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Nostalgia - Good or Evil?
I've been trying to make some sense out of my growing nostalgia for 70's pop songs. Don't get too sick. I'm not bopping along to the Partridge Family or Debby Boone...but I am guilty for enjoying, wholeheartedly even, Maria Mulduar's "Midnight at the Oasis," Firefall, Al Stewart (esp. "Year of the Cat"), and I can't get enough of Kenny Loggins "If You Call Me Friend" or Walter Egan's "Magnet & Steel." Thanks to the wonderful world of p2p mp3 sharing, all this year I've been stockpiling songs that entered my subconsious as a child which I have never quite known who sang them. A few years ago, I discovered that Steely Dan performed several songs that I always had stuck in my head ("Peg" and "Deacon Blues" esp.). This has been snowballing with other groups that I don't think I've heard more than 8 times since living overseas in the 70's - Badfinger, ELO (minus the obvious burned out "DBMD"), and Atlanta Rhythm Section among them. I can count the days in the past 3 months that I haven't listened to Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me" on one hand. Will I find myself whipped back into time like Christopher Reeves in "Somewhere in Time" if I continue my marathon listenings to Orleans's "Dance with Me" or Rupert Holmes's "Escape (Pina Colada Song)?"
In 1979 I was 6 years old. I'd spent the past 3 years in Germany listening to the pop mix played on Armed Forces Radio and living thru my parents' transition from Carly Simon, James Taylor, and Disco to more country sounds of Waylon, Dolly, and Kenny Rogers. I think the move back to the United States made me grab at the musical influences (along with episodes of Battlestar Gallactica & Three's Company) to piece together what I thought America might be like. The prevailing image I had, and what I'm nostalgic for, was a world of skyscrapers, leisurely bars, and airports - all of these scenes are always at sunset for some reason, too. I don't know where the images came from, but I can see myself in a high rise hotel looking out to a orange-red sunset with the city skyline underneath as clear as a recent memory. I've looked for beachfront bars playing Doobie Bros. or Gerry Rafferty, but I think they only exist in my mind now.
What I'm coming to think the purpose (assuming there is a purpose) of this wave of nostalgia is the destruction of a fantasy. Destructed not by facing that these places/experiences didn't really exist...but that they can't exist for me now. My first hurdle: JD hates 70's pop! Most everything from that decade gives her a smarmy feeling (not too big of a surprise given her later entry into the decade - she's more nostalgic about the 80's than I am). Secondly, I've always seen these fantasies from a bachelor's point of view. I would be living in lofts in downtown areas, going to a bar/lounge that people knew me, or taking red-eye flights across the country. I was pretty certain that I was going to be a bachelor for life up to the end of college. Now that I've been domesticated and a child is just a few hundred wriggly sperms away, there is a realization that these images are no longer possible in my own life. JD loves gardening too much to let us move into a loft in downtown. Why go to a bar now? I've been to 3 bars in the past 6 years. Why go when I can't drive home afterwards and I'm not going to pick someone up to take me to one of our homes?
Don't get me wrong. All of my fantasies aren't crumbling, only these dreams I've carried inside me for the past 20+ years. New ones are popping up. It's very difficult for me to be anyplace in public w/o all of my attention being dedicated to the children around me. I can't go to the zoo anymore without getting the urge to be pushing a stroller with a wailing child inside waking up the sleeping bears and antelope.
I don't remember where I heard this a decade or so ago, but I've added it to my rules of the universe: "Things don't begin or end, only change." So am I really destroying a fantasy or just seeing it change?
Steely Dan - "Deacon Blues"
I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues
Steely Dan - "Razor Boy"
I hear you are singing a song of the past
I see no tears
I know that you know it may be the last
For many years
In 1979 I was 6 years old. I'd spent the past 3 years in Germany listening to the pop mix played on Armed Forces Radio and living thru my parents' transition from Carly Simon, James Taylor, and Disco to more country sounds of Waylon, Dolly, and Kenny Rogers. I think the move back to the United States made me grab at the musical influences (along with episodes of Battlestar Gallactica & Three's Company) to piece together what I thought America might be like. The prevailing image I had, and what I'm nostalgic for, was a world of skyscrapers, leisurely bars, and airports - all of these scenes are always at sunset for some reason, too. I don't know where the images came from, but I can see myself in a high rise hotel looking out to a orange-red sunset with the city skyline underneath as clear as a recent memory. I've looked for beachfront bars playing Doobie Bros. or Gerry Rafferty, but I think they only exist in my mind now.
What I'm coming to think the purpose (assuming there is a purpose) of this wave of nostalgia is the destruction of a fantasy. Destructed not by facing that these places/experiences didn't really exist...but that they can't exist for me now. My first hurdle: JD hates 70's pop! Most everything from that decade gives her a smarmy feeling (not too big of a surprise given her later entry into the decade - she's more nostalgic about the 80's than I am). Secondly, I've always seen these fantasies from a bachelor's point of view. I would be living in lofts in downtown areas, going to a bar/lounge that people knew me, or taking red-eye flights across the country. I was pretty certain that I was going to be a bachelor for life up to the end of college. Now that I've been domesticated and a child is just a few hundred wriggly sperms away, there is a realization that these images are no longer possible in my own life. JD loves gardening too much to let us move into a loft in downtown. Why go to a bar now? I've been to 3 bars in the past 6 years. Why go when I can't drive home afterwards and I'm not going to pick someone up to take me to one of our homes?
Don't get me wrong. All of my fantasies aren't crumbling, only these dreams I've carried inside me for the past 20+ years. New ones are popping up. It's very difficult for me to be anyplace in public w/o all of my attention being dedicated to the children around me. I can't go to the zoo anymore without getting the urge to be pushing a stroller with a wailing child inside waking up the sleeping bears and antelope.
I don't remember where I heard this a decade or so ago, but I've added it to my rules of the universe: "Things don't begin or end, only change." So am I really destroying a fantasy or just seeing it change?
Steely Dan - "Deacon Blues"
I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues
Steely Dan - "Razor Boy"
I hear you are singing a song of the past
I see no tears
I know that you know it may be the last
For many years