Pandora's Box

For those of you who were directed here from Cliff Johnson's blog, this is my response to "The Soundtrack of Your Life". In fact, I considered using the same title, but then there's the whole plagiarism lawsuit thing, and it could all get very messy, so I went a different way.

And for those of you who are asking "Who's Cliff Johnson?", just read on anyway - or answer your own question by visiting his blog - cliffjohnson.blogspot.com - but read this first - otherwise you'll never be back. I can't compete with J. Clifford.

The eerie coincidence is that I have been blogging on this same topic (music in my life) for some weeks now, but only in my head. Only after a kick in the butt from Cliff, as well as another from my daughter - betsywilson.blogspot.com - who beat me by a day into the blogosphere, do I now put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking.

First a word about how this topic came about for me. I am a computer programmer by trade, and as I sit in my cubicle all day, cranking out some top-notch COBOL code, I am also able to listen to music via a free (and legal) web-based music streaming service called Pandora (check it out at www.pandora.com). As with so many other things, Cliff introduced me to this too.

Once in Pandora, you enter an artist or song that you like, then Pandora will proceed to stream music to your computer, by that artist, and by artists that they consider musically similar. So when I am playing my "Beatles Station" for example, I get the whole 60s sound, the British Invasion, and more. And occasionally, a song will come on that will immediately bring me back to a particular time and place in my life. Then of course I have to go home and buy that song on iTunes and load it on my iPod, so I can get back to that time and place whenever I want. (Don't tell Marcia, but I am frittering away our retirement on iTunes, 99 cents at a time).

I don't know if this is universal, but it seems that the songs that hit me with the strongest emotional impact go back to my youth and even my childhood, moreso than anytime in my adult life. Not sure why that is. Maybe I felt things more deeply as a child, or had more of a sense of wonder and discovery and imagination, than I do now in my battle-hardened and cynical twilight years. But for whatever reason, I can't, for example, think of one song from the 80s that needs to be on this list. (Sorry, Flock of Seagulls - love the hair though).

So enough intro, on with my list.

1. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" - The Beatles. Everyone my age remembers where they were the day Kennedy was shot, and most remember where they were Feb. 9th, 1964, the night the Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan. I am no exception. I probably would have missed it, having not heard of the Beatles (my parent's music collection consisted of Andre Kostelanetz and Ray Conniff records, for which I still have a strange affinity to this day), but as it happens, my parents were going out for the evening, and left us in the care of a teenage girl babysitter. You can guess the rest. She was literally jumping up and down on the basement couch screaming. I feared for my life. I did not quite have the same response, but I did become a Beatles fan from that day forward, going on just over 42 years now. And I can't leave this song without asking you to think for a moment about Beatles lyrics compared to what you would hear today. Is there anyone on the airwaves today who would be happy to leave it at, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"? Not going to happen.

2. "I'll Cry Instead/I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" - The Beatles. This is the first Beatles single I bought with my own money, at a little record store in or near the Hub Shopping Center at 66th and Lyndale. I still have that record, but alas, I have misplaced the paper sleeve, which had a nice picture of the Beatles in their dark suits and ties. According to eBay, it is worth about $6 w/o the paper sleeve, and worth about $150 with it. Story of my life. And this little bit irony just occurred to me. I was trying to recall what I originally paid for this would-be $150 treasure, and I believe it was about 99 cents - the same price I pay Apple for a song today.

3. "Hanky Panky" - Tommy James and the Shondells. One of the first songs that I can remember hearing upon my discovery of AM radio. I would fall asleep to a little transistor radio by my head. We had two stations in those days - KDWB AM 630, and WDGY AM 1130. KDWB survives to this day on the FM dial. WDGY is dead, but AM 1130 survives as KFAN Sports Talk. Back to "Hanky Panky". To this day I have no desire to know the deeper meaning of "My baby does the Hanky Panky", but trust me, to a third grader, who had yet to see his first Playboy, it was nothing more than a catchy tune. In fact I remember singing it with my cabinmates in "Maple" (still there, a stone's throw from the soda fountain), my first year at Trout Lake Camp, summer of '66. And I'm pretty sure none of those boys had a "baby", much less one who "does the Hanky Panky".

4. "Angel Of The Morning" - Merrilee Rush. Camping in the backyard. Green tent. Listening to the radio and playing "War" (the only card game we knew) with my best friend Mike Robertson.

5. "Red Rubber Ball" - The Cyrkle. Summer vacation. Long Beach on Trout Lake. I either had a transistor radio in my hand, or one playing on a picnic table in front of the cabin, but whenever I hear this song, I am at Long Beach with the sand between my toes. And it was just recently, upon acquiring the Simon & Garfunkel box set, "Old Friends", that I found out that Paul Simon wrote this song but never recorded it. Fascinating, huh?

6. "The Sound Of Silence" - Simon & Garfunkel. Back to the lake, but a little later, this time the Lindholm cabin. The loft, the late night Monopoly marathons. Nothing to do with the song, other than that is where I remember hearing it and loving it and singing along - "Hello darkness my old friend, its nice to talk with you again..." you know the rest.

7. "Reflections of My Life" - The Marmalade, and "Pictures of Matchstick Men" - The Status Quo. These are two I heard recently on Pandora and are now on my iPod. These are harder to pin down to a particular time and place, but they are just oozing with 60s psychedelia, and are just a general blast from my past. I don't know what this says about me, but the only lyric in "Reflections" that I still remember after almost forty years is, "The world is a bad place, a sad place, a terrible place to live...Oh, but I don't want to die..." What can I say, I was not the kid you wanted to invite to your party to liven things up.

