Alessandra,
Most of the time periods of my life have soundtracks to them, but oddly when I think of my times with you I hear nothing except a reverb chorus of "Rehab" and the sound of sloshing wine. Well, of course there is "Bobby McGee," the only song we all know the words to sing around a fire. But it surprises me since you were the first girl I knew in a band, you were also the first girl I knew who drove a motorcycle, but still no music--not even the rumble of a Harley.
Maybe it's because our salad days together were in the 90s. Do we really want a soundtrack from the 90s? I mean, how sad would it have been to fall in love and have your song be by Hootie and the Blowfish? (Deep breath Marty.) The Cranberries’ "Linger" reminds me of you because you lived in Cranberry. Damn, now that song is in my head!
Maybe it's just New Jersey in general, most of my soundtracks were generated in Maine. Probably my earliest was of summers, coming from Tennessee to Maine, and walking into my cousins’ house and watching whatever shirtless jean clad teenage boys were about walk by me, their heads thrown back, singing "Sgt. Pepper," then "Everybody Wants You," but mostly a steady stream of Zeppelin and AC/DC, fueled by 102.9 WBLM, classic rock baby.
Puppy love at 14, first year permanently in Maine, starting things off by falling so deep into Air Supply's "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" on my cottage bed surrounded by the black fall night, I needed Ozzy's majestic declaration of "I AM IRON MAN!" every morning on the bus to snap some sense into me. You ain’t gonna get a Mainer boy with Air Supply after all.
Next came my brother’s influence as we moved that first Maine winter into the Spofford house in Waldoboro, afternoons filled with Bread and late night frost bite truck rides brought to you by Squeeze. But I discovered The Police’s Synchronicity all on my own.
I think a lot of my soundtracks were provided by friends who had more money to blow than I did, and my friend Su had quite a record collection. Soundtracks with her have the most songs and get the most replay, probably because the years with her were truly the halcyon days of my youth. Su's and my soundtracks come in two Volumes.
Volume 1, Su and Linda: We painted my room in Warren, and our hair, teal blue (with a black lightening bolt across the wall), as we wore out my brother’s David Bowie Changes One album, and we were hooked. Nobody, nobody could dance and lip sync to Prince’s Purple Rain like us. After she died, I had a dream of Su and me being lowered into an empty room by poles, side by side and dancing a slow lovely lament to “When Dove’s Cry.”
But dancing never possessed you quite the way it can with Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony.” And that was just the tip of the iceberg; Su had every single album, bootleg or legal, of Billy’s. I nearly matched Su’s obsessive love of Billy, button for button, with my love of Duran Duran. In fact, when our friendship had taken a little break, it was the DD’s that got us back together. On the bus home one day, Su told me, “I taped the new Reflex video for you,” and I was like, “You had me at Reflex” and off we got at her house to begin a new phase of our love. But I’m getting ahead of myself, that song really belongs to Volume 2.
Cheering basketball bus: Violent Femmes, it took about 40 voices screaming, “How can I get just one SHOE?" then "DUCK” over the real words to keep the coaches from catching on and beginning the ban. Meatloaf, damn I can still do both parts of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” (Hey, I never claimed to be original in my soundtracks.) L-O-L-A, Lola, live version The Kinks, I wore out Kathy’s trailer phone calling that one in on the radio so I could tape it. I don’t want to admit it, but the voices screaming “WHOOAAA Living on a Prayer!” are too loud, so there it is.
First love: I had such tidal waves of butterflies to the tune of Madonna’s “Crazy for You” that I still catch my breath when I see Vision Quest… Getting a little rocked to “Rock Me Amadeus,” now how was it that I didn’t know he was gay?? Lying on my bed at the Faler House in Warren, listening to “The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald” over and over, my love for him was as heavy as that ship. Same bed, singing “I Want You to Want Me” to him when I was plowed on Vodka and Pepsi-free--his eyes locked on mine as he said, “You seem happy like you used to, with Su and Angie.” Uh-oh, can you see what’s coming? Yup, late nights with Marillion, the one hit wonder of Wale’s “Kayleigh” playing over and over, as I cry my eyes out for that boy.
Volume 2, Su and Linda: Mending my broken heart with the “Reflex” overture, Su and I are ready for Volume 2 and a smattering of new boys for the summer. We start off with a little Cure “Boys Don’t Cry”, Morrisey’s “Every Day is like Sunday,” mixed in with Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s and New Order’s “Temptation,” Su’s favorite as she really did have green/blue/gray eyes.
