Hearing old popular songs....
Yes, it's true, I didn't identify very much with popular musics when I was younger, especially the best-known for the most part. But they were everywhere, and some were wonderful, mysterious, eerie – the other day when I was lecturing about trends in the late 1960s I mentioned acid rock, and found myself somehow trying to explain the fascination of 'In-a-Gadda-da-Vida', which my brother played over and over one summer in the early 1970s. I still remember lying in the living room couch reading (Out of the Silent Planet, of all things), summer sunshine coming through the window, and this fantastically charged music pouring across the room....
And the same with Joni Mitchell – my eldest sister was so fascinated with the Clouds album in the late 1960s (and perhaps also my middle sister – there were points where I can't completely separate their likes and dislikes; they shared a number of talents and fascinations, and even an old book where I wrote down poems in rather clumsy attempts at calligraphy has small drawings by both of them scattered throughout, on different pages). I never had the same reaction to the early Joni Mitchell, because the voice was almost too light and girlish ever to mean much to me; but it certainly made my reaction to her eerie remake in 2000 of 'Both Sides Now' that much more powerful: like the final chapters of Proust, you suddenly look back over decades, overwhelmed by the complexity of change and memory.
And tonight, at the end of a television show, the score became Henley's 'End of the Innocence' – one of those wistful songs that fascinated and mystified a later me, in a darker year, where time and life seemed completely insoluble, and the time given to solve them all to short. Because I was the youngest child, because I was only eleven in May '68, because so many songs and news bulletins passed so mysteriously before me, all assuming that I understood things that seemed like half-open doors – all those possible meanings of time, passion, change, growing up, even loss: though none of it was clear to an eleven-year-old, or really to a thirty-two-year-old –
because of all that, some of those songs seemed to ring in huge spaces full of enigmatic faces and secrets and futures and illuminations: beautiful and strange and scary paths where I could only intuit fragments of what might happen, as one traveled further along each one. And some of those songs still seem so remarkable to me: when 'The End of the Innocence' came on the television, I couldn't help my reaction....
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