I once put the tool box list for “bagels and pastrami for Emma” followed by “Blessed St. Leibowitz, pray for us.” Up as the scrolling screen saver on a work computer in an open lab. At least 20 people stopped and looked at it without recognition. Only once of my friends at that lab recognized the source.
There are lines from books and lines from songs that simply bore into your brain and stick for ever. Some are good, recall pleasant events, great happenings in our lives. Others, called “earworms” are treacly, annoying, mawkish, saccharine, and when they surface refuse to be buried again until something drastic comes along to wipe the slate.
I don’t like music videos. I don’t watch, have never watched, MTV, VH1 or any other network founded upon a bed of music videos. I prefer to form my own associations to music. I like music to be personal, not defined by what some producer or director feels it should be in order to attract and sell to an ever-younger demographic.
One of my earlier music related memories is of me standing in the back seat of the family car on a graveled road in south east Missouri. It is dark, hot and sticky, there’s a long plume of dust and corn pollen trailing the car and the remnants of another from the car ahead make the air thick, coating the short napped fabric of the seat backs and back seat cushion. I’m hanging onto the long strap that is attached to the front seat. The windows are fully open, dust caking the outside, sliding down in sheets. Teresa Brewer is spilling from the tinny speaker, “Put another nickel in, in that nickelodeon.” She slides behind with the dust to be replaced by Eddy Arnold, “Any time you’re feeling lonely, any time you’re feeling blue…” Outside there is just enough moon light to see the corn rows flash by like the legs of a giant something running alongside us, keeping pace with the car. I can smell the dust, taste the air, feel the sticky-dusty seat cushions, hear the staticy AM broadcast from an era when DJ’s programmed more of their own music, when small stations were sundowners and rural communities depended on skip transmissions after dark. Country music was still not that distant from blue grass and old-timey Appalachian music.
I’ve written previously about the memories associated with Mary Travers.
I once saw the beginning of a television series based upon the VietNam War. The producer, the director, someone decided to use “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones as the theme. There’s no similar association for me. I don’t recall ever hearing that while in VietNam. If you asked me to come up with songs that I associate with VietNam the Stones would be represented by “Sympathy For The Devil.” The Beatles would be singing “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” and everyone listening would be displaying a tightly twisted grin that conveys absolutely no amusement.
The same box that those associations swam up from would contain Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” Country Joe McDonald’s “Feel Like I’m Fixing To Die Rag,” Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.” Shoved down in the mire, hopefully forever, Glen Campbell’s “Galveston,” Barry Sadler’s “Ballad Of The Green Beret.” Impossible to be there and not hear it as the official AFVN (Armed Forces VietNam Network) played mostly country music at the time I was within earshot. The demographic was largely enlisted from southern states and inducted from the urban and inner cities. Token programming for the inductees. They came and went without making much mark on the non-combat support services that provided such things as radio from home.
The music industry was changing rapidly. FM stations played entire album sides to those lucky enough to live within range. The British Invasion replaced the Philadelphia dance party music, Mo Town really took off, The San Francisco groups took rock into other spaces, whether the tightly engineered highly successful Jefferson Airplane albums, the wonder of Canned Heat, volcanic sounds of Janis Joplin and whichever group she had backing her, or the often-times amazing improvisations of the Grateful Dead. As always, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco were the entry points for the sounds and performers that gradually filtered into the middle states.
Country and Rock had a fusion period in the early 1970’s. Groups like The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band swam to the top. Garcia and friends laid down Working Man’s Dead and American Beauty for everyone to sing along with. And then the two styles went their separate ways. Disco captured the top forty markets and I quit listening to much popular music.
From the mid 70’s to the 1990’s, with one brief exception the towns I lived in had only sundowner stations and played to a mostly country market. The cable television providers didn’t carry MTV or its spawn. To this day I can’t tell you when MTV debuted. And I don’t need to know.
When I hear “Sympathy For The Devil” I don’t just hear the song. I see a world where all clothing is green, with red laterite dust or mud permanently ground into the rip-stop fabric. I feel that dust on my face, that mud under my fingernails. I smell the tropical decay, the nauseating smell of jet fuel blowing in my face, hot and unpleasant to breathe as I walk up the ramp into a Chinook, feel the rotor blast tearing at my clothing, pack tearing at my shoulder already. I smell diesel fuel and feces, the smells of explosives and gunpowder, gun oil cigarette smoke, I smell fetid socks soaked repeatedly in rice paddy water or monsoon-swollen streams, feet so badly damaged by continued use in wet, bacteria-laden socks that the skin comes off with the socks. I smell blood, spilled intestinal contents. I smell the charcoal cooking fires of the villagers and the napalm fueled fires we called down from above, changing some nameless hamlet or some isolated point on a highly inaccurate map into the latest reproduction of biblical extermination. Somehow I doubt any music video made for popular play can trigger that sort of flashback, recall those associations. And if it could, why would I want it to?