That following spring, Su fell for a boy with a sweet little edge of punk to him, and I soon followed suit with his best friend to the tune of Lisa Lisa’s “Head to Toe” with a little word change to celebrate, “Today started with a little kiss, on Robert’s couch” (Oh, oh my, you can't take the girl out of teenage girl no matter how much black you wear)... Fortunately, we moved on to the Sex Pistols, Generation X, and the Repo Man soundtrack. Hearing Sid Vicious warbling “I Did It My Way” and Burning Sensations’ “Pablo Picasso was Never Called an Asshole” could get me all tingly for years to come.
But I also remained faithful to David Bowie. My boy and I would spend late summer nights holed up in his bedroom’s loft, sneaking in, walking on his feet so his parents would only hear one set of footsteps, to spend hours lying on his mattress listening to Bowie’s Never Let Me Down loop on his tape player. I could practically fall into a sex induced coma just hearing one song from that album. That fall he and I went to “The Glass Spider Tour,” and it was fantastic. (I realized years later when I bought the CD that without the sex to accompany it, the album is quite a let down, but the concert remains pretty amazing.)
Our break up found me lying in my friend’s darkened dorm room with cigarettes, Diet Coke, and Pink Floyd.
College then gets a little lighter with some “Funky Cold Medina”, “Baby Got Back”, “No Hippy Chicks,” and “Gonna Make You Sweat.” Here is where I should probably admit to having a soft spot for dance music because “Groove is in the Heart” and you know I liked to get my freak on. But not sure if they qualify as being the soundtrack to my college experience, more like the soundtrack to certain drunken moments.
The air of college, especially those first two years in Corbett Hall, are filled more with the Steve Miller Band, Elvis Costello, Sinead O'Connor, INXS and here is where my lifelong journey with U2 and R.E.M begins, it was “The End Of The World As We Know It”, but just the beginning for me.
I left the Indigo Girls and 10,000 Maniacs behind on the smoke filled plane to Scotland for a semester, crying like the silly depressed girl I was for the boy I was leaving behind. If I could go back in time, I'd slap those headphones off and shout, "You'll be stuck with him for at least 20 more years, better live it up, girlie!" Scotland is filled with the Cure and dance tunes that were in America two years prior--but the best music was my professor reciting Yeats with his thick Scottish brogue.
Chris has been a sidebar in all of my Soundtracks since I saw him walking into school wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt. He was my brother’s destination the night of the Squeeze freeze. We walked into his house and watched him play his electric guitar airbrushed with Greta Garbo and despite my splitting headache I began my love, well okay, lust, of musicians.
Then as I sat at home that first college Christmas break entranced by INXS’ “Need You Tonight” video, wanting the drummer so badly I thought I would burst, in walks Chris, home with my brother on break from Bowdoin dressed head to toe in black with his buckled boots and shy smile, giving me something real to burst upon.
Though there would be boys and songs to follow for years before he became the only one, nothing can quite compete with his staring at me over the cabin's lamplight as he sang “World Leader Pretend.” Damn! Those green eyes! F___er still uses them to glare at me about the dishes, sheer abuse…
Chris's and my soundtracks are so intertwined at times it’s hard to separate them. I guess it’s the intersection that gives us our playlist, since we never danced a song or had a moment where it all began to have the music of it in the background. It was a collection of sounds and times and moments through years. But I think that’s a whole other post, I’ll just give R.E.M and the Cure top billing with emphasis on "Just Like Heaven".
As I wrote this, I realized that the Soundtracks have slowed down and wondered if they are for being young and dreaming, when your life isn’t part of a half written plot. But then I remembered four years ago, driving S around all of North Union’s back roads to get him to nap listening over and over to U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and R.E.M’s Around the Sun, and suddenly realized that time period, those roads, have a Soundtrack, so maybe it’s more about having the time to hit replay. Or making the time. I watch Chris with his earphones and IPOD as he mows the lawn, does the dishes, goes for a run, or sometimes just wants to tune out the noise. I see him sitting in our driveway in his car until the end of a new song he’s just downloaded, and I think, I’ll always have a new book and he’ll always have a new Soundtrack. Life, as we progress, does make it hard to have it all.
Most of the time periods of my life have soundtracks to them, but oddly when I think of my times with you I hear nothing except a reverb chorus of "Rehab" and the sound of sloshing wine. Well, of course there is "Bobby McGee," the only song we all know the words to sing around a fire. But it surprises me since you were the first girl I knew in a band, you were also the first girl I knew who drove a motorcycle, but still no music--not even the rumble of a Harley.
