Music and memory 2

"I'm The Ocean"

I'm an accident
I was driving way too fast
Couldn't stop though
So I let the moment last
I'm for rollin'
I'm for tossin' in my sleep
It's not guilt though
It's not the company I keep

People my age
They don't do the things I do
They go somehwere
While I run away with you
I got my friends
And I got my children too
I got her love
She's got my love too

I can't hear you
But I feel the things you say
I can't see you
But I see what's in my way
Now I'm floatin'
Cause I'm not tied
to the ground
Words I've spoken
Seem to leave a hollow sound

On the long plain
See the rider in the night
See the chieftain
See the braves
in cool moonlight
Who will love them
When they take another life
Who will hold them
When they tremble
for the knife

Voicemail numbers
On an old computer screen
Rows of lovers
Parked forever in a dream
Screaming sirens
Echoing across the bay
To the old boats
From the city far away

Homeless heroes
Walk the streets
of their hometown
Rows of zeros
On a field
that's turning brown
They play baseball
They play football
under lights
They play card games
And we watch them every night

Need distraction
Need romance and candlelight
Need random violence
Need entertainment tonight
Need the evidence
Want the testimony of
Expert witnesses
On the brutal crimes of love

I was too tired
To see the news
when I got home
Pulled the curtain
Fell into bed alone
Started dreaming
Saw the rider once again
In the doorway
Where she stood
and watched for him
Watched for him

I'm not present
I'm a drug
that makes you dream
I'm an aerostar
I'm a cutlass supreme
In the wrong lane
Trying to turn
against the flow
I'm the ocean
I'm the giant undertow

I'm the ocean
I'm the ocean
I'm the giant undertow
I'm the ocean
I'm the giant undertow
I'm the ocean
I'm the ocean
I'm the ocean
I'm the ocean
I'm the ocean
I'm the ocean

------------------------------------------------
Memorable albums...

Nirvana - Nevermind
I got this tape on a weekend in grade eight. Yes, a tape; CDs were only just becoming common then, and I had a tape player, a small ghetto blaster actually, in my bedroom. Anyway, I got the tape and then promptly got a cold, so Nevermind reminds me of being in bed with a sore throat and stuffy nose. Even when I look at the chlorine blue of the album cover I think of clogged sinuses and feeling shitty. And it's generally a feeling shitty about oneself type of album, anyway.

Pearl Jam - Ten
For years this was my favourite album and PJ was my favourite band. Ten plays in the background of all my junior high years. I guess if there's one particularly strong association, it's weekends at John Clorey's house, where he and I played Dungeons and Dragons in secret because his parents didn't think it was a good idea. Ten has a certain mystical feel about it and I think it fed my creativity in inventing wizard- and warrior-laden adventures. So many of my characters looked like Eddie Vedder. Except taller. (I was keenly dismayed at finding out that my hero was only 5'7".)

[Sidenote: Doug and Marion Clorey, if you ever read this, yes I led your son down the garden path. But it was an imaginative path, and probably better for our brains in the long term than all the video games we played. And we both turned out okay, don't you think?]

U2 - Achtung Baby
This is the album of summer nights for me. I got the tape around the time my mother and step-father got married on my twelfth birthday (this is the fate of the born-in-June). They didn't play it at the ceremony or anything, but the backyard reception went into the night and I remember chasing around this girl, whose name escapes me now, who was the daughter of my parents friends Ken and Nancy. She was two years older than me, which meant that she had learned how to flirt while I was still just a confused but amorous pre-teen boy. Nothing came of it of course, but I was smitten for the rest of the summer. Mom and Kevin were going on their honeymoon after the wedding so my sister and I went to stay with Dad in Charlottetown. When Aunt Nan dropped us off that night it was still warm out, there was a breeze coming in the windows of Dad's apartment, and he was watching the video for Even Better Than the Real Thing on Much Music. So, tangentially, Achtung Baby is a bit of midsummer night's dream for me.

A few years later, in grade eleven, I started hanging out with Linda MacDonald and Aaron Collier. Linda is the biggest U2 fan I've ever met and Achtung Baby was quite frequently on her car stereo that first summer when we went driving around the Island to coffee houses, moshes at the Arts Guild, parties, midnight beaches or down random roads when there wasn't anything else to do.

