I've got a few songs that will take me back to very specific moments during that adolescent time. If I hear one of them unexpectedly, I'm instantly back in that moment with a level of detail that I can never recall when simply trying to remember something.
1) Coolio - Gangster's Paradise. Riding around town in the back seat of a friends convertible Mustang with the top down sitting next to my future wife. We weren't dating at the time, but had dated a few months earlier. There was something special about that night and I knew then and there that she was the one for me. I really don't like the song though.
2) Violent Femmes - American Music. I was cruising 264 after leaving a friend's house late one weeknight without a care in the world. The windows were down, the road was empty, and the volume was up. Just me and the road and the blissful ignorance that is 16...and the cop that was following me for a few miles that I didn't notice at all. It was my first ticket. As he was handing me the ticket, he said "I really didn't want to pull you over. I gave you two miles to slow down. Just be aware of what's going on around you next time, ok".
Turning Japanese by the Vapors. I still associate that song with my 'puppy love' 40 years ago, Sharon L. Also Tainted Love by Soft Cell. And Whip It by Devo. Regarding Devo, I brought the 'Oh No, its Devo' album home and my dad was drinking scotch, he said 'do my eyes deceive me or is those young men adorned with toilet seats?' I beat a hastey retreat because the question was the answer.
Finally, to make a long answer longer, Listening Wind by the Talking Heads. And Disco Man by the Damned.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, pilot and author, lost on mission, July 1944, Med Theatre.
Posts: 5963 | Location: Central Texas | Registered: September 14, 2003
Doobie Brothers and The Eagles - just started listening to them on the radio after we moved out it our small town so I was hearing them all for the first time
Communism in Eastern Europe and eventually the Soviet Union finally collapsed the year this came out. Also I turned 16
I hate offended people. They come in two flavours - huffy and whiny - and it's hard to know which is worst. The huffy ones are self-important, narcissistic authoritarians in love with the sound of their own booming disapproval, while the whiny, sparrowlike ones are so annoying and sickly and ill-equipped for life on Earth you just want to smack them round the head until they stop crying and grow up. - Charlie Brooker
Posts: 646 | Location: Sammamish, WA | Registered: May 14, 2005
