Facing the Music

This Facebook fad about choosing ten albums that had an impact on you really has me scratching my head. I mean, it’s not coming up with ten albums, but somehow limiting it to only ten. How do you winnow it down? Thinking back on all the times that music has impacted me, I realize how many ways it shaped my perception of life, or changed my reaction to events even as they were happening. What does impact mean? Some albums opened me up to new styles of music, some to entirely new ideas. Others held my hand as we walked through the dark, whistling our way past the graveyard. Some were band-aids for a broken heart, others an excuse to let go and go crazy. I have a few friendships that are based entirely around shared musical interests. So...what impacts us? 

Maybe the better question would be, what doesn’t?

Recently, I’ve been collecting all the 70s music my parents played on the car stereo as we crisscrossed the country in service of the military. Captain & Tennille, Barry Manilow, The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, Linda Rondstat, Sonny & Cher, Dionne Warwick, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, John Denver, Roy Orbison, Carly Simon, Dianna Ross, Neil Diamond, Olivia Newton-John, George Harrison, Carol King. The list is endless because our trips were endless. Or at least it seemed that way, wedged into the back seat of a Datsun 710. Seriously, I’ve slept through more states than most people have been in, the sounds of the 70s playing the whole time.

Some of the music I didn’t even necessarily like. Dude, Muskrat Love? Really? C’mon Captain, you’re better than that! Still, I have such fond connections to it because of memories like rolling across Kansas wheat fields that spread out horizon to horizon like an inland sea as Olivia Newton-John sang Angel of the Morning. Or following the hypnotically swaying skeins of telephone wire as they looped over the relentless march of hoary poles, carrying Jim Croce’s message to the Operator all the way across Missouri. Endless rows of Nebraska agriculture flashing past, creating the illusion of someone on stilts running to keep up with us, ebullient as John Denver crowing about being a country boy. Driving through the Nevada night, marveling at how the moon was following only us as it hung outside my window, Carole King wondering why I’m so far away.

Often the music impacted me simply because it was an everyday domestic soundtrack, always on Mom’s record player. And make no mistake, it was Mom’s record player. The rest of us just lived there. She had eclectic tastes. Sometimes the music was just there to bebop along to. Dark Lady, Walk on By, or Copacabana; all the harmless mellow pop of the day. Looking back through the lens of adulthood though, I see that the music might also have been a statement about who she wanted to be, as a second wave feminist. Women singing about empowerment and freedom. Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman and Linda Ronstadt’s Different Drum stand out in my memory.

Sometimes Mom would walk over to the record player and skip a song, and when I’d ask why she’d say that what the song said about love or people was wrong-headed and she didn’t want to hear it. Of course, that meant that any time she missed skipping one of those songs I would listen intently to hear what secret message it contained. Later, after I had my own record player and she came into my room to confiscate AC/DC albums, I realized it was because it was actually me in specific that she didn't want to hear those wrong messages. Because she knew then what I know now: music has the power to change everything.

Some of the stuff she played seemed like simple novelty. National Geographic sent out an issue with a tear out “flexi-record,” sometimes referred to as a sound-sheet, that was just twenty minutes of whale song on both sides. Those plastic-y squares went out in magazines a lot in the 70s, kind of like perfume samples do today. Leonard Cohen’s wonderful Bird on a Wire was originally released that way. Other eccentricities included Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops performing a 70s disco soundtrack, humorously entitled Saturday Night Fiedler. Besides an eighteen-minute classical music disco-medley that ran from Stayin’ Alive to Disco Inferno, the album also boasted an arrangement of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue In "D" Minor. But, you know, Disco-fied? It’s a wonder I’m as sane as I am.

When we lived in Long Beach, we had a shed on the back corner of the property that served as a hobby room, an office, a rumpus room, and even a rental for a college student once. There was a sewing machine, a TRS-80 color computer, an inexplicable organ, and a parrot named Sam that all lived out their days there. My Dad's old bachelor-pad Hi-Fi system lived out there as well, and it was a pretty decent system with a milk-crate full of random records to go along with it. While my friends and I were hanging out back there, organizing and swapping Star Wars and baseball trading cards, or making prank phone calls, we’d listen to a variety of records that had found their way out there. That’s where I learned about Creedence. Three Dog Night. Willie Nelson. Really, anything that my Mom didn’t like and wouldn’t have on her stereo lived out in the shed. So most evenings, Dad would go out there to solder stuff, practice his clarinet, or just unwind listening to old records that were verboten in the house.

Before long, I had my own little collection of exiled records out in the shed. Disney’s The Black Hole Storybook and Record were on constant replay for what now seems like years on end, along with a couple of K-Tel Records pop-rock samplers that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I wore out both the Grease and Xanadu soundtracks by sheer ardent desire for Olivia Newton-John. There wasn’t much in the way of heat or AC in the space, so over time the records all began to warp from the temperature variance. But it happened slowly, so I hardly noticed the warbling and distortion until one day it hit me that ELO had started to sound like the Muppets. Or a bit like one of my other taboo records, Alvin & The Chipmunks. Today, I can see why those annoying cartoon voices would close out of town up in the big house. But in their defense Alvin and the boys’ Chipmunk Punk introduced me to Blondie, The Cars, Tom Petty, Billy Joel, and Queen all in one record.

