The Sunday Musician

I think famous musicians get cheated, in a certain sense. They’re inside their songs, looking out; lyrics on a napkin, a long night in a recording studio, debate over the exact way to play or format the song, how loud should the guitar be on the second verse, that sort of thing. They slave over the lyrics, struggling to say exactly what they mean in a few short words, and then…it might mean something entirely different to the consumer. For the rest of us, it just appears one day on the radio, and we don’t know anything about it except the way we feel when we hear it. It might be the song we forever connect to a first kiss, or some other important event, and that’s the emotional imprint it leaves on us. (I feel so…PBS, writing ‘emotional imprint’.)  In that sense, WE decide what the song means, not the artist. 

My friend Joe fell asleep at the wheel coming home from work one night, hit a tree and wrecked his car. Right at the moment he dozed off (he later deduced, after retrieving the tape that was jammed in his cassette deck from the accident) he was listening to the Eagles ‘Peaceful, Easy Feeling’. No lie. The song makes him hyperventilate now.

No, the unfortunate artist never gets the luxury of listening to his or her song unfettered, never gets to just let it wallpaper a moment, let it exist mysteriously in the ether.

An example from my life—the Rolling Stone’s ‘Brown Sugar’. They wrote and recorded it in 1969, then had to wait until 1971 to release it, due to legal wranglings connected with changing record labels. It’s about slavery, sex, race—very controversial lyrics for the time, and they unveiled it at the famous Altamont Speedway concert. Quite the emotional whack. Don’t tell Mick & Keith, but the song reminds me of playing the organ at my cousin Gail’s wedding.

Gail is three years older, always taller than me growing up, and I thought she was beautiful. I loved visiting the cottage up north where her family spent the summers. She and I would walk barefoot down the long two-track from the cottage to the main road, then sprint across the boiling blacktop to The Fun Spot where we’d drink orange soda, play pinball and feed the jukebox.

In 1975, the summer I turned 19, she got married in a tiny church out south of town, and I played the organ for the short ceremony. (BTW, I know I have the year right, because I just now remembered that Leo Sayers’ “Long Tall Bottles” was playing on the radio as I drove out of the parking lot after the reception. I Googled it to find the year.) It was a little bittersweet for me, watching her get married. All those summers.

After the reception, (again out on a two lane blacktop, this time a different one) heading west back to Jenison, a huge black thunderhead made it’s way up the horizon. I’ve never seen a cloud like that before or since. It was completely featureless, just a towering chalkboard-colored wall rising up from the horizon, with a glittering silver top from the sun behind it. Lighting flashed back and forth in it, and it looked like the end of the world. I was driving right into it, and it was fun like going over the top on The Blue Streak at Cedar Point.

The ’69 Ford XL 500 I’d bought from my dad had a killer stereo system, a sort of lucky meeting of the huge trunk and the speakers in the back window. All my life I’ve never had a better car stereo. Lightning streaked through the deliciously horrifying cloud and Keith Richards reached out through the speakers and smacked me with the opening to Brown Sugar. Whatever the song was about didn’t matter—it crystallized the moment for me. I drove on, remembering Gail and driving into the storm.

So there it is: the Stones meant it to be about slavery, abuse and illicit sex, and it ended up with an entirely different emotional curve for me. (That’s three different words I’ve used along with ‘emotional’. I like ‘curve’ best.) I can’t hear Brown Sugar today without thinking about that storm. And sadly, The Fun Spot burned to the ground not terribly long after.

So what's your song?  Your experience?  Is there a song that's irreversibly tied to an emotional event/time in your life?  Tell me about it, and I promise I'll find the song and listen to it, with your story in mind.  I love stories.

Note to guitar players: almost everybody plays this wrong. You have to retune the guitar. Buy me lunch at Don Miguel, and I’ll show you how to play it like Keith.