Blind Melon - The self-titled album with the bee girl on the front, Soundgarden - Superunknown, The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
These three tapes were on constant walkman rotation on my family trip to Ottawa in the spring of my grade nine year. The weather was making the transition from dirty, crusty snow to sunshine and the undeniable desire to doff your jacket even if it wasn't quite that warm yet. I remember a lot of Ottawa itself, and it's still a city I quite like, but the music reminds me more of watching the greening New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario countryside go past from the back seat of Kevin's Econoline van. Somehow there was much more to see then; I've made similar car trips several times recently and the 20 in Quebec and 401 in Ontario are plain deadening. But, perhaps because it was my first time seeing it and the music was good, even the endless flat straightness of the 20 held some sort of natural wonder. The best part was driving along the high waters of the Saint John river near Fredericton. I thought there was something hopeful about all those naked hardwood trees up to their shins in river water, and the little islands waiting for their summer cows...though I couldn't have known about the cows at that time. Maybe if I hadn't had the musical influence I would have thought the trees were hopeless and the islands lonely, who knows. I drove the river road, on both sides of the river, many times when I lived in Fredericton and it's always been one of my favourite routes, in all seasons. I've heard many people complain about it and bless the new, mind-numbing divided highway between Fredericton and Moncton, but I just don't understand. It's no wonder NB is dismissed as the "Drive-Through Province" when its residents would choose to overlook a treed, twisting, agricultural river path for a boring tunnel of gravel ditches and endless Irving spruce plantations.

Anyway, those albums, especially the Blind Melon one, have been suggestive of spring ever since that trip to Ottawa. Every spring there comes a day when the sun finally beats down on the rivulets of meltwater flowing down the street, and the bee girl album accentuates that happy springtime rush. Even Superunknown, with its plodding grunginess, somehow says sunshine to me. "4th of July" is perhaps the most grinding song on it. The first three lines go "Shower in the dark day / Clean sparks driving down / Cool in the waterway / Where the baptized drown". Rather grim, but somehow I think of sunlight reflecting off water dripping from the top of a shady under-road tunnel or culvert...I really don't know why, but I just see it as such an optimistic image. I guess music can influence the interpretation of a hopeless landscape and landscape can influence the interpretation of hopeless music.

Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral, Broken, Pretty Hate Machine, The Fragile
I would be remiss not to mention NIN, given the hold they had on me for the longest time. I used to get in arguments with Saundra Clow about who was better---NIN or The Beatles. I concede now that I was defending an untenable position, but at the time I argued with passion and conviction. NIN doesn't speak to me so strongly now, in fact I feel that I've grown up and Trent Reznor is still a depressed teenager, but there's still enough loyalty to make me buy new albums, or halos, as each one is called, and give them two or three listens before setting them aside.

I got The Downward Spiral the summer after grade nine. Upon hearing the first song, "Mr. Self Destruct," with the deep-fryer crackle of its chorus, I knew that I had found something nasty and beyond where grunge or heavy metal could ever take me. They were still just music, this was music with really menacing noises thrown in. Thus was my discovery of the industrial genre. I never got into other industrial bands like Marilyn Manson, Filter or Ministry, but for much of my high school years Nine Inch Nails spoke to both my teenage angst and surging testosterone. TDS doesn't really suggest one particular moment or season, but is more of the background for all of high school, like Ten was for junior high.

I bought the eight-song Broken album on a winter weekend in grade ten. I remember I was playing in an indoor soccer tournament at UPEI and between games I went over to the mall and bought it...and then my Dad picked me up and I played it on his livingroom stereo and I was actually embarrassed at how heavy and full of bile it was. But my Dad, cool guy that he is, (he watched Much Music more than I did) didn't mind.

I think I got Pretty Hate Machine in grade eleven. Produced in 1989, it's the first NIN album and is more synthesizer- than guitar-oriented, and therefore doesnt' quite have the heavy crunch of the 1990s stuff. I remember having it on the tape deck of the Colt, the first car I could drive, constantly during the weekend of the under-15 boys national soccer tournament in Hunter River in October of that year. Considering I was in under-17 by then and was just a spectator I don't know what significance that has.

The Fragile didn't come out until the fall of my third year of university. With its two discs it gave me plenty to listen to that year, but I was disappointed that in the years between it and TDS Trent Reznor hadn't developed his lyrical ability at all and was still stuck singing about "you" and "it" and how bad "you" and "it" are, with the occasional f-word thrown in for inarticulate emphasis. But the music was a funkier-kind of heavy that I enjoyed, so I just blocked out whatever he was moaning on about. Then in April of that year Aura Lea and Bryon got us tickets to the NIN concert in Toronto and invited me up to visit. So now The Fragile reminds me of driving around a spring-time Mississauga in Aur's mom's car and going to the show at Maple Leaf Gardens and never before seeing so many people dressed in black with white face paint and loving it but realizing that it was the finale of my obsession with the band. With Teeth came out last summer and I bought it, but aside from a couple of songs, it blows. Lyrically the same, and now it doesn't even sound much different from other guitar-driven metal crap like Linkin Park. But if he makes another album, I'm sure I'll buy it, 'cause I'm loyal like that.