8. "Day After Day" - Badfinger. This one is the most random of all. Whenever I hear this song, it takes me back to Southdale, mid-70s, favorite high-school hangout (pre-MOA, pre-Starbucks). This song is playing through a ceiling speaker at Wicks & Sticks as I am checking out the wicked cool collection of skull candles. I kid you not.

9. "Seventh Sojourn" (album) - The Moody Blues. And to a lesser extent the previous six Moody Blues albums. If I had to pick one band that defined my youth, it would be the Moody Blues (the pre-breakup, 70s Moody Blues - Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Ray Thomas, Michael Pinder, Graeme Edge). And if I had to pick one album, it would be "Seventh Sojourn". And if I had to pick one song, it would be "Isn't Life Strange". Long story short, this album came along at a very depressing time in my life, as the result of an unrequited love, the details of which I will not bore you with here. But in an odd way, I used this album to maintain my depression, in fact to deepen it, to almost revel in my sadness. And this album did the trick with lyrics like, "I woke up today, I was crying, Lost in a lost world, So many people are dying, Lost in a lost world..."

Needless to say, I eventually snapped out of it and moved on with my life, and now thirty years later, this was one of the first albums that I bought on iTunes when I got an iPod for my birthday. Not to revel in my sadness again, but only because I have such a strong emotional attachment to this album.

10. "Roundabout" - Yes. My first live in-person rock concert. Yes, March 5th, 1974, Met Sports Center. To be honest, I had to look up the exact date with the help of my friend Mr. Google, but I did remember that it was in March. In fact I remember saving the ticket stub for quite some time, but have since misplaced it - probably tucked into the paper sleeve somewhere (see #2 above). I was to see Yes once again, but with Patrick Moraz instead of Rick Wakeman on keyboards, so it wasn't quite the same.

I am also a huge Rick Wakeman fan, and could use up three more entries on this list just for him, but I will not. BTW, if anyone has a copy of "The New Gospels" by Rick Wakeman (it would be a British import) that they are willing to part with, let me know. (I know there is always eBay, but I am giving you, the loyal blog reader, first opportunity).

11. "Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding" - Elton John. I am traveling northbound on Normandale Blvd., and this comes on the radio. And from the opening synthesizer notes and into the piano solo, I am playing along on my imaginary dashboard piano. I don't know if it affected my driving, but when I pulled up to the red light at 84th Street, Mr. Hofer, a neighbor, pulled up next to me, got out of his car, pounded on my window, and screamed, "WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR LICENSE, IN A CEREAL BOX?!!!" Good times. And any discussion of Elton John would not be complete without at least a passing mention of Halloween Night, 1974, St. Paul Civic Center. Great show, Elton. (Yeah, I'm pretty sure he reads my blog).

12. "For Those Tears I Died" - by just about every Christian artist performing in the seventies. This one will take awhile to set up, so if you are one of the many who have heard this speech a thousand times, just move on, there is nothing to see here.

To begin with, I was not close to God in high school. I went to church every Sunday, played the part, put on the plastic smile, but between Sundays, I basically ran around with the wrong crowd and wanted nothing to do with God. So when it came time to pick a college, it was assumed by one and all as a good BGC kid, I would be going to Bethel. But I wanted nothing to do with it. I ended up going to University of Minnesota - Duluth, partly because they accepted me (having graduated in the top 75% of my class), and partly to get as far away from home as possible so I could party in peace.

First Sunday on campus, and church was the last thing on my mind. My roommate, Rick Duerr, (whom I had met just days before) and I went down to the student union in search of breakfast. We came to the right place, but the wrong floor. We wandered into a meeting room, just above the cafe we were looking for, where an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship church service was just getting underway. We were immediately swarmed by friendly people, with no chance of escape, and ushered to two open seats in the front row.

Then they proceeded to sing the song "For Those Tears I Died", (for you youngsters, like the "God of Wonders" of its day), which contained the lyric, "I came so close to sending you away, but just like you promised you came here to stay, I just had to pray...". I admit it. I wept. And I prayed.

And from that day on, InterVarsity became an integral part of my college life, to the point of becoming president of the UMD chapter my senior year, and, as a member of the evangelism team, accosting students in the hallway during finals week with the question, "Do you know where you are going when you die?" (not a winning approach in hindsight), and going to national Urbana missions conferences, and spending a month at a ranch in Colorado, summer of '78, sitting under the teaching of a young New Testament professor from Bethel College named John Piper. Since then, at least one of us has gone on to greater things. But I digress.

And it all began with one line in the song, "For Those Tears I Died", which, with thirty year's hindsight, can now be considered one of the cliche' songs of the 70s worship music genre, (perhaps second only to "I Wish We'd All Been Ready"), but on that day, in that moment, it meant something to me.

13. "Longer" - Dan Fogelberg. This will be my last, as it is getting late, and I am now bumping up against the eighties, where I said I would not go. But this song was hitting the airwaves about the time of my courtship of, and subsequent engagement to, my future wife (and now wife of 25 years, Marcia). So of course, we were obliged to at least consider including this song in our wedding, as it was the "in" thing to do at the time. If you are among the many who had "Longer" sung at your wedding, please do share. But as for me, looking back, I am pleased and relieved that we decided to leave that one out. "Longer than there've been fishes in the ocean..." What does that mean?


Well there you are, a baker's dozen, by no means an exhaustive list, but it is now nearly 2:00 in the morning, which is approaching my bedtime. Good night and thanks for "listening".