music and memories

Last night I had a drink with friends at a bar that managed to be playing the soundtrack of my junior high era life. Hearing songs like “There She Goes” by the La’s and “Here’s Where the Story Ends” by the Sundays, my brain explodes with images of posters, tape cases, and photographs of friends—the objects that filled my bedroom back then. In seventh grade, you could barely see the green-and-pink flowered wallpaper that was beginning to peel off my walls because I taped to it so many magazine-page pictures and posters of glam rock heavy metal bands like Poison, Guns N Roses, Skid Row (to each of whom I dedicated a wall and a door), Cinderella, Danger Danger, the Scorpions, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard that I once counted and found I had 284 pairs of eye-lined and mascara-enhanced eyes watching me. (And if you think their makeup was bad, you should try to imagine how my parents felt about the amount of skin-tight leather worn in this montage of metal men.)

A year later, I made room to add posters of the Sundays, Luna, and 10,000 Maniacs. I turned to my Georgia roots and started listening to REM, whose guitarist Peter Buck I once sat a table away from at a restaurant and said hello to. I became fanatical about the local high-school-band-made-it-big (at least in Atlanta), Drivin n Cryin. And though mainstream radio stations and MTV didn’t yet give air to these groups, I also started listening to Soul Asylum, the Lemonheads, Live, and a little band called Pearl Jam. The Georgia State radio station was ahead of the game, and though Sebastian Bach and Bret Michaels (lead singers, respectively, of Skid Row and Poison) didn’t come down from my walls for another few years, I began to listen to a lot of music with a softer edge.

I still love many of those heavy metal tunes, especially the ballads—GNR’s “Patience” and Tesla’s “Love Song” will always seem to me to be perfect songs—but it’s the music I turned to after them that really conjures up memories for me. Maybe that’s got more to do with what was going on in my life at the time than with the music, but some of the songs I then began listening to now shoot me straight back to another place the second I hear them. To this day, if I hear even a chord of Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” I am transported to the school cafeteria; the lights are dim; I’m walking in alone; I’m looking around; I’m excited. Play Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” and I’m at the same eighth-grade dance, arms around the neck of one of my best friends, thinking for the first time that maybe I like him, and maybe he likes me. Not six months later, I’m in a movie theater with my first boyfriend, and if you play Bryan Adams’ very cheesy “Everything I Do, I Do It For You” in my presence, scenes of Robinhood will flash across my eyes, and then an arm will pass around me, and I will get my first kiss.

Last week I heard Pearl Jam’s “Black” in the car and couldn’t resist singing along; but as I listened—I know some day you’ll have a beautiful life; I know you’ll be a star; in somebody’s else’s sky, but why, why, why can’t it be mine?—it brought up a darker memory, one I think hearing that song always will: I am at one of my best friend’s houses; we are in her bedroom; we are writing on the wall. She has an artful handwriting and I’m trying to imitate it; I’m writing those lyrics with a dark marker and I’m dedicating them to one of our friends, who has recently driven off a roadside on a rainy day and smashed headfirst into a pine tree. We have not experienced death before; we’re unsure what to do with it; so we drown it out with music that touches us in a deep place. Later in life, U2’s “All I Want Is You” will be the song that most does this for me—that sets my heart throbbing with an intensity that comes from knowing the song has perfectly captured an emotion of mine and put it somewhere outside my body. Cowboy Junkies’ “Blue Moon” will do this, as will their “Bea’s Song” and “To Live Is To Fly.” Every single release by the Indigo Girls will do this, and thankfully, most of them will right my spirit; they will take it back to a summer evening at the Chastain Park ampitheater, surrounded by the leaves and branches of tall tall woods, watching the light dim in the sky, the bats come out, the stars begin to sparkle, listening to the lyrics of “Galileo” echo off the stage and into the night; back to the dock on Montsweag Bay by whose side I sit in the low branches of a tree and listen on my walkman to “Closer to Fine” and feel it to be so; back to Pigeon Mountain, where I have gone climbing and caving numerous times and am now for the last time driving away from on an April afternoon at the end of high school and thinking Emily and Amy must have been right there when they wrote the lyrics to “Southland in the Springtime.”

I have memories that are so intricately intertwined with music that I’m not sure I would even recall them if a wire in my brain weren’t tripped by the gentle chords or throaty lyrics of a particular song. I’m sure I would still remember the occurrences; but what these songs do is revive the emotions evoked by experiencing them—what these songs do is let me relive them. There is nothing else that could capture quite that smell of leather, that small dashboard and the river beyond, that warm air flowing freely at me, that exhilaration that came from cruising down the highway with my bare feet out the window as one of my best friends drove us to crew practice in her dad’s 1980 MG convertible; there is nothing else that could capture the sensation of that twenty-minute moment than the opening refrain of Etta James’ “At Last”—that solitary word, traversing the spectrum of notes, rising from her throat up into her head and opening out into a tone filled with all the hope a heart can feel. Many a bride agrees that that song is incomparable; but what gets me more than just the richness and the romance of it is the ability it and many other songs have to rekindle something in me that long ago was and then wasn’t.