Our Song

I heard a startling idea on National Public Radio the other day...hold on to your CDs!...a neurologist at Berkley has determined that people prefer music that they listened to before they were in their mid-twenties. Apparently, by the time you're thirty-five, you aren't likely to vary your musical habits and you will listen to Bob Marley's Greatest Hits over and over until you lose your hearing and don't care.

This research shouldn't be too life altering. Classic Oldies radio stations and ABBA boxed sets testify to the fact that we are cheered by the familiar tunes of yesteryear, whenever that might have been. Someone said that music is the closest thing that we have to a time machine; just hearing the opening twang of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock & Roll" can pull me back into my omnipotent young adulthood so convincingly that I'm startled to return to my current self when the song ends:

I saw him dancin' by the record machine
I knew he must be about seventeen
The beat was goin' strong
Playin' my favorite song
And I could tell it wouldn't be long
Til he was with me, yeah me, singin'
I love rock-n-roll
So put another dime in the jukebox, baby
So come and take your time an' dance with me.

Only ethnomusicologists and very experimental listeners crave tunes not within their youthful experience. While I appreciate Zamfir and his pan flute, or Smithsonian recordings of pygmy hunting chants, when I drive around with "White Rabbit" or "Watching the Detectives" blaring from the side-panel speakers, I am in touch with the reckless, younger me.

I feel that the good professor's work fell short, however. I think he could expand his research further to encompass a musical phenomenon that I have long recognized, and am powerless to explain...Our Song. You know, that particular song that you share with a singular person that was elevated to your Relationship Anthem while you were together. I don't know how it was decided, or when the nominees were whittled down, but in the course of many of my significant relationships, one song emerged and provided the theme music for the duration. I never hear the song again without thinking of the guy.

I can't really see a pattern among the ten or so compiled Our Songs. A couple were popular radio hits at the time, but some were either recorded by relatively obscure artists, or were popular years before I was falling in love. Some seemed to be special because their lyrics reflected fundamental truths about either my feelings, or my boyfriend's character. Anyway, it's a vague analysis.

Another curiosity is that NOT every boyfriend warranted an Our Song. I had to be twitterpated in some way by the romance. I needed to pine a little. And I needed a personal soundtrack if I was going to pine with real commitment.

The first song that would make me weepy just hearing it was Rick's. We would drive endlessly up and down Main in his dad's forest green El Dorado and Chicago's "Wishing You Were Here" became the song I would forever associate with him. I don't really know why, since Rick and I lived in the same town and he didn't show any signs of moving away.

Sleepless hours and creepless nights and far aways
Ooo ooo ooo, wishing you were here
Heaven knows and lord it shows when I'm away
Ooo ooo ooo, wishing you were here.

Maybe I was just prescient and knew that we weren't going to last past my sophomore year. Rick was a paramedic, a few years older, and was destined to marry a girl from another town and have many, many daughters.

Shawn came along a few years later and brought with him a Workers Revolt kind of vibe. He was my first long-haired, bearded revolutionary boyfriend complete with king size waterbed and many cubic feet of albums. While Shawn was not mechanical, and on no occasion did we drop an engine or bore any cylinders, he was fond of Songs About Cars, if not actually cars themselves. He had a vision of our hitting the highway in the middle of the night, in high counter-culture style. Shawn wanted to head out of this dirty ol' town in a Bruce Springsteen - "Born to Run" scenario:

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on Highway 9
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin' out over the line
Baby, this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're still young
'cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Eventually, Shawn dropped out of college and joined the Marines.

Later, I met Joe who was a boy from the West Texas plains. He'd been raised a staunch Southern Baptist, which, of course, left him with a hankering for smoky honky-tonks and saw dust dance floors. Our Song was a country western two-step standard, "Amarillo By Mornin'":

Amarillo by mornin', up from San Antone,
Everything that I got, is just what I've got on
When that sun is high in the Texas sky
I'll be buckin' at the county fair
Amarillo by mornin', Amarillo, I'll be there,
They took my saddle in Houston
Broke my leg in Santa Fe
Lost my wife and a girlfriend somewhere along the way
I'll be lookin' for eight when they pull that gate
And I hope that judge ain't blind
Amarillo by mornin', Amarillo's on my mind

Both of us had been to Amarillo, and neither of us had any longing whatsoever to return. But we were both long accustomed to ending up where we started from despite a valiant struggle to land somewhere else. Joe married a girl in his hometown, became a deacon in his church and a municipal judge. When I last saw him, he had organized a handbell choir.

Michael was the lead guitarist in a band that played at the lounge where I worked in college. We were both terribly fond of his hair...a cascade of gold halfway down his back that shimmered with natural highlights. Michael was the only man I knew at the time who used salon quality shampoos and conditioners (instead of Palmolive), and the results were breathtaking.