Maybe it's because our salad days together were in the 90s. Do we really want a soundtrack from the 90s? I mean, how sad would it have been to fall in love and have your song be by Hootie and the Blowfish? (Deep breath Marty.) The Cranberries’ "Linger" reminds me of you because you lived in Cranberry. Damn, now that song is in my head!
Maybe it's just New Jersey in general, most of my soundtracks were generated in Maine. Probably my earliest was of summers, coming from Tennessee to Maine, and walking into my cousins’ house and watching whatever shirtless jean clad teenage boys were about walk by me, their heads thrown back, singing "Sgt. Pepper," then "Everybody Wants You," but mostly a steady stream of Zeppelin and AC/DC, fueled by 102.9 WBLM, classic rock baby.
Puppy love at 14, first year permanently in Maine, starting things off by falling so deep into Air Supply's "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" on my cottage bed surrounded by the black fall night, I needed Ozzy's majestic declaration of "I AM IRON MAN!" every morning on the bus to snap some sense into me. You ain’t gonna get a Mainer boy with Air Supply after all.
Next came my brother’s influence as we moved that first Maine winter into the Spofford house in Waldoboro, afternoons filled with Bread and late night frost bite truck rides brought to you by Squeeze. But I discovered The Police’s Synchronicity all on my own.
I think a lot of my soundtracks were provided by friends who had more money to blow than I did, and my friend Su had quite a record collection. Soundtracks with her have the most songs and get the most replay, probably because the years with her were truly the halcyon days of my youth. Su's and my soundtracks come in two Volumes.
Volume 1, Su and Linda: We painted my room in Warren, and our hair, teal blue (with a black lightening bolt across the wall), as we wore out my brother’s David Bowie Changes One album, and we were hooked. Nobody, nobody could dance and lip sync to Prince’s Purple Rain like us. After she died, I had a dream of Su and me being lowered into an empty room by poles, side by side and dancing a slow lovely lament to “When Dove’s Cry.”
But dancing never possessed you quite the way it can with Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony.” And that was just the tip of the iceberg; Su had every single album, bootleg or legal, of Billy’s. I nearly matched Su’s obsessive love of Billy, button for button, with my love of Duran Duran. In fact, when our friendship had taken a little break, it was the DD’s that got us back together. On the bus home one day, Su told me, “I taped the new Reflex video for you,” and I was like, “You had me at Reflex” and off we got at her house to begin a new phase of our love. But I’m getting ahead of myself, that song really belongs to Volume 2.
Cheering basketball bus: Violent Femmes, it took about 40 voices screaming, “How can I get just one SHOE?" then "DUCK” over the real words to keep the coaches from catching on and beginning the ban. Meatloaf, damn I can still do both parts of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” (Hey, I never claimed to be original in my soundtracks.) L-O-L-A, Lola, live version The Kinks, I wore out Kathy’s trailer phone calling that one in on the radio so I could tape it. I don’t want to admit it, but the voices screaming “WHOOAAA Living on a Prayer!” are too loud, so there it is.
First love: I had such tidal waves of butterflies to the tune of Madonna’s “Crazy for You” that I still catch my breath when I see Vision Quest… Getting a little rocked to “Rock Me Amadeus,” now how was it that I didn’t know he was gay?? Lying on my bed at the Faler House in Warren, listening to “The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald” over and over, my love for him was as heavy as that ship. Same bed, singing “I Want You to Want Me” to him when I was plowed on Vodka and Pepsi-free--his eyes locked on mine as he said, “You seem happy like you used to, with Su and Angie.” Uh-oh, can you see what’s coming? Yup, late nights with Marillion, the one hit wonder of Wale’s “Kayleigh” playing over and over, as I cry my eyes out for that boy.
Volume 2, Su and Linda: Mending my broken heart with the “Reflex” overture, Su and I are ready for Volume 2 and a smattering of new boys for the summer. We start off with a little Cure “Boys Don’t Cry”, Morrisey’s “Every Day is like Sunday,” mixed in with Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s and New Order’s “Temptation,” Su’s favorite as she really did have green/blue/gray eyes.
