This is a RSS file. Copy the URL into your aggregator of choice. If you don't know what this means and want to learn more, please see: http://platial.typepad.com/news/2006/04/really_simple_t.html for more info. http://platial.comhttp://platial.com/map/-These-are-the-Songs-of-my-Life/4666 Music has a way of evoking memories almost like smells, only songs are infinitely more eay to locate and place. Some of these are stories about specific songs and specific moments. Some are about a band or a record that meant something to me and why, and when, and where. Tags: past, history, story, stories, music, song, love, silly, evocative, telling, recounting http://platial.com/post/65636 My friends Corrine and Tague and I made a road trip down to Iowa City to see a band...can't remember which one. Probably the local band from Cedar Falls whose name I can't remember. Anyhow, this band from NY called Industrial Teepee opened. Their songs had a lot of lyrics, which is something that I have always liked in a song. You know, lots and lots of words, hardly any repetition, long storied verses... So, I went up and talked to the guys in the band when they were finished and then we all had a beer with them (We were 17). Then they invited us to go to a house party with them, which we did. It was so exciting being at this house party, which was in a big old house where one of the other bands lived. I'd never been at a party like that before. I think it might have been my first grown-up party where I was playing the role of one of the grown ups. I had a beer and the band's lead singer sat with me in a stairway whispering ee cummings poems he had learned by heart into my ear. I think that's one of the hottest things anyone has ever done to seduce me. It was probably just a regular piece of the young man's repertoire, but...well...good piece. We had been talking about books and poems for a couple hours. He went out to the van and brought back a book of Roethke poems, which he gave to me. Men used to always give me books. It's a good thing to give if you want to be remembered. Every time I see that book, I think of this night, even if it's only in passing. After the party, Corrine and Tague and I went back to the motel with the singer and the bass player. They sang Tom Waits songs for a long time, accompanied by acoustic guitars. This is how I discovered Tom Waits. Then of course came the making out. Poor Tague was left out. He watched an old 30s horror movie on the TV while we smooched. When I told my new friend that I was still a virgin, he said, "That's great," like he was trying to mean it. I don't remember if I also told him I was 17. I think that part of the reason I remained a virgin for so long (I was almost 19 before I got rid of that pesky virginity) was because I kept telling people about it. That and the fact that I have excellent taste in men and am generally attracted to a decent type of fellow. When we got back home, I went to the mall and bought "Frank's Wild Years" on cassette.

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]]> 2007-01-16 07:23:32.810347+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66142 I remember loving this song. I know it was 1979 because it was also the year that I discovered that years are numbered. I thought that was so incredibly clever. Now I knew when I was. I was in 1979. Slip, Slide and Away was a big hit that year. I remember singing it in the car while it played on the radio. I think that we were driving a Ford LTD that year, which was also my favorite of my parents' cars. LTD... it sounded so high-class. And it had electric windows! And a two-tone paint job! I pondered the meaning of this song quite a bit. "You know you're nearer your destination the more you slip, slide, and away." I figured it had to have something to do with playground slides and I imagined myself going down an infinitely long slide toward my destination when I sang it.

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]]> 2006-04-21 14:13:46.035599+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66172 The oldest son of my mom's best friend used to babysit us sometimes. I think his name was Alan, or maybe Andrew. I had a really big crush on him when I was 6 or 7, so whenever he came over to babysit I forced him to play the "Grease" sountrack on the record player and act it out, with me playing Sandra and him playing whatever John Travolta's character's name was. He was a good sport. I had seen Grease on HBO at my grandparents' house, so I knew the moves. My favorite character had been Roz, though, not Sandra. I couldn't identify with Sandra's wussiness, but I could get into playing out that finale song ("You're the one that I want, You're the one I want, I want, ooh, ooh, ooh, honey..."). My little brother and sister and I used to play at acting out songs on the record player a lot. My mother was a big fan of novelty music, so she had several great compilations which really lent themselves well to this game. Alan eventually joined the army and was stationed in Germany. He met a German woman and they got married and had kids. They used to come back to Fort Dodge every couple years. I remember the woman he married didn't talk very much. She always stocked up on blue jeans because apparently they were much more expensive in Germany.

