Sunday Prompt: Time Machine

Today’s Sunday Prompt is Time Machine. I spent a few moments this afternoon thinking about music that transports me back in time. The photograph is a copy of a slide I shot of Pittsburgh during light up night 1986. The shot was taken from the McKee’s Rock Bridge. This photo would be perfect if the album Goucho was playing in the background.


Music often serves as a vehicle to transport me back across time. Every time I hear an early Beatles tune, I remember Mr. Atkins. He lived behind us in Petersburg. The summer evening I recall, he’s sitting in a webbed folding chair, mocking his daughters who are crazy over the Beatles. It must have been in ’64 or ’65. Our families were grilling out. “All you have to say to be a rock star,” he kept insisting, “is yeah, yeah, yeah.” A year or two later, my brother and sister and I spent part of the summer with our grandparents while my parents moved us from Petersburg down to the coast. Whenever the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction” comes over the air, I recall my uncle playing his 45 of the tune over and over again, holding a broom like a guitar and dancing around his room. I was nine; he would have been fifteen. The horns on Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4,” take me back to a family vacation to Atlanta in the summer of ’69. We spent a day at Six Flags and another at the Cyclorama which depicted the Battle of Atlanta and also visited the zoo. The music of Chicago and the drive across South Carolina are cemented together in my mind. When I hear Maggie May by Rod Stewart, I think of an Order of the Arrow camping trip to Fort Fisher in the fall of 72. David Williams and I shared a tent. A northeaster blew in and a boat was lost in the surf. We were called out to help search for a missing person and spent a wet and miserable hour or so walking the shoreline with flashlights. It turned out the other person in the boat had safely made shore and headed inland before we were called out. When David and I got back to our tent, the lines holding the fly had ripped out of the gourmets. The fly was flapping in the wind and our sleeping bags were in about two inches of water. Wet and cold, we sought refuge in the back of an equipment trailer where we waited for dawn while listening to a station on a nine volt transistor radio that kept playing Maggie May. By the next morning, in which we could see the bottom of the hull of the boat rocking in the surf, Maggie May and Fort Fisher had been married in my psyche. Another song that brings back crazy memories is Angie, by the Rolling Stones. Angie is on one of my favorite LPs from high school, the Stones’ Goats Head Soup. My girlfriend in my senior year didn’t want me to play it because her “ex” used to sing it to her. We got married in college and after we split up, I found sardonic comfort listening to that album, the melancholy of “Coming Down Again” mirroring my mood at the time. Anytime I hear anything by Steely Dan, I think of Pittsburgh and Jim. We lived next to each other during my first year of grad school in the mid-80s and as I’d made cassettes of all my Steely Dan albums, he was always over listening to them. For good or bad, but mostly good, music has the ability to transport me back in time.