I’ve written a few times here about what I call “Time & Place” tunes, tracks that remind me so strongly of another, usually long gone, place and time. I’ve mentioned a few of those tracks here, but there’s no way I could ever catalog them all.
First of all, there are too many. Second, there’s no way to know: A record that might have no impact on me in, say, February might trigger an entirely different reaction were I to hear it in August. And that summertime reaction to that record might happen once and never again.
Now, there are likely records and tracks that I like that will probably never have a time and place component; the jump blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, are good listening, but I doubt I’ll ever attach any memories to them. One can never know, though.
Anyway, one of the most potent of my time and place tunes popped up the other day, and, after digging into my files, I was startled to learn that not only have I never mentioned the track here, I’ve never even mentioned the artist: Bonnie Raitt.
And she’s well-represented on the digital shelves. In the RealPlayer, where I stash my main collection, there are almost 240 tracks from the rootsy singer, most of those from her own albums and some finding her performing with other folks. In iTunes, where I keep my day-to-day listening, I have only four tracks by Raitt. (That seems bit slight; I may have to increase that number.) But one of those four is the one that caught me off guard the other day.
Every time I hear Raitt’s 1973 cover of Randy Newman’s “Guilty,” the opening chords by pianist Bill Payne always make me slow down, close my eyes and travel in time. I first heard the song through the wall of the hostel room where I lived during half of my college year in Denmark, as one of the girls in Room 6 had the song on a mixtape her brother had sent her from home.
And in the many years since then, no matter where I am, the song places me for at least an instant in my room in the middle of a winter night, the muted sounds seeping through the wall in a mix of sadness and resignation. I heard the song so frequently during my four months at the hostel that Raitt’s recording, as I wrote long ago, “took on forever an aura of beer-soaked regrets and midnight grief.”
That’s okay, though. We need to recall our grief and regrets from time to time. They are, after all, a large part of what has made us who we are today. And for me, as I would hope it does for all of us through time, the grief has eased its way to bittersweet, and the song triggers these days nothing more than a half-smile at how young we all were. And the recording – which includes, among others, Lowell George on slide guitar and New Orleans pillar Earl Palmer on drums – stands up well after fifty years, too.
– whiteray
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