Your First Favorite Songs
What’s the first song you remember noticing? Not necessarily the first song you remember liking or disliking, just the first song that registered in your consciousness, for whatever reason. Do you feel as though that particular song says anything substantial about the person that you were, or the person that you became?
I remember hearing “Octopus’s Garden”. I must’ve been around three years old. That’s a fairly predictable first song not only for those of my generation (the one they call X, and in typical Gen X fashion I am alternately annoyed and blasé about being part of it) but every subsequent generations as well. I’m betting a pretty huge percentage of people born after 1967 or so remember hearing this one or “Yellow Submarine” pretty early on in life.
Underwater Beatles songs plus childhood equals a unique kind of enchantment. I suspect it can shape the way we hear music from that point on.
As children we are often confined to limited territory - four walls, a few rooms. Maybe a decent-sized yard, if you're lucky. Given these physical limitations, the naturally expansive imagination of childhood can carry us great distances. At three years old I’m pretty sure I could imagine my way through several brick walls. Pretty sure you could too. But if our own willpower couldn’t give us the kickstart we needed, maybe the right song could get the job done.
I remember hearing Three Dog Night singing about being on the road to Shambala. All those tumbling rhythms and shouted gospel choruses induced a peculiar fascination in my young mind. I had no idea where Shambala was or what happened there, but it seemed pretty exotic. The song’s spiritual overtones seeped in, too, what with the promise that Shambala, or the journey to it, was going to wash away our troubles and fears.
My only troubles at the time I heard the song amounted to a few lost or broken Tinker Toys. Fear, on the other hand, wasn’t in short supply, given the preponderance of mysterious shadows in my little world, not to mention the bewildering behavior of all those tall people. Shambala seemed like a pretty good place to escape to, wherever it might be.
As we get older we lose trust in our own imaginations. We realize we can’t really go hang out with our octopus friends, so why bother even thinking about it? Shambala? Not even a real place, don’t try booking a trip.
When I was in my late teens, I heard “Shambala” on the radio for the first time in years. My initial reaction was that it seemed quaint, like a childish thing I had outgrown. On reflection, and maybe on some deeper level, hearing the song again reconnected me with the sense of liberation, spiritual and physical, that so captivated my imagination when I was younger.
It isn’t a matter of whether I liked the song or not. I’m not sure if I ever did. The point is the song established a feeling, an aura, that carried across years, a decade even, and remained intact.
Music triggers memories, it stirs feelings, it shapes resonances in ways both obvious and subtle. That might be a well-worn truism, but it’s hardly meaningless. It’s pretty meaningful, in a pretty huge way. It also might be beside the point. Music works in so many ways.
Maybe hearing those particular songs at an early age served as a kind of guideline, prompting me to seek music that could provide a sense of escape, of flight and freedom, of an elsewhere worth visiting, if not living in.
When I was in my teens I also discovered Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix. Side three contains a suite of songs that venture into underwater territory, keyed by the title “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)”. In some sense the lyrical content of these tracks might be a cheesy sci-fi adventure tale, but the overall sound, the mood, is dreamlike. Hypnotic, with spiritual undercurrents, so to speak. This was definitely a territory worth exploring, at the very least an escape from the same familiar roads of small town life, from typical teenage emotional perplexities, from going to the damn mall again.
By this time those aquatic Beatles songs had come to seem like childish things. I came to love them again later (seriously, listen to the way Octopus’s Garden sounds, it’s a marvel of sonic production) but maybe they had already served a key purpose, priming me for this Hendrix music, providing a ramp for lift-off, or a safe vessel in which to submerge.
Later I would discover Can’s Future Days and Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, each similarly watery and exploratory, alternately ruminative and reaching out with an unassuming sense of wonder.
The territory mapped out in this music is not merely some kind of wistful remembrance of a more innocent time, and it isn’t necessarily an imaginary paradise to escape to. Or it doesn’t have to be only those things.
In a sense, it can be a real place. A place to exist, anywhere, at any point in time, regardless of age, or the perceived limits of your own imagination.
We can go there now.
