Sunday, March 02, 2008

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.

18 comments:

  1. Beautiful skyline of the city. Did you hear that Myron Cope passed this week?

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  2. Songs transport me on a daily basis, such as CCR's Jeremiah was a Bullfrog and my 4-year-old self is waiting in the car to pick up my brother from kindergarten or lately any Nervana song and I'm racing coworkers down Winchester in my 5.0 maroon Mustang. ;D

    I heard that music stimulates the same area as memory and it doesn't have to be the classical kind. :D

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  3. That's very true for me too, Sage. The Beatles were my favorites for years and still are. I grew up on early rhythm and blues and it can transport me very quickly.

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  4. I like the way you connect the songs with such specific memories,

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  5. We all have our personal soundtracks, don't we. I wonder how bored songwriters and singers must get listening to people tell them their stories about the significance of certain songs. Do they care, or do they listen with pride that their work has touched others' lives?

    Cheers.

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  6. Sage it's a perfect time machine. Reading your blog always has a way of transporting me back to coastal Georgia. Excellent piece!!

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  7. Music is my time machine. I, like you, can hear something and go right back to a certain moment. Sometimes so much so it is scary. And there are certain songs that remind me of certain people or exes and you just can't make that go away...turning off the radio is the only solution for that. My life is time lined by music.

    Great post...and I love the song Maggie May.

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  8. Mistress, as you should know, Pittsburgh has a wonderful skyline--I love the view you get of the city coming out of the Tube when your coming into the city from the airport.

    Maggie, wasn't that 3 Dog Night? Jeremiah was one of those songs I remember listening to as I worked on a soap box derby

    Kenju, I too love the Beatles, but think their 67-69 stuff is the best--Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour...

    Thanks Crafty

    R., I would hope they listen in pride!

    Pat, but in my case, Coastal NC! :)

    Deana, I think it's true for a lot of us that our lives are measured with music--and I still listen to a lot of the music I loved as a high school/college student

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  9. Excellent post that took me back into the music of my life. Perhaps I should do a post on it sometime if I remember too.

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  10. I wonder what your life would have been like if you had good music to listen to, Sage. :-)

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  11. The Allmans at Jazz Fest, the Allmans in Emmigration Canyon, Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen...Layla live...

    Thanks for helping me remember Sage! Nice post!

    -MJ

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  12. Ed, do post!

    Murf, I'd be boring!

    Non-angel, good to see you around. Your other half mentioned another favorite of mine in his blog recently--Pink Floyd, "Shine on you crazy diamond" from the "Wish You Were Here" Album. That was popular the year I began college and I still keep the album on my ipod!

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  13. You are so right - there is nothing like music to take you back.

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  14. Ewe, UR right Sage! *blush* I was too young to know who was singing. I was just excited their was a song about a frog like my friend kermit. :D

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  15. That's why I listen to a lot of oldies (60s, 70s and 80s) music. They take me back and lift my mood. Music is a huge form of therapy for me.

    I love that song, Angie. I like to sing it like Mick, with my lips out to there (mocking him a bit). ;)

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  16. Music is the best time machine ever...for me "Angie" by the Rolling Stones and "Maggie Mae" by Rod Stewart take me back to Junior High with my friends getting into all kinds of trouble. Anything CCR reminds me of my younger years playing outdoors and singing with the girls. Yes, I definitely like the transporting of myself through the sound of music....

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  17. For me, Ricky don't lose that number takes me back to my first visit to Atlanta. I was in grade school or jr high. You're no good (Ronstadt) and Free Bird both conjur up memories of my grandaddy's musty house from the Christmas I got my first GE radio.
    I forgot how much memory a single tune can stir up.

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  18. music that can give you shivers, or make your eyes wet, we need more of that today.
    where are the poet/ songwriters?

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