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]]> 2006-04-21 14:28:02.7091+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66173 When I finally got the tape recorder I'd been pining for for months and months, it came with "The Best of Blondie" on tape. Lucky me! I still love this record. Debbie Harry. Now there was someone a girl could look up to. She was especially appealing because my cb handle when I was a little girl was "Blondie," and I never really could identify with anything about Dagwood's wife. Indeed, this was a better Blondie for me.

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]]> 2006-04-21 12:42:19.176624+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66175 In the Cyndi Lauper / Madonna scission of the early 1980s I was firmly and unshakeably in the Lauper camp. My favorite song from that album was "She Bop," because it reminded me of Betty Boop. When I later found out that it was a song about masturbation, well, I loved it all the more. Cyndi kind of lost me with "Time After Time." I still hate that song. It's just grating as hell.

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]]> 2006-04-24 08:00:09.458436+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66194 Six to eight teenagers, one Dodge Dart (Brown) and one cassette tape of Van Halen 1, driving, driving, driving, up and down Central Ave. "Ice Cream Man" was our favorite. When David Lee Roth left Van Halen, we mourned. I mean....Sammy Hagar? You must be joking. Coolest band logo EVER.

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]]> 2007-01-16 07:35:59.124363+00:00 http://platial.com/post/90650 In 1990 I went off to college at Boston University. Part of the reason I chose BU was that it was as far from Iowa as I figured I could get. I lived at Shelton Hall on the "writers' floor." It was here that I met Justine. I used to dance to this song at ManRay, stomping my combat boots and shaking my long hair around. Justine and I listened to this record a lot in our dorm. We went to the first Lollapalooza mainly to see Nine Inch Nails. I registered to vote for the first time at that concert.

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]]> 2006-06-21 18:08:19.081232+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66351 This was my first paying job. I had volunteered at the animal shelter and the art museum previous summers, but this year I was old enough to join a detassling crew. I was very excited about this job. I planned to buy myself contact lenses and a bicycle. I was a late bloomer. At age 15 I was still a child. My favorite passtimes were fishing and rabbit hunting and reading. Ambushing younger cousins in the woods, digging deep holes for tiger traps, building forts... The first day I went to the municipal swimming pool parking lot to catch the detassling bus, I was a little nervous. I didn't know anyone there. There were about 20 girls aged 15-17, mostly on the younger side. Everyone seemed to know someone else except for me. When we got to our first field of the day, after having slept a little bit on the bus in transit, we all woke up, ate something from our lunch stashes, and milled around while our crew leader got organized. When we got started working a group of four friends started singing "I want your Sex," and most everyone joined in. I had never heard the song. It was very bizarre. For a fleeting moment at the beginning, I thought it might be a song the girls had made up themselves. Then everyone started singing it and I knew I had stumbled across something known to the entire world, except for me. It kind of reminded me of the "Two all-beef patties special sauce double cheese pickles onions on a sesame-seed bun" craze of my grade-school years. I was shocked by the totally dirty lyrics, and excited. On the all-girls' detassling crew we tromped through fields sweating in the sun in our cut-offs and bikini tops, singing dirty songs. Nowhere else in the world could I experience anything like it. And be part of it! I became friends with two older heavy metal girls who took me under their wing. They brought in their lunch pails oranges into which they had injected peach schnappes with a hypodermic needle. They were the most fascinating women I had ever met in my life.

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]]> 2006-04-24 10:26:02.163381+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66349 "Nothing's Shocking" was an important record for my generation. I still love this record. It was played so much over about two years that it is almost unfair to try to pin it to one Place and time. But I do have one specific memory more tied to this record than any others. I don't even know why I remember it. Tague and Corrine and I are hanging out on the Iowa State University campus at night. We've been exploring, wandering... talking, dreaming of leaving Iowa... We have a boom box and we're playing "Nothing's Shocking." We're sitting on some kind of structure outside. We're not even really talking to each other. We're just 17 and waiting for our real lives to begin, and angry as hell that we have to wait, while we listen to Jane's Addiction.

