Music and memory

What is it that lifts us out of our traces, our trajectory of the time, and gets us thinking about a different possible world out there someplace? For me as a kid back on a farm in Idaho, it was first radio, then music and then historical novels from the library.

I had a room in the basement of our farmhouse that I had inherited from my brother, Jack, some sixteen years older than me. It had some interesting stuff left in it, including an ancient radio with a 78 rpm record player in the top, not unlike the one at left. It was also pretty powerful and could pull in strong AM stations from a long way away, particularly at night. On a good night, I could get Wolfman Jack on a station from Tijuana, Mexico. He played a lot of rock and roll stuff that the local channels were not playing and it got me thinking about what else was out there that I wasn't seeing or hearing in Kuna.

My sisters, who were all at least fourteen years older that I was, had begun to get console stereos like the ones that were fashionable then, like this one with the Mantovani records on top. I spent quite a bit of time at my sister Carol's house with her sons who were about my age. I was intrigued that her stereo sounded a lot better than my old radio.

I was also beginning to realize that music wasn't just something that radio dropped into your lap. She had records that sounded better and some were beginning to be interesting, like the Kingston Trio, whose music seemed to be saying something a bit deeper than a lot of what was on the radio, and Spike Jones, who was funny in an intriguingly adult sort of way.

I had a little bitty portable record player that looked kind of like the one in this picture, and some 45 rpm Little Golden records that my parents had given me, Disney songs, Davey Crockett, things like that.

So I began to think more about music. What did I actually like? The first 45 single I bought was sort of a howler in retrospect, Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las. Although I have to admit that I still kind of like the song--it was a whole teenage soap opera in less than three minutes--it was not exactly great art. One of the next was I Feel Fine by the Beatles, which was an improvement.

I gradually started putting a component stereo together from the cheapest pieces I could find in second hand stores. It was exciting to read magazines about stereos and dream about getting better stuff, in some ways it was the siren song of modern life (and consumer ambition), reaching into what was a isolated life on the farm, where we did not really buy a lot of extra stuff. I was also reading hot rod magazines (which I could not even dream of affording) and model car magazines (which I could afford to build). But music seemed on a higher plane than just something to put in your room (or fantasize about driving), and as the 1960s went on, the messages in the music were definitely coming in from way outside the rest of my life.