Branching out, I found what an education it could be going over to friends’ houses, because I learned that what I thought of as normal, wasn’t everybody’s normal. You know, not like twenty minutes of whale-song or anything. My elementary school friends John and Andrew Padovan lived just a few blocks away, but it soon became clear that their house was a whole other world entirely. They listened to the radio, not records, and really just one station. KRLA AM-870 played both kinds of music: country and western. Eddie Rabbit, Dolly Parton, Waylon, Willie, Loretta Lynne, Tammy Wynette, and Kenny Rogers all became hallmarks of the world where their Korean War vet dad brought home practice dummy grenades and real guns with their barrels plugged and firing pins cut for us to play with. He was an Army recruiter, preparing us through playtime for when we went to war with the commies, as Merle Haggard and Hank Williams reminded us of what we were fighting for: Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

One sad day, without warning, our beloved KRLA 870 changed its format. They simply stopped playing Johnny, Merle, and Patsy and started up with the Monkeys, Elvis, and the Everly Brothers. Nothing wrong with them golden oldies, except they didn’t belong in the clear-cut, militaristic world of the Padovan house. The change was so abrupt that we assumed that there had been a malfunction in the hammered old transistor radio we listened to out in the converted-garage playroom. We spent hours over the next couple of days taking turns patiently scrolling the radio dial in search of a world now lost to us. The change was so shocking that it actually seemed illegal to me. Maybe it wasn't, but it shoulda been.

Still other times, albums that weren’t necessarily amazing (Psychedelic Furs: World Outside, I’m lookin’ at you) became emotional mainstays, lifelines during extended seasons of caustic loneliness, when all I had to look forward to was new music coming out at the record store. Whether it was a broken heart, or being the new guy every thousand days at a new school, in a new town—or even a new country—the music never failed me. When the world seemed empty of all but myself and the music, when their words and ideas, melodies and pathos were all the light there was, it was enough. I hold them all dear today, friends that never disappoint and to whom I owe an unpayable debt.

When I think back on all the youthful hours spent hanging out or cruising in cars—no deeds to do, no promises to keep—lounging or roaming anywhere just so the music could play on and on, I can scarcely believe that now I just go to work everyday. What the hell am I doing with my life, when I could be laying in a beanbag chair in the dark with my friends, staring up at the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling, listening to The Cure’s Disintegration? Seriously, that was what passed for an 80s Friday night for years. Or Saturday nights, driving to nowhere, taking hours to get there as we devoured the music that we chose for ourselves, breaking each other’s hearts and imputing our own meaning to all those lyrics, until every song was somehow about us. The tragic, misunderstood heroes of our own stories.

Those days may have given way to mortgages, 401(k)s, staff meetings and lower back pain, but at least my iPod sits on my desk with 4,101 albums and 25.2 solid days of back-to-back tunes just waiting for me to hit play. And play it does, eight to ten hours a day, making the soulless drudgery at least a toe-tapping affair. And so my days wile away. 

So how do I define impact? Maybe it’s found in the surprise discovery that my niece Kailee’s favorite song was Yellow, by Coldplay. Or in wishing that I hadn’t learned that fact only as we planned her funeral service, after she was killed by a drunk driver in 2009. Pretty mature choice for a five year old. In discovering it, I felt like I understood her just a little better. Like another piece in the beautiful mosaic of her had dropped into place for me, even as Yellow played over pictures of her life floating by on a computer screen, only to fade and dissolve into the next in an endless loop that could have no more added to it.

Most days when Yellow comes on, I simply enjoy the beauty of it, and how wonderful life can be. Given its fragile, clockwork delicacy, and all the things that can go wrong, life is actually pretty great most of the time. Sometimes when Yellow comes on I really remember that revelatory moment of connection with Kailee, that affinity of our souls, and I smile and soar on the memory of her. I sing at the top of my stupid voice, “Look at the stars, see how they shine for you. And all the things you do. Yeah, they were all Yellow.” And it’ll be the best thing that happens all day. Because around here, we don’t talk about Kailee in hushed tones or the past tense.

Or maybe I found it on day six of passing a kidney stone, when the Doctors wouldn’t give me any more drugs because they thought I was 'scrip-shopping. So I waited out in the reception area, pacing in a tight little circle, sweating and shaking like the junkie they thought I was, my earbuds jammed far enough into my ears to play directly onto the surface of my brain. I alternated between Vivaldi’s Magnificat and Metallica’s Black Album, and stifled my screams into more socially acceptable whimpers until the Doctors agreed to take me seriously, over two hours later. As much as I appreciated the Percocet they eventually gave me, if I had to choose, I’d still take music as my panacea, any day. Because Percocet is only good for one kind of pain. 

But Music can do anything.