all of the musical hooks studded throughout David Bowie’s “Fame” - the chicken-scratch rhythm, the title repeated in a half-dozen different ways, that fuzz guitar lick that punctuates each line of the verse - may conspire to summon flashbacks of the environment I existed in at four years old, in that tiny four-bedroom house with the dark red carpet and day-glo curtains, and the accompanying strange sensation of everyday newness, in which a simple trip to Grandma’s or the grocery store may as well have been a voyage to the other side of the world. Through the years that song has roused these sensations. Except when it hasn’t. Sometimes I just enjoy the song for what it is, outside of any of the associations I’ve assigned to it. Either way, as when I was four, I still find myself waiting for that weird high-pitched voice near the end that repeats the title over and over as it floats from one speaker to the other, descending in pitch on the way down to a low, robotic moan. Again, “Fame” isn’t necessarily a favorite, even (or especially) in Bowie’s catalog, but it is dependably evocative. Weirdly elastic, both earthly and alien, it can withstand repetition.
Repetition can warp perceptions. How many times have you heard “Born to Run”? Bruce Springsteen’s signature song now seems so much a ‘signature song’ - a treatise, a summation, a big statement - that its original impact may have been blunted. We risk not hearing what’s actually there in the music because our minds are too busy responding to the associations we’ve accumulated over time. However we feel about Springsteen and his music, the temptation might be to boil it all down to a cartoon caricature. Here, for instance, he’s the shaggy street poet, the rebellious everyman singing an anthem of unbridled romanticism. Love it or hate it, we risk missing the substance of the song altogether. I remember hearing it in 1975, though, when none of these things made any difference and I was too young to understand what the difference might be anyway. Riding around in the back seat of the car - my father driving, one of his buddies in the passenger seat, conversation some kind of secret language I felt I probably ought to be learning, heavy cigarette smoke not a nuisance but an accepted given - so when the song burst out of the radio as background to all this it seemed vaguely scary, maybe a little sad, what with all that stuff about broken heroes and last chances and that whole widescreen, windswept quality that implied that everything might just explode or disappear any minute now. The song seemed very adult. In many ways, it is. If you wanna hear it that way.
When I heard Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles” I had to hear it in whatever way I wanted, not being old enough to grasp the overtly erotic subject matter. Like Springsteen’s song it seemed very ‘adult’ as well, though I wasn’t sure in what way. All I could really grasp was that amazingly gorgeous chorus melody that rises and falls and sways and shifts, stretching the word “by” into roughly six syllables. Background vocals encouraging the lead, chattering like distractible ghosts. The whole languid atmosphere carried along by a sleazy, spaced-out keyboard sound, a dominant feature of so many early/mid-seventies songs. The melodic sensibility at work in Marty Balin’s vocal is the central magnetic pull, though, and it cast such a strong spell that it’s little wonder it took me so many years to notice the lyric that explicitly references cunnilingus.
Misapprehension might be the defining factor in 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”. The song is almost all atmosphere - languorous, hazy, floating, threatening to disappear altogether. The lyrical approach plays with an old songwriting trope - saying one thing and meaning another. The singer repeats the title phrase like he’s trying to convince himself, while it’s obvious to the listener that he protests too much. Meanwhile we’re swept up by the mood, all the gauzy production touches that slip the song into an ethereal realm. The weirdest and most compelling touch when I was four was the disembodied voice that appears in the song’s interlude, whispering “big boys don’t cry” again and again like a mantra. I didn’t understand what that meant, the whole segment seemed out of place in the song somehow. Plus I misheard the phrase anyway - I thought he was saying the very nonsensical “keep poison quiet”. I wanted so badly to know what that meant. I thought it might be some kind of occult thing, an incantation or something, not that I would have been able to articulate it that way. That one misheard phrase affected the way I would hear the song altogether, so the whole thing seemed like something witchy. I still hear it that way. Stage whispers still freak me out.
All these songs just happened to be there, they were in the air when me and Mike G and maybe you just happened to be there, doing whatever we were doing. Maybe we would have liked the songs in any circumstance or maybe we wouldn’t have, either way they appeared and they mixed with our lives and created associations that linger way beyond the initial hearing.
1975 happened, and it’s still happening, and we can make it happen again.
