Music

    Out of the blue, my daughter, Virginia, sent me the following text.  “Every time that I hear ‘Renegade’ by Styx, I think of the four of us in the car and, wherever we were going, just singing the song at the top of our lunges.  I don’t know if you remember that but it is one of the strongest memories I have of our car rides during the summer or going to and from school.”  Music is the soundtrack of our lives and when I hear certain songs, they act as a trigger and send me back years, if not decades, into my past. 

   My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen when I was a kid and she listened to a lot of am radio from a monitor installed on the wall.  “Georgie Girl,” “Downtown,” and “The Happening” are examples of songs that I remember bellowing from the radio.  The happiest that I ever remember my father was when he sang “King of the Road,” prompted by the car radio, as we took road trips to Minnesota or Vermont.  Late in his career, my father bought a really nice stereo system for our living room so that he could calm his nerves by listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

   My sister, Cherylanne, was the one who taught me how important music could be in my life.  She had a record player in her bedroom and had quite a collection of 45s.  “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” “I’ve got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates,” and “Run, Joey, Run,” were among the hits that she collected.  I remember that she had a pink carrying case for her 45s and she treated them like a treasure.  My brother, Thomas, influenced my taste in music in that he learned a lot of songs from his week out at Camp Tall Trees.  He was so happy when he sang these songs, like “Titanic” and “The Bismarck,” that I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go to camp so that I could learn them as well.  

   In 1978 I was hired on at Camp Tall Trees to be a Blackfoot, which is another name for the kitchen help.  It was in that year that the movie “Grease” was released.  It was so popular that you couldn’t escape the soundtrack because the radio was continuously playing its songs.  The commute to Camp Tall Trees took about an hour and, to this day, when I hear a song from the soundtrack I am immediately transported back to that drive out to camp.  Similarly, Chris Wagoner, David Greenwell, and I, who spent our Blackfoot year together, spent hours cleaning the pots and pans and dishes after the campers and counselors had left the mess hall.  Chris liked to listen to classic rock and, since it was his radio, we heard “Joker” and “Money” over and over again as we scraped the plates and mopped the floors.  

   I’ll have to admit that I was moody kid throughout middle and high school because I was trying to figure myself out.  I listened to a lot of depressing music like “Cats in the Cradle” and “Seasons in the Sun” and I must have worn out my cassette tape of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”  By the time that I reached my senior year, I switched over to Disco because it had uplifting music.  “Celebrate Good Times,” for example, send me back to my cheerleading days at Xavier University.  After I graduated from Bellarmine, when I reached the depths of despair while working at a dead end job at Metal Sales, I listened to a lot of Van Halen, which helped to buck me up.

   In 1986, when Tracey and I started to date, we decided that our song should be “The Lady in Red.”  My wife taught me that not all Christmas music is bad; that you have to pick and choose which songs are uplifting, so we listened to a lot of Amy Grant.  Then, after we married and we started a family, Jimmy Buffett was constantly on our CD player.  “Jolly Man” was my favorite Buffett song because it told a good short story and I could sing it in about the same amount of time that it took to change the diapers of my children.

   Today, I still depend of music to distract me.  When I jog in the morning I like to listen to the local pop stations just so that I can keep in touch with the modern music culture.  I’ll plug in my MP3 player when I am on long bike rides and listen to Broadway musicals.  It is happy music with a narrative and I never tire of the songs.  If I need to block out distractions while I read something dense then I will YouTube classical or jazz music.  Movie soundtracks are a favorite for classical and you just cannot go wrong with the jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.

   Forgive me from becoming too personal but, often, from the deep recesses of my mind, comes my “Citizen Kane” moment.  Only for me, it is not a sled that is so important to my childhood, that keeps reappearing.  No, my “Rosebud” is a song and it goes something like this.  “Chip, chip, my little horse.  Chip, chip, again sir.  How many miles to London Town?  Four score and ten, sir!”  This song comes from the 1948 movie, “The Boy with the Green Hair.”  My brother and sisters and I would race home from Holy Trinity School to watch television and one of the local stations played old movies in the afternoon.  For some reason, this movie, and this song, is a happy memory for me and my brother.  I clearly remember laying on the floor, watching this movie, and from the deep recesses of my mind, this song reappears, like a haunt wandering through my consciousness, searching for meaning.  Thomas and I shared a bonding moment s we sung this song together.