Other veterans from VietNam and from other wars will have their own set of musical association with their own set of tactile, aural, visual, and olfactory tie ins. Helicopters in flight, jet war plane landing, launching, flying overhead are reminders. Smell tends to be an extremely powerful agent for tripping memory cascades. Watch a VietNam vet in a rain forest exhibit at a zoological garden.
My point is not to paint myself as unique but to begin to communicate how powerful association with music can and should be. We should be able to hear a song and recall who we were dancing with, where, and how good it felt; rather than to see images of silicone enhanced dancers gyrating or of men using women as toys for reasons of status. Violence to women, to men, to anyone is nothing to glorify. Yet, MTV and the music video industry excel at selling violence, arrogance racism, and lifestyles that lead to incarceration and early deaths. The various genre of music publishers have all done equally poorly at taking something as wonderful as music and making it little more than background noise in the videos that every song must have to be considered for popular play.
Music genre are so splintered and fragmented today that it is possible to have some sort of music award every night. At least two of the genres are notorious for generating performers who excel at being rude and violent. We have patriotic – read GOP friendly – country, corner bar/lost pickup/lost dog country; soft rock, indie rock, grunge rock, punk, jam band, oldie, rock and everyone wants an award show or at least to be a major category in some award show. According to a recent CNN poll, only 17% of respondents watch awards shows of any kind. Why the hell are they being televised? I truly have no idea who watches them. But then, I don’t watch athletic competitions, religious channels, shopping channels, or most of the channels I’m forced to pay for in contracting with a cable/satellite television provider. There are enough news, history, science, sci-fi, BBC and other programming that offers genuine amusement or a chance to learn that I don’t need those channels. I write the cable company about every 6 months to insist they allow me to pick and choose what I have to pay for and to not pay for what I never watch. That generates a BS response in another 3 months telling me it would cost them too much to treat me honorably.
But just so you know, just because you may think I’ve forgotten what I began writing earlier today, have lost the train of thought; the flags are hoisted for storm warnings. “There’s anger in the land.” (another bit of lyric that surfaced yesterday) Anarchists are gathering in Pittsburgh, a city without brotherly love in mind. Anti-globalization is the battle cry of the week thee, along with nearly every other fringe cause you can imagine. Too much Jesus, too little Jesus, good coffee, bad coffee, big government, too little government, end this war, end that war, continue some war, pro-nuke, anti-nuke, the signs condemn or praise it all. We’re heading into cultural and food wars, religious wars already abound. The demand is ringing loudly to stop the spread of nuclear weapons – at least those nations that have them mostly want to stop their spread. Who do we have left demanding their turn to sit with a finger on the button? Other than North Korea, ready to invade the world to advertise Kim’s masculinity, the major drive to acquire nuclear arms is found in Islamic nations and among Islamic fundamentalist terror groups.
Bin Laden would like nothing better than to deliver one or more nuclear weapons to sites in the U.S. Other than fostering Islamic national pride he doesn’t care where the fissile material, the technical expertise, or the martyrs who make the delivery come from. If Iran doesn’t win the race to nuke Tel Aviv, bin Laden would just as happily use Pakistani weaponry; or Korean, or stolen Russian, tools to accomplish his goal.
I have no doubt that bin Laden and all the Islamic fundamentalists are quite willing to use nuclear fire, their own flame deluge, to purify the planet of infidels. Blow away enough people, destroy enough infrastructures, bring about a nuclear winter or two and watch the crops fail. Education, technology, higher learning may just become as feared and hated as all the movies and books predict. We already have one political party and one political movement that rail against education and those who pursue it. If the majority of the survivors are from third world nations, already reduced to being a poorly educated populace ruled by dictators and mullahs, it isn’t hard to postulate that world Miller saw so clearly in his novel. I’d like to think that science and reason would triumph, this time, over superstition, bigotry, and tribalism. But when has it ever? Can we guarantee that the European Enlightenment that gave rise to the educated and wise men who founded the United States was not just an anomaly? Can we guarantee that The Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, the colonization of the New World and Africa, the near extermination of the native Americans in the entire Western hemisphere, are not the normal patterns of human behavior?
I can’t bring myself to believe it. Neither, apparently could Miller. Heinlein had no faith in most of mankind.
I’ll prepare, I think. A booklegger or two is just what we need around here. I’ve got a water proof container ready to fit into a hole in the ground that I’ve lined with a plastic tarp. I think I’ll begin with “Trout Streams of Northern New England” “Scout Field Book” from 1948, Davidsohn and Henry’s “Clinical Laboratory Diagnosis” and, of course, Miller’s “Canticle….”
Beate Leibowitz, ora pro me!" "Blessed Leibowitz, pray for me!"
Fahrenheit 451 - start memorizing books.
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