What is most
elemental about summer? For me, it’s getting out on the road and being gone
gone gone.
Like one of our other bloggers, I make my life as an expat teacher, so travel is a pretty...well, elemental part of life. and I'm gone as much as can be.
Which doesn’t leave a
lot of time for writing—at least for me. I’m a creature of habit when it comes
to getting the words down, and I often lament that I’m not taking advantage of
new environments to inspire my work into new directions. Great writers would scoff at that notion--that it's hard to write when you're on the road. Maybe I spend too much time seeking out and imbibing the local booze...
When I do travel,
though, I love listening to music, especially music inspired by the places I
am. When I went to Philadelphia a few years back for a ball game and a night of
boozing it up at one of my favorite bars, 12 Steps Down I listened
to Marah’s brilliant rock epic Kids In Philly the entire weekend, and the music made more sense when backed up by
the visual vibe of the streets it spoke about.
(an aside: Marah? One of the greatest f@#king bands you've never heard--The LAST Rock 'n Roll band!)
Meeting your music
this way—viscerally, tactically, by-hand—is the best way to hear what it means.
Same goes for this
batch of tunes I’ve picked out for our theme this month: elements. Each of
these are songs I’ve dug into deeply in their proper places, by inspiration, by
the fact that the song was written in or is about the place I heard it, or…just
because it made sense to associate the place with the song. And speaking of,
that is another great way to connect to a tune: loving it because of the time
and place you first heard it, and forever associating it with the place. For
example, I can not hear OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”
without going back to Spoleto, Italy 2003, when I was falling in love with the
Umbrian hills and “Hey Ya!” was coming out of every radio I passed. It was the
soundtrack to a great time. Always will be. And even if I don't particualrly like the song, the association has the magical, unnameable resonance forever attached to it, so, I will always listen when it comes on the radio.
That being said, here is a small
selection, culled from a much longer list, from the strange soundtrack of my life
with a brief explanation of how each song came to achieve its own unique
significance. (Making sure I could
satisfy the ‘elements’ requirement made this all the more interesting…)
There was a pawnshop
right next to the Music and Arts Center where I first took guitar lessons. I
was in 7th grade at the time, and while the guitar lessons were
great, the pawn shop was it’s own wonderful treasure chest. Among the usual
pawnshop fare—guns, jewelry, power tools—the place had a huge section of vinyl
for sale. This is where I bought AC/DC’s Backin Black and Dirty Deeds; LedZeppelin Four; and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, which featured Iron Man, a strange little exercise in sci-fi
headbanging. And the main riff , the one everyone knows, was pretty much the
first thing any nascent guitar student learned. When I hear Iron Man, I always think back to rushing
headlong across Rt.1 with my pocket full of saved up quarters, wondering
musical gem I was about to find.
This gem from Recovering the Satellites is a ghost
walking in a blues funeral suit. Recovering
the Satellites was my constant soundtrack after graduating from college.
Released in October of 1996, this disc was a perfect accompaniment to a quiet
winter of near-total solitude when I lived in Nag’s Head, North Carolina,
trying to figure out what to do with my life. The album, soaring and
contemplative, full of affirmation and dark, whispery sadness, was the perfect
turbulent collection of songs I needed to get from one ending to a new
beginning. It was also a different, sometimes harder and much more complex
sound than their debut, August And
Everything After. And where that album spun gold out a feeling of nostalgia
for American solitude and Van Morrison-esque lyricism, Recovering nearly roared to life at moments, and for this listener,
cemented Counting Crows’ reputation as one of America’s finest bands. Mercury , one of the quieter tracks on Recovering, is a song about a girl who
is unstable, and whose changes of mind and heart put the speaker through that
special hell known as ‘love’, and though she changes like mercury, ‘she’s alright
with me…’ Multilayered slide and whisper guitars and a rhythm like a creaking
ship on the water, Mercury showed the band was capable of brilliant musical
chameleonism, and they made a brilliant career out of exploring and expanding
rock n roll soundscapes. And Mercury will forever remind me of sitting on a
cold, windy beach at night, with my guitar, trying to capture not only that
sound, but also a clue.
