A piece in the Washington Post over the weekend explored the topic of the links between music and memory. Headlined “Why music causes memories to flood back,” it explored the brain chemistry of memory and how music is processed by the brain, which was interesting. And it echoed, in part, another Post piece from a few years ago about a study that noted that the music that is most affecting to most of us is the music of our youths, generally the years from about 14 to about 30.
Geez. Instead of a study, they could have just asked me. I’ve spent a good portion of the free time in my life pondering the connections between music and memory, and I’ve spent a good portion of that invested free time pondering the music that was around me from the time I was, oh, 10 to the time I was 25. (That doesn’t quite fit the parameters of 14 to 30, but it’s close enough, I think.)
And there are many, many records that pull me back to certain times and places, bringing back memories – good and less good – of how those times felt:
I hear “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and I am in Miss Kelly’s third-grade classroom at Lincoln Elementary School in early 1962, watching with Miss Kelly and the rest of my classmates as a few of the girls in the class demonstrate how to dance the Twist and its relative, the Peppermint Twist.
The first notes of the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” pull me back to the autumn of 1965 and the hallways of South Junior High during the first months of seventh grade. There’s no one else in that memory with me, and that fits, because the three years of junior high were the loneliest times of my childhood.
It’s a time near the end of those three years –in early 1968 – that I recall instantly when I hear the Vogues’ “Turn Around, Look At Me.” She was unattainable, and I knew it, but I kept hoping. She never did turn around, but she was kind enough not to tell her friends about my feelings, for no one ever teased me about them.
When I hear Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” it echoes the sounds of the radio in the training room of the St. Cloud Tech High football locker room during August of 1969. I’m a manager, and I’m experiencing for the first time the camaraderie of being a member of a team, of belonging to something lively and vital and important.
And they cascade, those records that pull me back in time and fill me with the memories of places and people long gone from my life: “Are You Ready” by Pacific Gas & Electric, “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart, “We” by Shawn Phillips, “Lowdown” by Boz Scaggs, “I’d Really Love To See You Tonight” by England Dan & John Ford Coley, “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, “Time Passages” by Al Stewart, and on and on, at least through about 1978.
I turned 25 that year, and I’ve long wondered why the music from the years that came after was rarely vital to my life. Part of it, I’ve theorized, was that I was in the working world, with less time to listen avidly to music . Part of it, I’ve also thought, was that the popular music of the time was shifting to styles I found less appealing. And part of it, I’ve guessed – and that guess is supported by the two pieces from the Washington Post mentioned above – was that I had reached some spot on my timeline that somehow separated me from my youth.
Oh, there are songs and records that remind me of places and people and events that have taken place in the years since I was 25, many of them. But few of them have the power to yank me back viscerally to those places, people and events. Some do, but not many. That power is almost entirely reserved for the music of the years from 1964 to 1978.
Among the most powerful sounds from those years is the entire Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon (coincidentally released fifty years ago this week). It was a constant during the months in 1974 when I lived in the youth hostel rented by St. Cloud State in Fredericia, Denmark, playing pretty much every day on the tape player in the lounge. Most of March and April that year were spent riding the trains through Western Europe, but during late January, all of February, and the first three weeks of May, every track of the album insinuated itself in my head and heart.
And the track “Time,” though perhaps not my favorite from the album, speaks louder to me now than it did then, bringing a duality as I listen. It pulls me back to a time nearly fifty years gone, reminding me how it felt to be living in that remarkable moment at the age of 20, and at the same time, it tells me things I could not understand then but that are clear to me now at the age of 69:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the
rain
And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
So, you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the
time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of
scribbled lines.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say
Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home, cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away, across the field,
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
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