In Between Seasons
Sometimes the period of transition is more interesting than the periods that it connects. Even when the stages of time on either side are - ostensibly, at least - full of action, sustained emotion or deep meaning, those quiet connective days in between can take on a tone of their own that lingers in the memory, or in the spirit, with peculiar vividness.
Those strange days in late February and early March, when winter has yet to truly fade and spring has yet to fully emerge, are always tricky days to navigate. I get easily drawn back to those days in late winter 1990, a time during which I felt that my own future should have been coming into sharp focus. Instead, it was becoming more and more blurry. I’d been out of school for a short while and had a decent job at a radio station, a job that I very much liked, though my dedication to it was minimal. I knew somehow that I’d need to try something else at some point relatively soon. I had a significant other, my first more-or-less mature(ish) relationship, but the first cracks in that particular endeavor were beginning to spread at an alarming rate. The band I had formed with my best friends a couple years earlier was also crumbling, along with the solidity of our friendships.
Nothing was at all solid anymore, yet all of this seemed to be sinking in at the speed of molasses. Day to day life rolled on slowly, with no markers designating any dividing lines between any kind of before or after.
That winter was oddly quiet and mild. Overcast, not cold. No snow. A vague, colorless haze seemed to hang in the air, and my psyche reflected it. Call it malaise, I guess. Jimmy Carter famously once used that word, and things only went downhill from there for his presidency. So maybe I could be forgiven for feeling hesitant.
Something was going to happen soon, and I didn’t know what it was. Was I supposed to be taking some kind of action to set some kind of future in motion?
Music, as ever, still brought some degree of assurance. On the last day of February I went into a store that specialized in stained glass but also happened to sell used records. (Those two things go together, right? No, really.) There in the bin I found Neil Young’s On the Beach. The cover, with Neil under a drab gray sky looking forlornly out at the sea, surrounded by comically ultra-seventies plastic orange lawn furniture, was an unnervingly accurate representation of my own mood at the time.
Then those songs. This music has often been described as sad, even depressive, and that’s maybe not altogether off-base, but it is also not wholly accurate. Certainly there’s confusion and exhaustion at work, and the three long songs on side two especially contain varying degrees of melancholy; things are out of reach, torn down, waitresses are crying in the rain and Mother Goose is on the skids. And everything is a drifty, slow, bare-bones blues. However, each song also contains at least some small degree of humor, and a distinct undercurrent of hope. Neil tells a funny story about being alone at a radio interview and later invites his critics to “get together for some scenes”, presumably to find some common ground. Hell, the first song on the record is about moving on in the face of adversity. People talking shit about you behind your back? Walk on.
Sometimes we need to see a reflection of our own feelings in order to start sorting through them.
Late at night near the end of my radio shift, I would put the station on automatic pilot and listen to the album over the studio speakers. That isolated, lonely little control room seemed like the perfect space for that music, all those wracked, ruminative songs about being worn-down, worn-out, sinking below the depths, but knowing that there will be a way out, if only because there is no other choice. “I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow.” “Sooner or later it all gets real.” The whole album might boil down to the struggle to find clarity through very dense fog. I think it genuinely helped me pull out of my own fog during those first weeks of listening to it. Periodically it has done so in the years since.
The atmosphere of those days in late winter 1990 has hovered regularly in my world like some kind of bewildered ghost. It was a strangely quiet, reflective time, something like a calm between storms. The moody, contemplative air of On the Beach is to me the sound of that emotional transition, of someone realizing that life will go on in the face of all the good and bad and better or worse. We do stand a good chance of it being better more often than not, it just takes being a little proactive about it, right?
