It's been a few days, as promised. I stuck some essays in the draft folder, figuring they were a little too accurate and personal for this public forum. Emerging from a weekend that didn't go as planned, but ended up fine and happy. Sometimes things just get better on their own. Life heals.
At 4 a.m. I found myself in that thin, warm space between waking and slumber, music playing in my head above the tinnitus. What? You don't have music playing in your head all the time? Don't feel bad. Neither does P. I sometimes ask her what song is playing in her mind right now, figuring that's an indirect measure of where she's at emotionally. Usually there's no song at all, which I find baffling.
Sometimes the song in my head is a signal of what's going on in there, beyond the conscious or the ability to articulate a feeling. I pay attention to the playlist, a form of "checking in" as pop psychologists put it.
This morning was an odd one: "It's 1900 Yesterday," by Liz Damon's Orient Express, a long forgotten easy listening group that had its brief brush with success over fifty years ago. It's a lovely song:
I don't think the message from my subconscious is really about the lyrics. Songs for me are a time and a place; just as P can tell you what she was wearing during some major life event, or even a trivial one, that faded into the mist decades ago, I can paint you a scene around a song, can tell you where I was when I first heard it. I have no idea what I was wearing, but it's a fair bet that if the memory is from before about 1976 it was something Mom bought at Sears or Penny's.
I had never heard this particular song when it was something of a hit in 1970, but one day Spotify suggested it on a playlist, and it's been there ever since. There is a whole genre there that was part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and maybe yours too. Long forgotten now, buried under a heap of Rolling Stones and Buffalo Springfield and all the other "youth" sounds of that time, there lies a pile of old 45s by performers like Ray Conniff and Mason Williams and Sergio Mendes & Brazil '66. Some of it even showed up on Top 40 AM radio. For instance, I bet you remember, if you're of a certain age, "Music to Watch Girls By."
It evokes the soundtrack of a movie from around 1968 you might find if you stay up too late watching TMC.
Of course, a lot of it was softer than that. And speaking of movie soundtracks, there was Henry Mancini's then-ubiquitous tune.
I remember one prime example from an actual moment in my life. It was 1972, I was eight years old, and somehow I'd slipped past my parents to watch television late into the night, finding myself in front of the screen when WTBS Atlanta, Channel 17, signed off for the night. Often you'd get the Star Spangled Banner at that moment, but this particular night they signed off with an Air Force Recruiting video, a spectacular film of T-38s flying in formation somewhere out west. The song is "Who Has Touched the Sky?" by the Anita Kerr Singers, and it starts at about 4:40 on this video (the whole video is fascinating if you're interested in the sights and sounds of pilot training--they really nailed it):
I sat there in my Kansas City Chiefs footie pajamas mesmerized, listening to what felt like the umami of music, watching that student fly solo, hurtling past clouds seemingly at the edge of space. Who gets to do that? Well, as it turned out, I'd end up there myself, fifteen years later. A two a.m. dream come true.
But mostly this genre of music evokes a feeling as much as a time, and a sense of ease and safety comes over me whenever I hear it. Come with me. I'll show you.
It's somewhere in the mid-60s. The inside of the house looks like California space age modern, clean and spare and angular. The head of the household is some guy in the prime of his professional life, maybe 45 or close to 50, a veteran of Tarawa or maybe the Mighty Eighth over Germany, now basking in the life he's built. Perhaps he's a design manager for an aerospace firm, or owns an Oldsmobile dealership, or is an executive for a chain of family restaurants, maybe Bob's Big Boy. He pours himself a Johnny Walker Red on the rocks, tie loosened after a day at work, and this music is playing in the background. Perhaps there's still a son or daughter at home, or they've just gone off to college. After he and his wife, dressed and coifed even if she isn't going anywhere, smile and talk about the day's events, he pours a second and adjourns to the family room to watch Huntley and Brinkley at 6:30 on the RCA console television. He can just barely smell the salisbury steak cooking in the kitchen, which will arrive on a TV tray with mashed potatoes and green beans just in time for Laugh-In.
He'll work his whole career in one place, live in that 3-2 rancher with a pool out back for his whole working life, wired to be grateful for it all by a childhood spent on the economic edge in the 1930s.
Mostly, it's just a secure, comfortable place, a mirage in this age of tumult and creative destruction.
And if you spent any time around guys like that (and their wives--back then a man living alone would have been an anomaly, and she would've been right there with him, drinking a martini and watching the news), you could not escape this playlist of covers, of what we would now deride as "elevator music." There used to be radio stations in most towns devoted exclusively to the genre--when I'd ride down the hill in Hemet with my grandmother in 1980, in her blue Chevrolet Caprice, this stuff was always playing on the radio. And in her hair salon. And at The Anchor, my grandparents' favorite place to eat crab legs on Wednesday nights. It was musical Oxycodone, a warm, soft blanket of security.
Which I guess is why my deep subconscious drags these old 45s out of the musical closet during really tough moments. The last time was in 2007, while I was in the midst of that most horrible professional experience, the Girls Gone Wild litigation. I found myself on television, in the papers, every day a new forest fire with a client merrily spraying gasoline around and over both of us. At some point in all that I discovered Luxuria Music, a musical website featuring what I've heard called "space age bachelor pad music," the obscura of the 1960s easy listening era.
It's still there, if you're interested:
I'd work late into the night throughout those dreadfully heavy days, toe tapping to the theme song of some long-forgotten TV series playing on my computer speakers, mentally slipping through the curtain between the day's disasters and that living room from another era. A drug-free escape.
And maybe there was a little escapism in my grandparents' generation basking in this stuff. After all, my contented World War veteran was probably sending a tuition check to pay for his daughter to go to Berkeley. David Brinkley used to lead the news each night with a body count from Vietnam. Those days had their troubles and challenges as well. This over-produced music, as carefully matched as a polyester pants suit, marked an orderly, wholesome space in a less-than-orderly world.
So why did my subconscious dredge this up now? Well, obviously we're navigating a world turned upside down these days. There is no security, no matter what we tell ourselves. I don't have the slightest idea what next week is going to look like, much less next month or next year. And in the place of the Brinkleys and the Cronkites we have Hannity and Maddow, stoking the fires for ratings. Objective reality is open for debate.
I guess I just answered my own question. That voiceless kid buried deep in my head would love to find a secure place, and this music speaks from there, fills the room with that atmosphere like lighting a scented candle that smells like 1967.
But the present intrudes. I need to get ready for a hearing in a few minutes, then another day of depositions before heading to my first in-person meeting in months later in the week. Maybe I'll listen to a little Anita Kerr on the plane.
Comments