Pearl Jam - Vitalogy
This album reminds me of mornings sitting in Mr. Kelly's homeroom in grade 10, talking about it and the band with Steve and a classmate named Shawn Arnett. I don't know how the three of us ever managed to talk about the band so much...it was all Steve and I had in common with Shawn, so it was either silence or Pearl Jam. Oh the conversational abilities of teenage guys.

Pearl Jam - No Code
I had just managed to finance a shelf-stereo CD player in the summer between grade eleven and twelve and No Code was one of the first CDs that I owned. I played it non-stop through my last year of high school, a year that is also synonymous with my first multi-month relationship, with a gal named Heather McLaren. As I said before, after we broke up not-so-smoothly I couldn't listen to this album for awhile. But sour tastes fade after awhile, and I enjoy this album musically and memorably now...it's particularly suggestive of a sunny but cold morning in the fall when I gave Heather a drive into Charlottetown and we ate muffins from Tim Horton's on the giant concrete steps of the Confederation Centre before she went off to her graphic design program at Holland College and I drove back to Bluefield, my high school nestled in the bucolic brown (not blue) fields of Hampton, for first period. Again, no great significance to that morning, other than it was something out of the ordinary. If you're waiting for the great, life-directing moments of my past in this post, I guess you might as well stop reading. The connections I make, and I suspect most people make, are often abstract and not obviously important.

Pearl Jam - Yield
This album came out in my first year of university, again it tied into a significant relationship, this time with Darci Arch, and again it was unpleasant to me for awhile after we broke up. Time passed and I like it again. The image I still get with it is a night in the summer, must be between my first and second year, that I was visiting Darci in Fredericton and we were driving to some destination I forget on the Lincoln Road (which runs along the south side of the Saint John river, and I love it). "Wishlist" was playing and the line "I wish I was the full moon shining off a camaro's hood" struck me as very fitting, though we certainly weren't driving a camaro. "Wishlist" is a song with vivid imagery you don't often hear in rock music.

Neil Young - Mirrorball
Ah, my Neil. My love for the man and his cowboy-hippie-grunger music grew gradually through my teenage years. It started with playing Mom's Comes A Time record on the player in what we call the "good livingroom" (read: no tv in there). A lot of teenagers go through a period of exploring their parents' music and realizing some of it is actually, umm, kinda cool. I thought I was reaching far back by dusting off this old country effort of Neil's, but it's actually only a year older than I am. In high school I used Harvest Moon as a calm, acoustic counterbalance to NIN's electro-death. Sleeps With Angels is a strange, sparse, piano-focused album that I liked in grade twelve and has really grown on me since. But during the 90s the Neil album with the most influence on me was Mirrorball, a great collection of driving hard rock tunes he did with the members of Pearl Jam. I really enjoy the memory associated with "I'm the Ocean" which is a little known song that I think should be much better known and appreciated. It was some summer night after rain had passed but it stayed grey and moist on into the evening and Linda MacDonald, myself, Mike Stanley and someone else were driving from somewhere in the country like New Glasgow into North River...don't remember where we were coming from or where we were going, but "I'm the Ocean" was playing and we all got caught up singing along to the chorus, which is just "I'm the ocean" repeated several times. The wet evening, the ocean metaphor, and the aimless longing of the song and our own literal and figurative aimlessness all rolled together...I don't think any of us could have not sung along. The funny thing is, I can't remember who the fourth person was.

Big Wreck - In Loving Memory Of...
In my second year of university Adam Neal and I used to listen to this album while playing PlayStation in our residence room. We always played either this Star Wars fighting game or Cart racing game in which we derived great pleasure from driving backwards on the track and trying to get in spectacular accidents. Big Wreck, car wrecks, oh the irony! Adam and I used to call the whole affair "Smashy-smashy".