Michael was the type of boyfriend who had already given rock-n-roll the best years of his life before I met him. Our Song was "Turn the Page" by fellow sufferer, Bob Seger:

On a long and loneseome highway east of Omaha
You can hear the engine moanin' out his one long one note song
You can think about the woman or the girl you knew the night before
But your thoughts will be wandering the way they always do
When you're ridin' sixteen hours and there's nothin' much to do
And you don't feel much like ridin', you just wish the trip was through
Here I am, on the road again
There I am, up on the stage
Here I go, playin' the star again
There I go, turn the page.

Eventually, Michael's combo broke up. I graduated and moved to Colorado for about 15 minutes. I'm not sure where Michael went, but I like to think his hair is still mesmerizing.

A few years rolled by and I met and married Greg. He had a vast record collection and we lived in a musical bubble - no television, but a stereo system with enough power to make the china cabinets down the block quiver. I conjure Greg when I hear Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash sing "Girl From the North Country", which he loved:

If you're traveling to the north country fair, and the winds hit heavy on the borderline,
Remember me to one who live there, for she was once a true love of mine.
Please see for me if her hair's hangin' down
If it curls and flows all down her breast
Please see for me if her hair's hangin' down
That's the way I remember her best.

Our Song runner-up might have been Brewer & Shipley's "One Toke Over the Line", for no reason that I can remember:

One toke over the line sweet Mary,
One toke over the line
Sittin' downtown in a railway station,
One toke over the line.
Awaitin' for the train that goes home, sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
One toke over the line, sweet Mary, one toke over the line.

Pure genius, eh?

Ray followed and was my singular experience with totally unrequited love. I did more pining for him than I have ever done before or since. My most memorable moment with Ray was when, finally, I had worked up the courage to ask him where he thought our relationship was going. Ray looked at me, completely mystified, and asked, "Are we having a relationship?" (Note-to-Self: If they have to ask, the answer is probably "no.")

The raw anguish of ignored love led me to wallow in Patty Smith's cover of Springsteen's "Because the Night":

Take me now baby here as I am
Hold me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed.
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I'm in your hands
Take my hand, come undercover
They can't hurt you now,
Can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now.
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to lust
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us.

Eventually, Amazing Derrick came along with his golden and generous heart. I read volumes of poetry when we were together and pined greatly when we were apart. We were all over Peggy Lee's "Fever":

Never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When you put your arms around me
I get a fever that's so hard to bear.
You give me fever, when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever in the morning
Fever all through the night.

Enough said.

And then came William. William was a passionate wreck of a man, who lived in a private world of no predictable outcomes. As a boyfriend, he was fascinating, but totally unreliable...one night, he was supposed to pick me up for a date and never materialized. A couple of days later, William called from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico having forgotten to tell me (or, simply forgotten he was going any where until he returned to normal consciousness and found himself on a plane) he was leaving the country. Our Song was Joe Cocker's "Feel's like Forever":

I saw you, that was all I had to see
Wanted you, had to have you next to me
From that moment, I knew that you'd be all I ever need
And there's a place inside my heart nobody's touched before
And when I found you, I found all that I'd been searching for
You turned my world around
All I know is that it feels like forever
All I know is that I love the way it feels
All I see is how good we are together
And I never wanna see it slip away
I'll never let you go
Is all I know.

When the feeling started to take a turn into "feels like this is going to go on for freakin' forever", I moved on.

After all of these years of observation, it's pretty clear to me that the song materializes along with the object of romance. I have songs lined up, waiting patiently to ascend to Our Song status. And I'd love be able to get a jump on all that pining and say, "The Next Our Song is going to be Shake Russell's "Deep in the West":

Deep in the West, where the tall mountains grow, I've gone home
Where the heaven above turns red from the fire down below
Are you listening to me when I'm talking to you?
Said together we're one, divided we're through.

or Townes Van Zandt's "To Live is to Fly":

We all got holes to fill,
And them holes is all that's real,
Some fall on you like a stone,
Sometimes you dig your own.
The choice is yours to make
Time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea,
some toil upon the shore.
Days up and down they come
Like rain on a conga drum
Forget most, remember some
But don't turn none away.
Everything is not enough,
nothing is too much to bear
Where you've been is good and gone
All you keep is the getting there.
To live is to fly,
Low and high.
So, shake the dust off of your wings and the sleep out of your eyes.

But it doesn't work that way. Love sneaks up on you with soft paws. Experience has taught me that one must go about the business of life with the faith that love will arrange its own schedule according to some unposted cosmic manifest. Until then, I will bide my time and sing along to Warren Zevon's "Searching for a Heart":

They tell me love requires a little standing in line
And I've been waiting for you lover for a long, long time.
I've been pacing the floor, I've been watching the door,
Meanwhile, I keep searching for a heart,
Searching everyone.
They say love conquers all,
You can't start it like a car,
You can't stop it with a gun.

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Ingrid divides her life between the San Juan Islands (where her heart lives) and Austin, Texas (where her paycheck is generated). While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra ..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Ingrid is an old-school Libra and believes that the Revolution should be a catered event.

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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