I love these two passages about music and adolescence, each capturing that blend of joy, mystery, fantasy, desperation, identification, and bittersweet reality that scored countless days and nights. The first is
"Records," from Kevin Sampsell's 2010 memoir
A Common Pornography: "Two plastic record
players and a nice stack of Top 40 45s were all I needed to start my
own radio station."
My plan was to do a pirate radio show that
would broadcast to my neighborhood. Instead I just pointed my speakers
out the upstairs window and hoped the sound reached the corner.
In fifth grade I started writing really bad pop song lyrics. When I
wrote something I thought to be particularly hit-worthy, I’d cut out a
piece of paper in the shape of a 45, and then, after coloring in the
black wax area, I’d put the name of my song on the “label.” Some of
these hits were “Sound of Thunder,” “Rich Dude,” and “Diamond Girl." The
name I gave myself was Billy Rivers, because I thought it sounded
cool.
After cutting out the center hole, I’d string
the smash hit to a hook on my ceiling. I imagined I was a megastar.
Sometimes I’d even put them on one of the turntables and watch them
spin. Forty-five revolutions per minute. Once I put a needle on one as it
spun and ruined the needle. I had to go to the record store, where they
sold little smoking pipes and stoner posters, spending my entire
five-dollar allowance on a new snap-on needle.
The second is from Bruce Springsteen's new memoir
Born to Run: "I
always remember driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, and shortly before
you reached New York, somewhere out in the industrial wasteland, stood a
small concrete building."
There in the middle of the stink and marshes
hung a brightly lit radio call sign. It was just a relay station, I
suppose, but as a young tween I’d first imagined it was the real thing.
That all my favorite deejays were crowded into this one cramped shack
out here in Nowheresville. There, they were bravely pouring out over the
airwaves the sounds New jersey and your life depended upon. Was it
possible? Could this abandoned-looking little frontier fort so far from
civilization be the center of your heart’s world? Here I dreamed in the
swamps of Jersey were the mighty men and women you knew only by their
names and sounds of their voices.
1 comment:
Road Runn-ER, Road Runn-ER...!!
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