Jamiroquai - Travelling Without Moving
The summer between my second and third year at STU I had the privilege of not only having a vehicle all to myself, but a swanky Ford Explorer with a leather interior and good stereo. The environmentalist in me is ashamed that I once drove an SUV, and a Ford (Fix Or Repair Daily) at that, but at the time I thought I was hot shit. I even referred to it as the Sexplorer, though it never did earn the name. That summer was a good one for hanging out and partying with my co-workers at Green Gables and I put quite a few clicks on the odometer in Cavendish alone. The same summer I got Travelling Without Moving, which is a most funky album, definitely the funkiest thing I owned up to that point...well, there were a few preceding Chili Peppers albums, but who's counting. Anyway, the Explorer's stereo had a great bass and I must have played TWM a thousand times that summer. Jacquie Griffith and I hung out a lot that summer, and she never liked Jamiroquai, so after listening to maybe half of it she would always bug me to put on Radiohead's Pablo Honey which I had bought at the same time, and also conjures memories from the same period. But Radiohead are not a very funky band and Pablo Honey, even in its early-nineties alterna-poppiness, just doesn't quite make you want to dance.

Kula Shaker - Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts
At the end of the same summer, on a total whim after only having heard a brief clip of "Mystical Machine Gun" and liking the album title, I bought Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts and played it on into the fall when I returned to St. Thomas for third year. There is an interesting picture on the back of the album with a guy, or actually the figure makes me think it's a girl, in a strange astronaut-ish outfit, sitting in a copse of trees reading a newspaper. And the ground is cluttered with leaves...only they're all purplish-pink, like the astronaut suit. That's my image of the album and in my memory I tied it with a cloudy Friday afternoon after classes when Erin Gallagher, Shelly Collette and I drove out to Shelly's apartment way out in the woods of the north side of Fredericton to make dinner and drink wine. While there we decided to take a hike in the woods themselves and we took the wine with us. We ended up choosing a very random place to just sit on a fallen log and drink...and being fall, the ground was covered in leaves. I'd say that the wine was extra potent and the leaves turned pink, but it wasn't and they didn't. Doesn't stop me from thinking of that Friday whenever I play or look at PPandA, though.

Leonard Cohen - Greatest Hits
Finally an album analysis that won't start with "in the summer between...". This is definitely a winter album for me. I got it in January of my fourth year when my then girlfriend Kyla and I took the train to Montreal for Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) program interviews. I found it in a used CD store that my co-worker and completely oddball friend Nick Robichaud took us to. (Nick gave us a walking tour of old Montreal in -25 weather...I can still see him plowing on ahead in a big long brown coat, turning around every now and again to say "If you guys need to stop, just tell me, I don't get cold"...we ended up in a very strange theatre/art centre on the waterfront that was fully lit and open with apparently nothing going on inside and no staff manning it. Nick was also the person who turned me on to the comedy of Mitch Hedberg, and in a sense is very much like Mitch himself...you gotta hear him to understand, but he's funny in his own way.) Anyway, Greatest Hits surprised me because until then I only had heard a few more contemporary Cohen songs, like "Closing Time" and "First We Take Manhattan", and was expecting his smoky baritone. But apparently he hit a mid-life puberty, or drank a lot of hard booze at some point, and the earlier hits featured a youthful tenor that I almost couldn't believe was the same person. I loved the album nonetheless, and still do, especially songs like "Susanne", "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye", "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "Chelsea Hotel". For memories, listening to it reminds me off-rhythm rocking of the train on the ride home through the night. Fitting that I first got into Leonard Cohen in Montreal, I guess. I was accepted to go to Japan as a JET, but I turned it down and decided to go to grad school instead. I've often wondered "what if"; it could have been fun, but it could have been torturous, too.

Esthero - Breath From Another
Esthero, my favourite one-album wonder. Breath From Another defines trip-hop for me. I'm not really crazy about the genre; I can only take so much of Portishead, Morcheeba is boring and so on. But this one is a major standout; Esthero has a voice that at times reminds me of Bjork, at other times of Holly Cole, at other times of no one else. Most of the music is done by this guy named Doc, and it has such a range---slow beats, break beats, salsa-like rhythms, mellow grooves, classical guitars, heavy electric guitars and on and on. I don't know which of the two wrote the lyrics, but they are strange and evocative (e.g. "Superheroes": "Stay awhile longer sweet tongue of fur and feather / There is a white breast / Waiting for you here / Between the superheroes and the electric blanket is warm"). Unfortunately after this album came out Esthero and Doc split, and since then Esthero's stuff has been very dancy, clubby, ravey electronica that is sometimes catchy, but nowhere near as intelligent or hypnotic. If you are at all into sultry trip-hop or just looking for a good album, I've seen Breath From Another on sale for cheap so many times at Music World and the like. Anyway, I bought this album in the summer after my fourth year, which was the first one I stayed in Fredericton instead of going home to the Island. It was kind of a lonely summer after the high of graduating from STU; with all the students leaving Fredericton gets a little empty in the summer, and it gets oppressively hot. I think Adam was working weird hours that summer and my only other close friend in town was Jared Cheverie. We hung out and did a lot of drinking, but otherwise it was not completely what I had hoped for. I broke up with Kyla part way through the summer...turns out we would get back together and break up two more times over the ensuing years, but that's a whole other drawn out story. At the end of the school year I had moved out of my old apartment to sublet a place down the street for the summer. I was living with a bunch of people I knew as aquaintances, and they were all nice, but we never became very close. My room was off the kitchen, and there was a washer and dryer right outside my door...with five of us living there there was always someone doing laundry, which added noise and more heat to an already sweltering place. I spent a lot of time in my room trying to get lost in Esthero.

