music: the early years

The screen door slams behind me as I bust out into the sun, my transistor radio pressed hard to my ear, the volume cranked and distorted. My favorite song has just come on and I am seriously fired up, eager for the adrenaline rush again. Bad Company's frontman, Paul Rodgers, is singing the first verse calmly enough, letting his special lady friend know just how special a lady she is, but he's getting close to the chorus and that's where all kinds of guitar-fueled hell breaks loose. Almost quietly he sings, "Feel like makin'..." but before he can finish his thought the stuttering power chord slams like a truck into a wall and he and I both tilt our heads back to the sky and bellow in unison for all the world to hear, "FEEL LIKE MAKIN' LOVE! FEEL LIKE MAKIN' LOVE! FEEL LIKE MAY-KIN' LOVE TO YOU!" I am twelve years old in the middle of my front yard and I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I had a weird relationship with quite a few of the songs of my formative years. Some, like Bad Company's aforementioned anthem to The Urge for Intercourse, tingled the as-yet-to-develop horny adolescent regions of my pubescent brain and spoke to me in an indecipherable yet somehow fundamentally relatable way of the females who would soon become my one and only focus. Foghat's Slow Ride is another good example. I loved two things in the sixth grade: Beth Aslakson (she had no idea), and Slow Ride. See, this guy takes his girlfriend out for a leisurely drive in his car - a "slow ride", if you will. Well, he starts out taking it easy, driving slow, but by the end of the song he's driving really, really fast. Actually, as I discovered some time later, the song is about good old-fashioned fucking, plain and simple. Like Ravel's Boléro, it's a nice example of form following function, the musical equivalent of a prolonged and vigorous sexual encounter with an enthusiastic partner; starting slow, then building, building, accelerating, and finally careening wildly into a sweaty, orgasmic finale, during which the lead singer (nobody knows the name of the lead singer of Foghat off the top of their heads) also tilts his head back to the sun and lets loose, "SLOOW RIIIIDE!!", then laughs maniacally as the song finishes up and presumably falls asleep immediately.

Other songs left me confused and anxious, or just plain freaked me out. Eric Clapton's I Shot the Sheriff always gave me an uneasy feeling, and not just because the song sucked. I would try and imagine the setting in which the nameless, murdering, boring protagonist explained the "self-defense" killing of the sheriff in irritating, yawn-inducing detail. Even now, if I'm unfortunate enough to have to sit through this song, I think the same question I did when I was eleven: if you didn't shoot the deputy, man, who the hell did? And America's A Horse With No Name quite simply blew my nine-year-old mind, what with the whiny, Neil Young-ish voice, the reliance on that one repetitive note, and the batshit-crazy lyrics. I pondered many questions: First of all, why not just give the horse a name? Is that so hard? And what's with all the plants and birds and rocks and things? Things? Can you be more specific? Finally, please explain why you let the horse, your only mode of transportation in this desert/ocean, run free? I wanted some goddamn answers.

It's a rare treat: lunch with my dad at the Sonic! We sit in the car waiting for our burgers to be delivered, talking about nothing in particular, listening to the radio, having a good time. As I hear the familiar opening piano of Jim Croce's Bad, Bad Leroy Brown I think to myself, "Hey, I really like this songHOLY SHIT THIS SONG HAS CUSSING IN IT!" I quietly panic. How can I keep my father who, in my mind, has a soul as clean and pure as the driven snow and who, I'm certain, has never heard the word "damn" before, from being sullied by this impending profanity. Simply turning off the radio is not an option: too suspicious. Before I know it the chorus arrives: Well he's bad, bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole"DELICIOUSBURGER!!", I blurt, hoping to cause a diversion. Dad's raised eyebrow indicates success. This continues for the duration of the song - "IS THAT A TORNADO?!", "CORVETTE!!" - my sudden non sequitur exclamations drowning out the bad word and saving my dad from becoming like me, an obscenity-soaked 10-year-old who swore like a sailor.

My parents used to ship me off to my Grandma's in Kerrville, Texas for weeks at a time during the summer. The stated excuse was my mom's graduate schooling or something but I think the real reason was to just get some damn peace and quiet for a while and to repair the damage I'd done to the house and property during the rest of the year. It was on one of these visits that the Angel of Death visited me, though not in its usual black hooded robe and scythe carrying form. No, this time Mr. Death was a song: Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again (Naturally). This catchy tune casually introduced me to the cheery notion that my parents WOULD SOMEDAY DIE. As a nine-year-old, I had never considered this a possibility before and as I spent each day of my sentence aimlessly roaming the empty streets of this mostly geriatrically populated town, alone (naturally) with my thoughts of my beloved parents ceasing to be, this godawful song would occasionally play on my radio but would continuously play in my head; the cloying, nasally voice rising up into the most upsetting minor key possible, the maudlin lyrics detailing the heartwrenching demise of first the singer's father, then his heartbroken mother. I was inconsolable and forever changed. To this day I can't stand to even think about this song lest it get lodged in my brain, like it is right now. Thanks, Gilbert. You're an asshole.

I remember being awake in the wee hours of the morning in late 1976 (ongoing bicentennial excitement, no doubt), my little AM radio rasping out Bob Seger's Night Moves. It was chilly outside, "with autumn closing in" as Bob says, and I drew pictures into the dew that covered the inside of my window, a crescent moon lighting up my work. The song told the story of this horny kid making out with this equally frisky girl wherever and whenever possible, that part I got and appreciated. What I didn't really get, though, was that it was actually about remembering these shenanigans much later in life. The wistful nostalgia, the hint of melancholia at the end of the song was to me, a thirteen-year-old, troubling but in a strangely enjoyable way. It's as if I knew, even then, that I, like Bob, would frequently enjoy the pleasant pain of nostalgia as I grew old, with my own autumn closing in.

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