That following spring, Su fell for a boy with a sweet little edge of punk to him, and I soon followed suit with his best friend to the tune of Lisa Lisa’s “Head to Toe” with a little word change to celebrate, “Today started with a little kiss, on Robert’s couch” (Oh, oh my, you can't take the girl out of teenage girl no matter how much black you wear)... Fortunately, we moved on to the Sex Pistols, Generation X, and the Repo Man soundtrack. Hearing Sid Vicious warbling “I Did It My Way” and Burning Sensations’ “Pablo Picasso was Never Called an Asshole” could get me all tingly for years to come.
But I also remained faithful to David Bowie. My boy and I would spend late summer nights holed up in his bedroom’s loft, sneaking in, walking on his feet so his parents would only hear one set of footsteps, to spend hours lying on his mattress listening to Bowie’s Never Let Me Down loop on his tape player. I could practically fall into a sex induced coma just hearing one song from that album. That fall he and I went to “The Glass Spider Tour,” and it was fantastic. (I realized years later when I bought the CD that without the sex to accompany it, the album is quite a let down, but the concert remains pretty amazing.)
Our break up found me lying in my friend’s darkened dorm room with cigarettes, Diet Coke, and Pink Floyd.
College then gets a little lighter with some “Funky Cold Medina”, “Baby Got Back”, “No Hippy Chicks,” and “Gonna Make You Sweat.” Here is where I should probably admit to having a soft spot for dance music because “Groove is in the Heart” and you know I liked to get my freak on. But not sure if they qualify as being the soundtrack to my college experience, more like the soundtrack to certain drunken moments.
The air of college, especially those first two years in Corbett Hall, are filled more with the Steve Miller Band, Elvis Costello, Sinead O'Connor, INXS and here is where my lifelong journey with U2 and R.E.M begins, it was “The End Of The World As We Know It”, but just the beginning for me.
I left the Indigo Girls and 10,000 Maniacs behind on the smoke filled plane to Scotland for a semester, crying like the silly depressed girl I was for the boy I was leaving behind. If I could go back in time, I'd slap those headphones off and shout, "You'll be stuck with him for at least 20 more years, better live it up, girlie!" Scotland is filled with the Cure and dance tunes that were in America two years prior--but the best music was my professor reciting Yeats with his thick Scottish brogue.
Chris has been a sidebar in all of my Soundtracks since I saw him walking into school wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt. He was my brother’s destination the night of the Squeeze freeze. We walked into his house and watched him play his electric guitar airbrushed with Greta Garbo and despite my splitting headache I began my love, well okay, lust, of musicians.
Then as I sat at home that first college Christmas break entranced by INXS’ “Need You Tonight” video, wanting the drummer so badly I thought I would burst, in walks Chris, home with my brother on break from Bowdoin dressed head to toe in black with his buckled boots and shy smile, giving me something real to burst upon.
Though there would be boys and songs to follow for years before he became the only one, nothing can quite compete with his staring at me over the cabin's lamplight as he sang “World Leader Pretend.” Damn! Those green eyes! F___er still uses them to glare at me about the dishes, sheer abuse…
Chris's and my soundtracks are so intertwined at times it’s hard to separate them. I guess it’s the intersection that gives us our playlist, since we never danced a song or had a moment where it all began to have the music of it in the background. It was a collection of sounds and times and moments through years. But I think that’s a whole other post, I’ll just give R.E.M and the Cure top billing with emphasis on "Just Like Heaven".
As I wrote this, I realized that the Soundtracks have slowed down and wondered if they are for being young and dreaming, when your life isn’t part of a half written plot. But then I remembered four years ago, driving S around all of North Union’s back roads to get him to nap listening over and over to U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and R.E.M’s Around the Sun, and suddenly realized that time period, those roads, have a Soundtrack, so maybe it’s more about having the time to hit replay. Or making the time. I watch Chris with his earphones and IPOD as he mows the lawn, does the dishes, goes for a run, or sometimes just wants to tune out the noise. I see him sitting in our driveway in his car until the end of a new song he’s just downloaded, and I think, I’ll always have a new book and he’ll always have a new Soundtrack. Life, as we progress, does make it hard to have it all.
High School: The Big Chill
21: (Gilberts) Bonnie Raitt, (Dreyden Terrace) Sister's of Mercy
***************************************************************************
L
You're right there...I think the soundtrack to our times was the sounds of the Canal path [in Princeton] the chirping and whirring of the birds and our conversation, and of course the truckers' horns on Washington Rd. You know, in summer, in those leotard things. But also, and I must say it, there was that Country Music Phase that you went thru, and you'll notice the singular pronoun there since at no time did I ever voluntarily pay to hear "Achy Breaky Heart" or "I've Got Friends in Low Places" and I am talking about the line dance evenings at that hotel (motel?) on Rt 1 and of course The Yellow Rose.