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]]> 2007-01-16 07:41:37.726015+00:00 http://platial.com/post/66354 I discovered Bob Dylan at about the same time as I discovered the Columbia Record and Tape Club. The two went so well together. Those old albums were cheap to get, from the back of the catalogue. I listened to only Bob Dylan during several different phases of my life. My passion for Bob only waned some time in my 20s. I'm not sure I can even say for sure why this music meant so much to me. I was unhappy a lot during those high school years, and this music helped. When you're 16, you spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of things. The opacity of some of Dylan's lyrics was an ideal ground for that yearning to dig for meaning.

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]]> 2007-01-16 07:49:31.199298+00:00 http://platial.com/post/77422
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]]> 2007-01-16 07:56:22.773756+00:00 http://platial.com/post/91282 My sister was born exactly one year and one day after me. Consequently, we grew up sharing birthday parties and I've never really forgiven her the crime of stealing my birthday before I even got a chance to really enjoy it. The year that I turned 10 and she turned 9 we were both allowed to invite three friends over for a sleep over. I invited Jennifer Bloom, Cherry Riesburg, and Tina Powell, my only friends. My siter invited a couple people I don't remember and this new girl in school who was blessed with the fantastically exotic name Raquel. Oh, to have a "q" in your name! What must it feel like?! I remember seeing her name written on the rectangle of paper the teacher had prepared before the first day of scool, stuck to the front of her desk with generous loops of masking tape. I'm not sure if it was actually written in glue and glitter or if that's just the way it felt to me. Raquel not only had an exotic name, but she was also extremely petite and noticeably brown but obviously not black. I think she is the first Hispanic person I ever saw. Well, she ended up defecting from my sister's party to join my party, where we were lip synching to the day's greatest hits, using my music stand as a microphone. My sister was furious, but I didn't care. Not only was Raquel beautiful and exotic, she was also a wonderful mythomaniacal storyteller. As we begged her for details about her exciting and glamorous life, she regaled us with tales of far-off Places like Arizona, where she had had two pet squirrels. I don't remember most of the outlandish things that she told us, but I do remember that I absolutely did not believe her when she told us that Rick Springfield had written the song "Jessies Girl" about her.

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]]> 2007-01-16 07:59:02.496299+00:00 http://platial.com/post/91627 When I was in 4th grade, our school musical that year was "Little Orphan Annie." I desperately wanted to play the lead role. Unfortunately, singing more loudly than anyone else in my class was not going to get me the part. I practiced the song "Tomorrow" for the audition, recording myself singing on my tape recorder. In the end, a girl named Sarah got the part. I don't think there was really any contest. After the try outs, I was miserably sad. I went home and listened to the recording of my rendition of the song a few times and felt pretty strongly that my singing had been just as good as Sarah's. And louder! Did I mention that Sarah had red hair?

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]]> 2007-01-16 07:59:52.306569+00:00 http://platial.com/post/95135 The first year I was in Paris, my friends and I listened a lot to Oui FM, mostly because they seemed to play the most American music of all of the French radio stations. When Kurt Cobain killed himself, Oui FM played a 24-hour-solid Nirvana mourning tribute and dozens of distraught young French people called in to compare Cobain to Rimbaud. We laughed, but we also loved the way the French youngsters were unashamed to be pretentious. I remember that in the later part of the night on Oui FM they had a really bizarre radio show co-hosted by a British woman who spoke French and a French guy speaking English, pretending to be American, parodying a brash American DJ style. All shouting and laughter that was too loud. They took calls from teenagers who wanted to talk about their romantic problems or school problems. It was one of the weirder radio shows I've ever listened to.">

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