My tale last week of my imaginary tuneheads Odd and Pop and their assistance in deciding what to post here mentioned – well, actually Odd mentioned it – that I have a great deal of Danish music. As I responded last week, I have the collected works – thirty-some CDs – of Sebastian, who is probably Denmark’s foremost artist of the pop-rock era. And I also have maybe a couple of hundred other songs in Danish.
That music is part of my life because of the nearly nine months I spent in Fredericia, Denmark (and elsewhere in Europe), through St. Cloud State during the 1973-74 academic year. About 110 students from St. Cloud lived in a youth hostel or with host families – some switching at mid-year – and we took classes taught by a roster of St. Cloud State professors that changed quarterly.
That time is on my mind today because last Thursday and Friday, about sixty of us gathered here in St. Cloud to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that year abroad. We told tales from a half-century ago, we caught up on each other’s health and retirement lives, we celebrated the memories of departed comrades, and we marveled – as we do at every reunion – at the bond between us that those months created.
When I came home to St. Cloud in May of 1974, I was very glad to jump back into life with my friends. The first morning I was back, I went over to St. Cloud State and back to my friends in the student union. They bought me coffee, noticed my longer hair and my inadequate beard, looked askance at my wooden clogs, and asked me, “So, how was Denmark?” And I said “Oh, man, it was great!”
And I told a few stories and got some laughs. But I soon realized that there was no answer I could give to that question: “How was Denmark?” Nothing I said could get across the sense of a February evening in the youth hostel or the feeling of walking with some of the other St. Cloud State students through – to pick just two – the Hermitage Museum in the city that was once called Leningrad or the central square called Grand Place in Brussels. Nor could I communicate the sense of belonging that my memories of times like that evoked. And I didn’t understand why that was.
I got a bit of an answer one evening from my dad. He said that what I was feeling was similar to how he felt after he got back to his hometown of Cambridge after serving overseas in World War II. He said, “You’ve had an intense experience with a small number of people, and only those who were there will ever understand.” And that made some sense. But it still left me unable to explain to my friends how my time away affected away. And I learned over the years that it’s been the same for almost all of the others who were students in Fredericia.
So we celebrated that bond and those memories last week. Among our events was the showing of a documentary put together by a couple of our guys that featured interviews with about ten of us (me included). Most of the soundtrack to the film was music we all recall hearing in the hostel lounge: the Allman Brothers Band, Pink Floyd, the various tunes in a Duane Allman anthology, but there was one Danish tune in the soundtrack, and it tugged at me very hard.
The record was “Rør Ved Mig” by the duo of Lecia & Lucienne. (“Rør Ved Mig” translates to “touch me.”) I heard it in many places during our first few months in Denmark: in two or more bars and taverns, on the radio that my Danish host parents placed in my room, from a record player when I visited the American girl I was seeing at her host family’s home. And once when that girl and I wandered the streets of the city of Thisted in far northwestern Jutland as my host parents visited my host mother’s parents.
When I got back to the U.S. in the spring of 1974, I was startled to hear the same tune coming from my radio with nearly the same arrangement, but with the words in Spanish. The website Second Hand Songs tells me that Mocedades’ “Eres tú,” was the original song and “Rør Ved Mig” was one of many covers in other languages. (I have mp3s of versions in English and Norwegian as well as in Spanish and Danish.)
A couple years after I came back to the U.S., my Danish host brother visited, and during his visit, I mentioned “Rør Ved Mig” to him. After he got home, he mailed me a copy of the single. And when I got my USB turntable for Christmas 2007, it was one of the first records from which I made an mp3.
And whenever I hear “Rør Ved Mig,” it has the same effect: For just a few moments, it is the fall of 1973, and I am walking somewhere inside the old portion of the city of Fredericia, maybe heading to have a beer with some of those folks with whom I celebrated last week, maybe walking with that long-ago girlfriend, or maybe just walking. It’s a golden day in October, and somewhere, not too far away, Lecia & Lucienne are singing “Rør ved mig. Så jeg føler at jeg lever . . .”
– whiteray
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