In the movie, Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke is on a book tour where he is talking about his next project: this idea of a song transporting you back in time. How it grabs you and can make you remember things you’d forgotten – all of it locked within a song.
I feel the same way, where the music moment can transport you back to those memories you might not always have right at your fingertips. Things you thought had been lost are now crystal clear once again.
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Far – Water and Solutions Album
When you have a group of friends your musical tastes can certainly merge over time. It only makes sense since once you discover a cool band, you’d want to share it with everyone else. Other times you break off into smaller groups within the circle where you celebrate a particular album with everyone else merely tolerating it.
When I first heard Far’s Water and Solutions a group of us had headed up to North Carolina/Tennessee mountains to go skiing. We arrived that first night, and Egg put on the album and when it finished, someone else started it again. This continued throughout the weekend when we were in the cabin. And it was always someone different who restarted it.
I don’t know if I’ve ever quite seen that before or since. Whatever magic contained on that CD was exactly the right sound for the weekend.
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Helmet – Impressionable
Back in the dark ages of the internet (the 90s), it was suddenly possible to find out about rare songs from your favorite band without needing to scour random record stores throughout the city (now, we still did that too, but this helped narrow down exactly what it was we were looking for). For some bands, the list was extremely long (Pearl Jam, I’m looking at you), but for some others they became these names without any knowledge about what they may or may not have sounded like. And there was one song we did manage to hear: “Impressionable”.
At the same time I started working at the Georgia Tech Radio Station, which meant I could sign up for Will Call tickets for various shows in the Atlanta and Athens areas. Now, I was low man on the totem pole, so most of the bigger acts’ tickets were gobbled up, but a band like Helmet was just the right size for me to snag one for myself and one for Egg.
We make it to the show and decide that any time there was a lull between songs, we’d shout “Play Impressionable”. Aside from being a crazy plan, we certainly didn’t really think about the fact that most of these bands had a pretty standard setlist night in and night out. So unless Impressionable happened to already be on the agenda for the night, there was no way they would have practiced it enough to even play it. Maybe if we’d chosen a one of the rarer album songs… maybe, but not some b-side which had never made it on much of anything.
So, this isn’t the story of victory where the band suddenly heard us, decided we were hardcore fans, and played the track. No, but the song always brings that concert back to my memory.
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LIVE – Throwing Copper Album Tour
This is effectively an anti-memory. Don’t get me wrong, I love LIVE, but when Throwing Copper came out I was in my Freshman year of college and my tv viewing had gone to near nothing, and my radio listening had done much the same. I still listening and buying new music, but LIVE was not the type of act which would have fallen into my lap without some radio play (which I wasn’t hearing anyway).
Except, it should have been right in my wheel house. My roommate bought a six disc changer that he loaded his music in to play on my stero. He was listening to LIVE, but somehow, I never really heard of them. Maybe it was just one of those things where it didn’t make it into the changer or maybe it was on a different disc when I was in the room, but regardless, I had no idea who the band was.
Flash forward to November of that year, and LIVE was going to play on GA Tech campus. It was literally the largest show they’d done up to that point. My roommate and his girlfriend got tickets, but I don’t remember any talk about the concert prior to them heading out that night. I saw plenty of people heading down to the arena as I walked around campus.
Maybe I was just in my own little world. Just me in blissful ignorance.
Over the next couple of months, I discovered LIVE and only then did I realize I’d missed out on something special. It’s no one’s fault (I do blame Chris a little for not forcing me to listen to them), so it becomes this weird not memory of the time I didn’t get to see a favorite play.
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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.
He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!
Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.
His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com