Another bluesy stomp,
with the politically charged lyrics that are now almost an afterthought when it
comes to the definition of U2’s sound and themes. Originally released on a
compilation called Artists United Against Apartheid,
with Keith Richards and Ron Wood, the better-known version appeared on Rattle and Hum. Both versions smoke—but
it is Bono’s lyrical reaction to apartheid politics, the boom drop drums and
the Edge’s lightning sweep guitars make this a loud and strident statement.
When I was in South Africa, I kept hearing Bono’s famous refrain, “Am I bugging
you? I don’t mean to bug you—OK, Edge, play the blues!” After listing a
imagistic litany of grievances and abuses that dwelled in black and white on
subjects like rich versus poor and freedom versus slavery, Bono’s question to
the listener is hard to ignore. The song is literally on fire, taking about
fevers burning white hot, and doing its best to explain to those who might not
understand, why it is the oppressed is ready to take up arms against an
oppressor.
One doesn’t need to study too long to
know that sad tale that is modern South African history. The sense of wrong
doing is palpable when you go there and
It’s hard not to shake your head in
terrible wonder at what happened in South Africa for so long. Ghost stories
about troubled times that seem like they might never really go away—but Bono’s
take—that money and greed will always trump good will and morality—rings
particularly true and rang in my head the entire trip.
Honestly, I never
paid attention to Marley until I went to Jamaica and stayed off-reservation, so to speak. Bob
Marley’s Legend was a prerequisite
requirement for college admissions and honestly, every tool I knew that wore
frat letters could sing Redemption Song
by heart, and thought Get Up, Stand Up
was all they needed to know to get a poli-sci degree. Marley was realpolitik to
most of the kids I partied with and I thought I might crack if I had to dance
another slow groove with some girl to Waiting
In Vain. So, I never listened. Ever. Unless I was at…oh, any party ever. Fast forward a few years later, my misspent
college days far behind me, I got the opportunity to in a private seaside
mansion in a pretty remote part of Jamaica, on the shore in Saint Anne’s
Parish, where Marley was born. It was a pretty amazing trip—far away from the
resorts and the pale, never- smoked-a-jay-tourists lounging it up in Montego
Bay and really, just kind of out there. No Internet, no phone—just the vibe of
solitude and the sound of the surf. Honestly, with what I know about the place
now, I probably would never stay that far away from any kind of security, but
at the time, it was pretty cool just to be in the middle of the island, walking
to the villages, snorkeling in the open water and fishing for our dinner every
night. Someone in our group was a big Marley fan, well beyond the greatest hits,
and when I said I didn’t dig the music, he told me to put Rastaman Vibration, “dig into the stuff that doesn’t get played all
the time.” By the end of the week, I’d gone deep, devoured all the LPs, and
heard the songs that never got played on the college radio station. By pure stroke of luck, he’d brought all his
CDs with him—this was pre-ipod and mp3 days. So, in fitting with our theme, I
pick Iron, Lion Zion as my representation
of this time and the amazing memories I have of Jamaica. The track comes from the
Songs of Freedom box set, which is
where anyone not interested in hearing Legend
for the billionth time needs to start. And the song itself is a good primer for
the complicated political and religious belief system that mark so much of
Marley’s music. Rastaman Vibration
remains my favorite album by Marley, and even though, I don’t listen to Legend on principal no matter what song
happens to come up by the man, I will always be reminded of good times on a
strange, quiet part of the island of Jamaica.
...As I write this, I am
waiting to get on a plane to head back to America. While I’m excited to see
home, see my family, drink amazing IPAs and eat Mexican, I wonder excitedly at
what new music I will discover on this trip and hope to find yet another
perfect song that will define this summer and all the strange places I will be…
(Hint—I’ve been
digging hard on the Dead this summer, so….and the new Wilco…hmmm….? What's next?)