Queens of the Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf
Got this album in my second year at UNB, and it rekindled my love of loud music. Metal has turned sucky in recent years, with the so-called new metal of craptastic bands like Staind, Nickleback taking over and sounding so very, mind-numbingly, gratingly similar and awful that I'd rather listen to Tiny Tim tiptoe through the tulips. But QOTSA is one heck of an exception. "No One Knows" is such a catchy tune and I was hooked right away. The rest of the album doesn't let up. With the exception of a few songs where they let the bassist caterwhaul, it's got lots of heavy but captivating melodies and Josh Homme can sing some great harmonies (see, metalheads, harmony does belong in tough-guy music). Best of all he doesn't sing like he's trying to shit a bowling ball like the guys from Nicklestaind. I've often thought that all the singers in that group of bands (Creed, Staind, Default, Three Doors Down, etc.) all listened to Alice In Chains in the early 90s and tried their best to immitate Layne Staley. 'Cept that that is Layne Staley's real voice and those guys are faking it in hopes of sounding tough. Anyway, I got Songs For The Deaf in my second year, while I was primarily focused on writing my poetry thesis, and it influenced some of my writing. Heavy metal poetry, yup. Don't know how successful it was. I guess if there's a memory here it's walking back and forth on Albert St. from campus and my apartment, listening to QOTSA and working out aggressive poems in my head.

Neil Young - American Stars n' Bars
After we finished our MA, Dave Hickey and I moved in to an old, cavernous duplex on George St., set to become salarymen with our double degrees. Shauna moved in with us in the fall, and around the same time I decided to get serious about Neil, and ordered six or seven recently re-released albums through Amazon. Lots of good stuff there, but the album we played the most was American Stars n' Bars, with great country rock tunes like "Hey Babe", "Star of Bethlehem" and "Like a Hurricane". I used to play it on my computer stereo and the three of us would sit around the kitchen and drink tea, Dave and I talking Islanderese and Shauna just laughing.

Keane - Hopes and Fears
I first heard this band when Shauna and I were on our WWOOFing trip in Ireland, and assumed because of the airplay and the name that they are Irish---only recently did I find out they're from Sussex. Anyway, I bought the CD one evening when I decided to take a solitary walking tour of Dublin. I highly recommend doing this if you ever go to Ireland, there is so much to see in that city. For example, I stopped and had a pint in The Brazen Head, a pub that's been in operation since 1198. However, it wasn't until the France leg of the trip that we managed to get a pair of discman speakers and play Hopes and Fears publicly, and so now I associate it more with our time at Les Courmettes in the Alpes-Maritimes near Nice. If you've never heard of Keane, they're made different by the way fact that they play like your typical four piece rock band, but they have no guitar. The songs are very piano driven and the singer has an epic voice, giving the music a soaring quality. I felt Shauna and I were soaring, living up a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean, taking in the French sun, wine, food and joie de vivre. I'd return there in a second, and I frequently return there in my head.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers - By the Way
I've played this album a lot in the last two years. At one level it's very strange to listen to, as I began listening to the Chili Peppers in grade eight when I got their What Hits?! tape, the wacky funkiness of which is very different from the sound they make today. On a summer drive back from a weekend trip to PEI I once tried to explain to Adam and Molly my enthusiasm for By the Way, but I couldn't quite articulate it. Shauna and I listen to it a lot on car trips, and there's a part on "Dosed", near the end, where either John Frusciante or Flea, or maybe both, chime in to the chorus with such a lovely harmony that we always stop whatever conversation we're having to hear it. We never have to shush each other, it's just automatic that we stop and then start again after it's passed. This isn't just a memory, but an ongoing moment, a high note that we both tacitly recognize and love.

Okay, if you've read all of this, I congratulate you. I hope my memories were worth reading. I suspect they're similar in theme to anyone who has gone through teenagerdom, university and the mid-twenties. May rock n' roll never die.

Next I think I'll write a little bit about the other joy of collecting: acquiring new music...