Music from that certain time...

Music has the power to transport you back to a certain time in a way quite unlike anything else. Yes, they say smell is one of those senses inextricably linked to memory, and I agree. There's a certain Avon perfume that when I smell it on someone I think of my beloved second-grade teacher. I have no clue what it is, but I know she wore it and I remember it.

Music, though - so much about the memory thing. In the encoding, I've taken a brief detour to encode some Smiths CDs. The Erotic Poetry night, an annual event at the Cantab, is taking place tomorrow. Some of the things I wanted for this decidedly bitter, angsty night are on those Smiths CDs. When I was encoding the compilation Louder Than Bombs, I was reminded of the first time I heard "Asleep" on a cassette tape playing in a guy's van (no, I wasn't in the back at the time!) - I had no real clue who the Smiths were - it was the tail end of the 80s and I was just discovering the Cure, the Smiths and Depeche Mode.

Although I was only 45 minutes from Boston where I grew up, I might as well have been 4500 miles away. The radio stations that we got up in our small town in North Central Massachusetts were limited to the local (at that time) rock station WAAF and KISS 108, which did a lot of disco and R&B stuff in those days. I got a few cool New Wave songs like the Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby" and there was, of course, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill gang - these came from the DJ at the skating rink in Leominster where I went pretty much every weekend in my high school years, or at least as often as I could pester my mother into taking me there. This was probably a good indication of where I'd go in the future, but I was completely oblivious to things like the Cure, who were very much a staple of college and alternative radio at the time. Of course there was WBCN (I'm pretty sure it was around back then) and probably the Emerson station, but their signal didn't reach out into the sticks where I was. This was way pre-internet, so we didn't have any of that to get music. Think you've got it tough? Ha! Imagine no MySpace, no bittorrent, no MTV (yes, this was early MTV days when they still played videos, and our cable provider didn't offer it - that was around the time of the "I want my MTV" campaign).

So I was woefully underexposed to cool music when I went into the Air Force right out of High School (so much for Berklee when my parents said "hey, if you want to go to this awesome place you got accepted to, you're going to have to pay for it yourself"). But I was lucky enough to have a friend in the dorms in Albuquerque who was from New York City. He turned me onto the Cure (Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - oh my, I wore that tape out) and also Depeche Mode. For that, Jim will always have a special place in my heart. But I didn't get to hear "Louder Than Bombs" until that trip home from the club one night in the van of a guy who was working the door while his band played inside. That was also the time I first heard Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, and it was all...so much. I listen to NIN pretty much all the time, but the Smiths have settled in to a place in my collection and memory that still has the power to evoke powerful memories of a specific time when I hear them now. It seems so long ago, but I can remember the whirl and thump as those angsty feelings of love and isolation that I felt the first time I heard "Unloveable" or "Asleep." I remember how much simpler and yet so much more complicated things felt back then. Now I stretch back and remember that guy who drove the van - how we ended up friends, where he lived (a strange apartment above a garage), his friends in the band who introduced me to Jane's Addiction's "Nothing's Shocking." Wow.

It's almost Valentine's Day, and I'm still all kinds of single, but not so bitter these days, I think. I'll always have music, which is one of my truest and most faithful loves. It makes me feel so many different things, and brings back so many memories I thought were lost forever - finding them in the chorus, the bridge, the sound of the howling wind at the end of the track. So I'm going to raise a glass to my first and best love - music. It's best when it's shared with others, like that guy in the van, like Jim, like me bringing something to you when you're at the Cantab and then ask me what I'm playing (you really have no idea how happy that makes me every time it happens). I want to share this thing I love with as many people as possible, and even better - it doesn't make me a huge slut or anything. I think.