Alessandra
***************************************************************************
Alessandra,
Ahh, I did think of it, although, it wasn't Maine and technically it was a Country Line Dancing Phase, not a Country Music Phase. To imply that because I liked a little "two stepping", I would have ever voluntarily listened to "Achy Breaky Heart" is like saying because you like to ride, you aspire to a Honda Goldwing!!
I did spend many a night at Oakley's and Colorado Cafe and any other place Sara and I could scour up, after they closed down the Yellow Rose. Having a love for dancing can bring about some unlikely outlets for it in your life. (See: Cheerleading.) Although CLD in New Jersey differs from cheering in that everyone was masquerading, not just me. I remember parking lots full of trucks with confederate flags on the window behind empty gun racks. I wanted to go into the bar and shout "you're pretty far north of the Mason Dixon Line boys!"
I actually probably had more legitimate claim to the world of country than most in NJ as I was born in Nashville, Tennessee and raised in spitting distance, and my father being a country music songwriter and all. (Not to mention that we grew up with a defunct refrigerator on our porch, country style.) But being as I was currently working at an Ivy League academic press at the time of my short skirt-cowboy-boot-and-hat wearing phase of my "tush pushing" life, I'd say I was right on par with the rest. (How about you? Do you think mentioning Princeton may have gotten you booted from the Merry-Go-Round?)
S, Me, M.Sadly, the only picture taken during the Line Dancing Phase. Oakley's Halloween night. Three Blind Mice!
Echoes. Taken less than two years ago, you can see how I clung to the hat and short skirt, until my fingers were pried offMy two favorite things about CLD were that no one, NO ONE, ever talked about what they actually did for a living, it would dispel the magic and we would suddenly all find ourselves in the middle of a dirty dance floor with a strip mall down the road, wearing outrageous castoffs of Dolly Parton and John Wayne.
But my favorite CLD feature was that it knows no age limit. It was the one place where I saw 20 year olds mingling with 70 year olds--which gives me dancing hope for the future as I seem to be getting older and older every year.
You make it sound like we were walking down the canal in just leotards, I assume you just mean the leotards as shirts phase that made our breasteses look as young and firm as they once were...
L
***************************************************************************
Linda
No no no you paid good money on your crappy academic salary to hear "Achy Breaky Heart" and no amount of twisted semantics is going to get you out of that one. Mmmm...Manville was one of those Towns That Time Forgot, and they can be found pretty far from the Mason Dixon Line, and altho the residents of said towns may have embraced modern technology, such as the aforementioned pickup trucks, they may not be aware that the Civil War is actually over. They may not talk like they got a mouthful of tabacky but they're still as shitkicker as anything under any Tennessee rock. Ah the parking lot of the Yellow Rose, pickups, piss-cheap beer, broken glass and broken dreams.
But it's wierd that you chose to write about soundtracks because I just ordered some of CDs of music I used to listen to a long time ago [Killing Joke, Gang of Four], that I realized I really miss. I hate the fact that I have to buy it twice since I've already got it on vinyl, but I'm too lazy to play my records and now I can put it on the pod.
On another, sad note, I got my hair cut (at this chichi place in ny but that's another post) and it's a lot shorter and loads more stylish and no one has noticed. How more invisible could I be. Sigh.
Excuse me have to go. The boss is throwing all her crayons on the floor.
PS You *are* getting older each year. By at least one year.
Alessandra
1 comment:
(this is Marty's Message, I copied it)
Linda and Alessandra --
What a cool way to share our witty banter...thanks Linda! I will have plenty to say later, but at the moment I am awaiting the arrival of the world famous Ombudsman Lee Ann Smith and I have to clean some of the crust off of this house...
Speaking of house, as I mentioned to Alessandra, Marion and I will be moving to Myrtle Beach in September (that is the tentative closing date...we are building a house and as of yet they have not broken ground)...yay!! A brand new house!
Which brings me to...is there any way we can do our cabin trip in August, or very early September? I will be in rehearsals for the final Raleigh tread on the boards in Sept, and I do not want our annual get-together to lapse. Linda, I know it's likely you'll be all rented up for August, so I'd be willing to spring for a hotel room somewhere (Camden, maybe?) for us all...let me know what you think.
Love you muchly...M
Post a Comment