Dear Phantom Reader,
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
If you’re like me, you’re slowly inching your way back into a more active social life. When I go to events these days – concerts, parties or plays, yes, they actually do still exist – and run into an acquaintance I haven’t seen in, well, years, I always say, “Wow, I haven’t seen you since before the world came to an end.”
(Supposed) post-Covid life feels like a thaw after a long winter, and now you see the gunk and junk frozen so long beneath the snow. I for one, still feel raw and unready, not to mention rather sure we’ll be masking up again come fall…
For the time being, I’m trying to enjoy the summer and the more (or less) carefree feel in the air. Hope you are too.
XOXO
Rebeccah
Five Songs for Five Memories
The other night I went to a karaoke party in a run-down bar. Not a run-down bar in an ironic, this-is-cool-because-it’s-run-down kind of way, more one that’s just genuinely sad. Worn out industrial carpet, padded red doors from circa 1976 leading to private karaoke rooms that may or may not once have been part of the saddest bordello in the world.
Just us, a bunch of middle-aged ladies shouting out songs from our youth while we slurped on watered-down cocktail, which had up stumbling out to the bathroom where we met bachelorette party after bachelorette party in matching t-shirts, flower crowns or Minnie Mouse ears.
Here’s the thing:
Even though we were more or less the same age, we all grew up in different places: One from Canada by way of Senegal, one from England by way of Japan, one from England by way of the Czech Republic, two from Germany and two (including myself) from the Republic of California (because, really, how can we say we’re from the US when that’s such a complicated thing?)
What happens when you get a mix of people from different places at a karaoke party is situation where only a few are having a good time and the others are just waiting for the song to be over so they can finally sing along again. That was me and my California friend when we waited through Spandau Ballet and Brit pop songs we’d never heard of, and the rest of the gals when we brought some twang to Kenny Roger’s The Gambler or goofed out to Def Leppard’s Pour some sugar on me. I never listened to country growing up and I didn’t like hair bands, but I still know those songs.
We all sat in silence when the two Germans rocked out to an 80s hit from Die Ärzte.
The whole experience got me thinking about music and how tied it is to memory. I mean, a fair amount of the bands I really loved in my teens are actually really bad. One of my absolute favorites, the Ramones, would have readily admitted they were bad because being bad was kind of their thing. Punk 4-ever, sez I.
But, bad or not, those songs are a part of me, which makes me forgiving of any of their possible artistic shortcomings.
And now, dear Phantom Reader, I present to you five songs tied to five memories, random and eclectic and in no particular order.
Escape (the Pina Colada Song)
This song was actually one of the ones me and my fellow Californian and the Senegalese Canadian had fun belting out at our karaoke night, much to the dismay of the Europeans. I remember listening to this song on KLOK FM, an easy listening station in the Bay Area that was on the air until the late 80s (and yes, I was super pissed when they shut it down. The soft rock artistry, gone forever. Gasp!)
When I was a kid, I was pretty sure the story this song tells was very, very deep. But then, sometime in our mid-teens, my sister pointed out that just about everyone likes Pina coladas, getting caught in the rain and making love at midnight, which kind of ruins the romantic climax of the song.
The Rainbow Connection, Kermit the Frog
Speaking of my sister, like me she was an opera singer, a music connection that appeared out of nowhere in our family. Even before the classical singing – we started training in our teens, which btw is the earliest you can get vocal training in a healthy way because your voice hasn’t really properly formed until then – we sang all the time together. Church canons, Christmas carols in two part harmony (and sung in July), renditions of long forgotten doo-wop songs from my dad’s 1950s 45 collection (I was always the back up singer, much to my chagrin), Barbra Streisand show tunes, you name it, we sang it. One of our absolute favorites was The Rainbow Connection from the Muppet movie. At the time I thought Kermit’s banjo strumming ballad was so beautiful and poetic it made my heart hurt. I can still really relate to It’s not easy being green. Love you, Kermie!
A Horse with No Name
Speaking of my sister and KLOK FM, we used to play this game in our early teens. We would lie together on her waterbed – it was the 80s so of course she had a waterbed – and listen to KLOK FM to get a message from the boy we liked. All we had to do was listen to a song for each letter of his name. In other words, if his name was Josh, we listened to four songs and the fourth song was the secret message he was trying to send us through the airwaves. If the fourth song wasn’t romantic, we added in his last name. If the song still wasn’t romantic we added in his middle name (if we know it, and somehow we almost always did). After all that, if the final song was A Horse with No Name, we were screwed. There is absolutely no way to make A Horse with No Name into a romantic song. Believe me, we tried.
KLOK FM played A Horse with No Name a lot, but they also played a lot of sappy love songs, so it was really just dumb luck if we got the message we wanted in the end.
I wonder whatever happened to Josh. Probably he became a real estate agent. A lot of my former classmates became real estate agents. That’s the kind of town I grew up in.
Rapture, Blondie
I grew up Christian, but luckily not super scary, fundamentalist Christian that scars (or traps) people for a lifetime. But I did have run ins with these kind of groups over the years, including one summer in the early 80s when I went to a vacation Bible school at a Baptist church in Tucson. I liked the camp. We did the usual bible story stuff, Jonah and the whale, Daniel in the lion’s den, blah, blah, blah, and created dioramas for some reason or another. Mine was made with real pieces from real plants my pet praying mantis later lived on until he got eaten by another praying mantis. Such is the way of the pray.
At the end of Baptis vacation bible school, we had a big session in the sanctuary with the head pastor where he talked about the evil of backmasking in rock music. The pastor showed us pictures of album covers and a couple of song quotes on an overhead projector. I seem to remember him also playing clips from the songs, but probably he didn’t. Most of his backmasking rants were the typical conspiracy theory 666, mark of the beast, all hail Satan heavy metal stuff, but he got creative with some of his damnation talk. I remember him mentioning an Elton John song that promoted lesbianism. I can’t remember which song it was, but I do remember how he said the word. Leeezzz-bee-ah-nism. I didn’t know what it meant, but it sure sounded bad. He also mentioned Rapture by Blondie, a song he considered evil because “it just didn’t make sense.”
“Eating cars and bar, children. Only say-tan could have put such words in her mouth.” Probably he was just pissed she used the name of the event he was jonesing for.
I found the whole presentation terrifying – I was only seven – but for some reason this Blondie song example seemed the scariest of all.
Like the Weather
I got into 10,000 Maniacs the first summer I spent away from home at 18 working at –you guessed it – a Christian summer camp. That experience is worth a post at another time because it was truly heinous and what inevitably turned me away from the church for good. But it was also a wonderful summer, working on the housekeeping staff with my sister and two great friends we made, Barb and Rosa and listening to 10,000 Maniacs in our cabin in rainy Eastern Washington. I found a first edition of The Color Purple in the library the camp director would have been horrified about had he known the story, because talk about Leeezzzbee-ah-nism (I ended up stealing the book, so he never did find out).
A horrible, wonderful summer right after high school, when I was still a broken, morbidly shy girl trapped in the transparent, too-small cage of my emotional rollercoaster of a mind, worried I might never break free. This song and that summer gave me a glimmer of hope that I might someday escape my town with its Josh-es, destined to sell cat puke colored California stucco homes for the rest of their lives.
I didn’t manage to get out until seven years later, and any sense of emotional stability took even longer. But on the other side now, looking in, listening to these tunes that bring back what once was.
Which song are these for you, dear Phantom Reader? Draw a bath, give them a listen and sing along at the top of your lungs no matter who can hear.