The Music I Bathed In

{Prompt: What band did you love in high school?}

Imagine leaving home, in 1980, at age 16; and moving into a dorm room, at a residential high school 30 miles away. What would you take with you? Clothes, obviously. Maybe a book or two. Perhaps a blanket. But most importantly, you’d bring your music — a digital clock radio at a minimum. If you were cool, or wanted to be cool, and you had a cassette collection, you would bring your tapes, and a boombox for your friends, or a Walkman for your private enjoyment. If you were old-school or an audiophile, you would bring your records and a stereo. That was living the good life.

My roommate, in my senior year at the School of Science and Math, had a beautiful black boxy stereo system with speakers the size of side tables, and he loved to play The Cars. The Cars, if you don’t know, were a five-member band with the lanky and geeky-looking Ric Ocasek on most of the rock vocals, but they also had a photogenic bass player named Benjamin Orr who had a beautiful voice, a talented keyboard player who gave them their signature synthesizer sounds, an electric guitarist who could play a killer bridge, and a drummer to keep the songs driving and real (no such thing as a drum machine then—thank God). They had tunes like Just What I Needed, Let’s Go, Moving in Stereo, and Bye Bye Love, which I love.

Keep in mind, I’d probably never heard The Cars before my roommate put their record on the turntable, but I heard them early, and often. I can’t say I complained. That was just part of the milieu of our end (the far end) of the hall. When I opened the fire doors at the entrance to that wing, the distant sound of The Cars would often come drifting down the acoustic echo chamber of the hallway.

The Cars band members.

Our dorm (Hill House) shared an uneven quad with a dorm to the East (Wyche House). We often played ultimate frisbee on the quad, and sometimes an enterprising student would turn their speakers, playing music through the windows, and we would be treated to their own personal jam.

We also had music playing when we were doing our homework, or out on Ninth street for a bite to eat. I remember a lot of Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road — one of my friend’s personal favorites. Pat Benatar was taking numbers and breaking hearts, so to speak. She was one of only a few rock bands with a female singer, but she was killing it! Freddy Mercury and Queen were blowing people’s minds with their raw talent and their eccentricity, and at my school we were all “Under Pressure”. Hall & Oates were bringing soul to the white masses, and Journey was perfecting the release of the pop-rock ballad, one right after the next.

My personal favorite was Boston. I could listen to their debut album over and over again. I found out much later that most of the demos for the songs were created by Tom Scholz in his basement. He could play guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums, and he had his own personal studio with mixing equipment to create sounds that no one else was making. And his musical compositions were insanely good! All he really needed was a singer, and somehow he found an amazing singer —Brad Delp. I think a lot of songs are pretty perfect, but More Than a Feeling might be the best of the classic rock era.

Boston’s First Album.

There were many bands that I was too young or too cloistered to embrace. Those are the ones that I like to go back and listen to today: Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, The Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, and The Who. When those bands were big, I was still listening to John Denver, Olivia Newton-John (before Grease), Billy Joel, Heart, and the Eagles.

I didn’t listen to much country or heavy metal… and I still don’t, although there are an alarming number of country crossover artists in my CD collection: Shania Twain, Martina McBride, and Amy Grant, to name a few. I blame some of this on my wife, who claims that she doesn’t like country, but kind of acts as if she does sometimes. (I think she just doesn’t like banjo or fiddle music.)

My brother went down his own musical journey, and at various times, he introduced me to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimmy Buffett, and the Indigo Girls, for which I thank him. Each of those groups found their own niche in the musical zeitgeist.

Living and Dying in ¾ Time.

These days I worry that I’m listening to too much music from the past — getting a little too comfortable in my musical niche.

I’ll never forget an embarrassing incident when I was only nineteen. I was working as a lifeguard at the outdoor Pullen Park pool (now filled and replaced with an outdoor stage). I was having a break with some of the other lifeguards, and we were talking about music. They were Black, and they asked me if I listened to any Black artists.

I was a little unprepared to cite my musical preferences, but I thought of one of the latest hits on the radio, that sounded like a Black recording, and I said that I liked Madonna. Bear in mind that I hadn’t ever seen Madonna. (It was a very long time ago; before she was world famous.) But I assumed, from the groove of Borderline, that she must be black.

Of course, everyone got a good laugh out of my reply, much to my chagrin. I never forgot that feeling of utter stupidity.

Sidebar: It turns out that I was half right. ‘Borderline’ was written and produced by Reggie Lucas, a black artist, who had a lot to do with Madonna’s success.

Madonna at her best.

I recently bought some albums by R&B artists like Donny Hathaway, Al Green, Roberta Flack, Bill Withers, Otis Redding, and Ray Charles , artists that I didn’t know by name when they were in their prime. I really love the music of Stevie Wonder, Grover Washington, Jr., Earth, Wind & Fire, and a lot of other African-American artists; but I think I will always be one step behind, and a little bit at a loss, when it comes to my appreciation for Jazz, Soul, R&B, Rap, and the rest of the catalog of music with Afro-Caribbean roots.

I’m trying to sample some tunes from musical genres that I might have overlooked and underappreciated. I’ve gotten an album by the Tex-Mex band, The Mavericks, and another by Filipino artist, Freddie Aguilar.

I started following Lake Street Dive to see if their eclectic sound would become a hit.

First an album. Then a musical.

Once, on a road trip, I put in the Green Day album, American Idiot, because I heard that it was pretty good. (Maybe it was Jasmine who brought it.) Same thing with the Dixie Chicks album, Wide Open Spaces. Both albums were brilliant. They really take me back to a moment in time, in a way that is hard to explain.

I could go on and on with fond recollections of the music that I bathed in, from one stage of my life to the next. From Three Dog Night… to Peter, Paul, and Mary… to Jim Croce… to Cyndi Lauper… to Pink Floyd… to 10,000 Maniacs… to Crowded House… to Echo and the Bunnymen… to Alison Krauss… to Eva Cassidy… to Dakota Blonde… to Evanescence… to Pink… to Chappell Roan…

This is one time when words are doomed to fall utterly and invariably short of the mark. Nothing can describe the beauty of music, or the way it makes you feel… but music.

So go! Listen to some music.

Put on your super noise-cancelling, iridescent headphones, roll down the windows and crank up the car stereo, or tell Alexa to play yacht rock in your kitchen. You can’t get that visceral sensation — those vibes from my written recollections.

The best music you’ve ever heard, might just be the next thing on your Spotify playlist.