I'm not exactly breaking any new ground if I mention that iPods are cool. But--at the risk of sounding like an old fogy to the kids out there--damn it, iPods are cool. Songs I bought over ten years ago--and haven't listened to in likely over nine--now sit, conveniently stored in a compressed digital file, right next to the music I bought yesterday, just waiting for their turn to play for me.
Before iPods, music had a shelf life directly proportional to the number of CDs you could put up with sliding around the back seat of your car. Once something got bumped, like that Offspring CD you listened to a thousand times over the summer of 1997, it was relegated to the shelf by your home stereo, to collect dust until that fateful day your bored, out-of-work-for-the-summer-girlfriend decides it would be fun to alphabetize the CD collection.
With iPods, though, music never has to die--with the possible exception of the soundtrack to the Heights. The random number generator behind the shuffle algorithm plays DJ in your headphones, and every so often becomes a musical time machine, sending you into a vivid memory from the past as you kick it up a notch on the treadmill. Certain songs--ones you listened to incessantly for a brief period and then never really heard again--seem especially good at this. These songs seem to define and capture a moment or an event in your life, and hearing them sends you back there without warning.
With that in mind, I'd like to present a few songs that do that for me, along with the, hopefully, amusing and/or entertaining memories I associate with them. Enjoy!
Kokomo -- The Beach Boys
There was a brief period in the late eighties when my family found an obsession with Papa Ginos. Maybe it was the allure of the all you can eat pasta on Wednesday nights (meatballs not included). Maybe my mom just wanted a break from our daily McDonalds and Burger King runs. Or perhaps it had something to with my mom being afraid to go home to our scary neighborhood after she picked us up from school, and a trip to Papa Ginos seemed to kill an entire afternoon. Whatever it was, for a while it seemed like we were there two or three days a week.
A somewhat distinctive fixture in Papa Ginos restaurants--a New England pizza chain that serves as the Burger King to Pizza Hut's McDonalds--was the jukebox. My sister and I would excitedly flip through the pages of song selections to pick our eight songs every visit. This was way before iPods, kids, and even before CD players for us. Getting to play DJ for the entire restaurant, even if it was empty, was a pretty cool trick.
We always had to be careful not to pick something so outrageous that it would bug our parents. Bear in mind these were the same parents who owned two cassettes (don't ask, kids) between them--a Kenny Rogers greatest hits tape and the debut Air Supply. A poorly chosen musical selection one trip could easily mean no dollar the next time. I can still remember my dad's usual admonishment as we slipped out of the booth:
"Hey, no acid rock, okay? There are elderly people in here!"
To this day I have no clue what acid rock is, or why he thought it would be included in the Papa Ginos jukebox, but I was careful just the same. And just to be on the safe side, we'd usually pick one or two songs specifically to appease our mom.
"Don't worry, mom, after Parents Just Don't Understand, it's going to play that Beach Boys one," my sister would say as our generation's version of Will Smith--before he took up acting--came over the speakers.
"Yeah, and there are no swears in it, I am sure of it," I'd add. They were big on swearing. Even today, I look over my shoulder when listening to the uncensored channels on XM in my car.
The Beach Boys' song Kokomo was always a big hit with my mom, and so it almost always made the playlist. My parent's weren't huge Beach Boys fans, but a few years before we'd taken a cruise to the Bahamas, and retained a flirting fascination with island life. Kokomo was hardly reggae, but it evoked a sense of nostalgia that spoke of virgin Pina Coladas and hours of bingo fun in the starlight lounge.
For me, though, the song always brings me back to the Papa Ginos by the Market Basket, eating dinner at three o'clock in the afternoon and rocking the house. And, of course, going up to a clearly irritated worker at the counter for a forth plate of pasta.
Come Out and Play -- The Offspring
In college, a really good friend of mine would often invite us up to the summer cottage his family owned in New Hampshire on weekends when it was sitting empty. We all still lived at home, so these little weekend excursions away from the prying eyes of parents and professors were especially exciting.
We'd load up our cars with our music gear--we were trying to maintain a fledgling band at the time--and head up, usually on less than an hour's notice. On the way, we'd hit the grocery store--and on later trips the liquor store--and load up like we were going to be snowed in for a week. Within minutes of arriving, we'd have turned the charming lake cottage into our makeshift frat house, complete with a stereo system and a stack of Fender amps.
It was about an hour drive up to the place, straight up route 125. Invariably, we'd drive up at night and, for reasons never quite explained, in extremely dense fog. And every time we took that drive, we'd here Come Out and Play at least once on the radio, which we cranked to eleven as we rolled down the windows so all of Epping, NH could hear us sing along.
The song sort of became the official anthem for these trips, and hearing that intro guitar riff always sends me back there, driving up 125 in a burgundy Oldsmobile emblazoned with more than a dozen Nirvana stickers, on our way to a testosterone filled weekend of slamming down frozen pizzas and playing embarrassingly bad metal covers.
Chicago Greatest Hits -- Chicago
In the summer of 1994 I won the lead in a semi-professional play at the beautiful Giordano's Starlight Dinner Theater. It was an amazing summer. Over July and August, I'd drive up for rehearsals at least three nights a week. Then, when our four week run opened in September, I was there for four shows a weekend. It was almost a full time job, and for those few months, I felt like an honest-to-goodness actor.
On show nights, we'd all stay way past curtain, just hanging out in the restaurant till one or two in the morning. We'd talk about the acting scene, or how the performance had been that night, or what we all wanted to do next. It was just this really amazing artistic environment, and I felt like this lucky kid who'd stumbled his way into the cool club just by accident.
I had about a forty-five minute drive home from the theater, and on those show nights, I was usually making that drive at two or three in the morning. A buddy of mine had left the Chicago Greatest Hits (1981 - 1989) CD in my car, and every night of the run I'd listen to the whole thing start to finish on my late night drive home. The tone of the CD just fit the mood of the time perfectly, and I'd crawl into bed with my ears ringing from the horns in Love Me Tomorrow and What Kind of Man Would I Be? exhausted but more excited about my life than I'd ever remembered being.
It was a good summer.
