Three-Song Time Machine

I was driving home from Philadelphia the other night, when I heard a song that has always been tied to a particular time and place in my life—tied so strongly that, no matter how many times I hear it, it always takes me back to that place, so powerfully that it’s dangerous to drive.

What is it about music, and specifically music from your childhood, your teenage years, and maybe your early twenties? There is plenty of music I’ve loved since then, but none of it does that thing to me, where it triggers sense memories and makes me feel, viscerally, like I’ve traveled through time.

Here are three musical time machines that do that thing to me.

Subscribe now

If You Leave Me Now

This is the song that got me the other night on my drive home. Is it one of my favorite songs? No. Do I think it’s a great song? Meh. But for some reason, this song is tied like no other to a very particular time and place—and even to the radio where I first heard it playing.

It was a little transistor radio in the shape of a Campbell’s soup can—this very item, in fact, which apparently still exists. It was given to me as a Bar Mitzvah present. It had an on-off dial on one side and a tuner dial on the other. The speaker was the top of the can. Mine had my name spelled out in thick, red letters on the top.

I guess it was a cool novelty item in the mid-1970s. It was a bad, tinny little radio. It picked up only AM stations. But it was mine, and it sat proudly on my desk for years. And, for some reason, any time I hear this song by Chicago—every time I hear it—my brain hears it as though it’s coming out of that crappy, little tin-can radio.

I can see it sitting on my desk in my childhood bedroom, and all the memories of that room come flooding back: I can see my bookshelves, groaning under the weight of childhood obsessions (Marx Brothers movies, science fiction novels); my dresser; my lime-green comfy chair that did not fit with the color-scheme of the room at all; the custom-made, wooden loft bed with the black desk suspended below it, so that I could sit against the wall and look out into the room.

I can feel myself sitting at that desk, looking out at my room with its tartan plaid carpet and the lurid, alternating red and yellow walls that I insisted on, to match the carpet. It was a crazy little room, but it was all mine. The window was completely covered up: a shade pulled down over the top half, and a little air conditioner filling the bottom half, with more books standing between the AC unit and the edge of the window. I can even feel something indescribable about the quality of the air—what it felt like to be in that room in the 1970s. It’s not a snapshot or even a memory; I’m there.

Lawyers Guns and Money

Moving to Atlanta from Long Island, moving from high school to college, and leaving the 1970s behind for the 1980s, all brought changes. There was a lot of different music in my ears and my head—stuff that was new, stuff that was weird, and stuff I had simply missed. That’s what college is about—expanding your horizons. New experiences, new knowledge, new kinds of people. Each of them can bring the others with it: new friends introducing you to new experiences; new music introducing you to new friends, and so on.

Theater friends, I had known before. Geeky literature friends, too. But there were so many other kinds of people waiting for me in college, a thousand miles from where I had grown up.

One group of new friends introduced me to Warren Zevon, who had been recording since 1978, though I had never heard of him. By the time I left college, I knew most of his debut album by heart. Zevon is inextricably linked that group of college friends, who played his music whenever I hung out with them. We sang “Excitable Boy” at the tops of our lungs, replacing “boy” with the name of one of our friends. And the song linked in the header above, ”Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” got special treatment every time it came around.

This was back in the days of record albums, when you had to listen to things linearly. Once you committed to an album, you knew what was coming next. And this song, the last on the album, had a four-second introduction where you could hear someone quietly counting the band in. That gave the group time to get ready. Everyone would climb up onto a chair or a table or whatever they could find that got them off the floor, and we would wait through the counting so that we could time our jump perfectly to coincide with the opening chord.

I can see the shabby rooms where we all hung out, and where we climbed up and jumped down, night after night. I can see the guys (it was all guys) in their unwashed hair and their t-shirts, their unbuttoned, flannel shirts flapping as they leaped down off the furniture. We yelled, “send lawyers, guns, and money—the shit has hit the fan!” although, fortunately, the shit never really hit the fan for any of us while we were there, in our safe, collegiate cocoon.

I don’t climb up on the furniture much, anymore—and, anyway, now that songs are on shuffle, it’s hard to know when you’re going to get this one. But whenever I hear that opening chord, I’m always back there, leaping off a chair, making the empty bottles of beer rattle, but never, somehow, making the turntable needle skip.

The Untitled Song

My first years after college were kind of a waiting period. I wasn’t treading water, exactly, but I wasn’t moving forward either. I was working as the assistant director at my college theater department, where I had great fun and learned a lot. But I spent a lot of time hanging around my college campus with the undergrads, and that wasn’t ideal for Early Twenties Growth and Change.

In the evenings—often several evenings each week—I’d go to a local bar to see the Indigo Girls play. I had known them briefly and slightly at school, but had gotten closer to both of them after graduation. I saw them play as often as I could, and hung out with them and their crew enough, for a while, to be given an “Indigo Boy” t-shirt. They even wrote songs for one of the plays I worked on at the theater department.

I would go to The Dugout, or The Purple Parrot, or the Little Five Points Pub—sometimes alone, sometimes with a group, and sit through all three of their sets, nursing my whiskey, loving their music, and feeling both happy and melancholy. I liked both feelings, and they didn’t seem to contradict each other back then. Some nights, it was raucous fun; some nights, I was alone at a table, feeling sorry for myself for whatever angsty reason was top of mind that week, back when everything was so important, even though nothing had really started yet.

I’ve heard their songs hundreds of times since those days, so the connections to time and place have worn a little thin. But there’s a song they’ve never formally recorded, and when I hear it on an old bootleg tape, I’m right back at that little glass-topped table at the Purple Parrot, hunched over my whiskey, like Rick in Casablanca, brooding about lost love and letting the music do its thing to me.

“The Untitled Song” can be found on a bootleg cassette called, “Blue Food,” which was recorded in 1985 at an Emory campus eatery and drinkery called The Dugout, where The Indigo Girls played every Sunday for a long while after I graduated. Someone uploaded the tape, so you can hear it at the link in the header, above. This is the last verse, for those who don’t know the song.

It's been some time now that I saw you in a photograph
Looking just the way you did so long ago
I could almost see you throw your head back
And start to laugh in that gentle way that used to let me know
Things were okay, and a hurting song is just a cliche
And what's the use if they only always fade away
Just like the sun - just like everyone - but you…

That verse captures so much of the time-machine feeling of these songs for me: times gone by, moments lost but re-captured for a moment—just a wisp of a moment, like smoke you try to catch in your hands, as though there’s something substantial to hold on to. But there isn’t, and when you close your hand, it’s gone.

Share

Leave a comment