The Resurrection
When it comes to music-listening, like many, we have options: iPod, CD player, DVD player, phonograph, Tivoli radio, regular radio, satellite radio, Internet radio, etc. For the most part, we’ve got the bases covered — or so I thought. Lately, the one gadget I’d assumed I was through with forever suddenly became the most surprising of must-haves, the kind I absolutely could no longer live without.
We needed a cassette deck. And bad.
Granted, over the past few years I have thought about it… there is that dusty box I almost never open, housing all my old tapes, stashed in storage, at the very bottom of a stack of other miscellania that require minimum accessibility.
But about a week ago, I picked up Eric Clapton’s recent autobiography from the stack of books I’ve been meaning to read forever and finally dug in.
To be honest, for $26, it wasn’t particularly enlightening reading. The writing is overall subpar and the story lacked discovery. After all, we pretty much know the deal… world-renowned guitar talent, infamous unrequited love eventually conquered and subsequently destroyed, tragedy upon unthinkable tragedy, and a seriously ungodly amount of drugs. For the most part, the book revisits Clapton’s well-publicized, 40-odd year elusive chase for happiness, from band to band, tour to tour, and lover to lover, all perpetuated by a sort of insatiable numbness fueled by the fog of heroin and alcohol. In a nutshell: a life — that is, one hell of a life — sadly missed-out on by its owner. To that end, a really, really, really fucking depressing read. Nonetheless, I kept on, mostly driven by Eric’s seeming inability, even in retrospect, to have just one, singular “holy shit, this is my amazing rockstar life” moment, to recognize and connect with the magic in his own music that we fans feel. And while the book ends warm and fuzzy with his hard-won sobriety, his selfless, successful efforts in helping others achieve the same, and the love of a devoted family (all truly miraculous, wonderful things), my desire went unfulfilled.
After 300 plus pages of Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, D&D, etc., he’d gotten me all wound-up. I went hunting for that box.
Longing to feel that connection, to re-live my own Eric Clapton “aha” moment, at first, I panicked. The box wasn’t where I thought it was. Three closets and a crawl space later, I found it. Buried in a jumble of various mix-tapes, air-checks, and my earliest and occasionally embarrassing stabs at music-discovery (Bronski Beat Age of Consent, Yaz Upstairs at Eric’s, Alphaville Forever Young, The Ramones Loco Live, The Police Outlandos d’Amour, The Caddy Shack Soundtrack, etc.), was my first ever Clapton cassette: a two-sided compilation of favorites an old boyfriend had pieced together in a valiant effort to expand my at-the-time fairly limited tastes.
Now all I needed was a tape deck.
I’d long ago chucked my Fisher Price Walkman and lilac pastel Sony boombox. My vintage Bang & Olufsen had been hopelessly busted for at least a decade. Even the last holdout, my car deck, had been recently replaced with a CD player.
Situation desperate.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have access to E.C.’s music otherwise… there were CDs, records, and Internet for a quick fix. But it was the ORDER of this particular mix that I’d listened to over and over and over again, indelibly committed to memory so that I expected each song to come after the next. It couldn’t be any other way.
Side One:
Bell Bottom Blues
Slunky
Have You Ever Loved a Women [sic]
Let It Rain
Anyday
Key to the Highway
Peaches and Deisel [sic]
Watch Out for Lucy
Side Two:
I Shot the Sheriff
Promises
Knockin’ on Heavens Door [sic]
Wonderful Tonight
Cocaine
Lay Down Sally
Willie and the Hand Jive
After Midnight
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Let It Grow
Blues Power
This was how I’d heard it all first, how I’d first discovered the music in music. How I’d fell in love with blues without even knowing it was blues. How “Bell Bottom Blues” was the first song that I wished someone had written about me, long, long, long before I even knew what love was. How at some point, I’d accidentally pressed the record button during “Key to the Highway” so that there was that inevitable irritating silence at the bridge. How the last song on side one ended way before the actual end of the tape, requiring an impatient couple of minutes of fast-forwarding. How I’d first heard “I Shot the Sheriff” and was eventually (actually!) bummed by Bob Marley’s original.
More than anything, a dedicated, uninterrupted listen to this cassette what I wanted, in part to feel as though my time spent reading hadn’t been wasted.
So. It’s official. I’m now the proud owner of a little Aiwa that we found online today for about 20 bucks in the next town over. And later tonight, after we pick it up and get the whole thing hooked into the stereo, I’ll pour myself a glass of wine, put on the headphones, and nestle up to the hot, hot picture of Eric adorning the book jacket. Happy Monday.
© Outlandos MusicTM 2008
Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, KATE BRADLEY, OUTLANDOS MUSIC —
5/5/08
Categories: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE • KATE BRADLEY • OUTLANDOS MUSIC
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An e-mail from a friend, thought you would like to read:
[Your] brain works in a very similar fashion to mine. But I guess everyone from our time has that same experience of the “committed to memory” playlist order. That’s just the way it was. You could hear the next song starting before it actually started. That is the original way to listen to music. Looking back, it wasn’t perfect but it made me listen to each and every song and eventually grasp an appreciation of the album in it’s entirety. Now, there is selective downloading and the ability to skip a song that I haven’t yet (or given it the deserved time needed) learned to love. Younger music listeners don’t know the joy of picking up an album cover, reading the lyrics in regular sized print, reading who the studio musicians are on the album, who produced it, etc. I would read an album, while listening to it, like a book – cover to cover. And then you could connect the dots with other bands and labels, etc.
-Tracy