11 p.m. tonight, I hopped on a train on the Upper East Side and headed home to Brooklyn after a wonderful dinner. The trip is probably 7 or 8 miles, but for those of you not used to traveling by subway, that equates to about an hour late at night. Those aren't exactly the moments that try men's souls, but it's a great time to have an iPod. I've been gravitating to music from my teens this week, and flipping through the artists, I land on Rush. From there, I hone in on "Spirit of the Radio," from 1980's Permanent Waves.
Music in my teens was a very different thing for me. It wasn't tied down by any form of nostalgia. Even my deep passion for music of the 1960s was really an exploration of something that was new, at least to me. Rush was my second or third concert. My brother Jeff and I went when I was 15 — Moving Pictures tour at the (then named) Brendan Byrne Arena in Jersey's Meadowlands. It was my first experience with a full multi-media show and it floored me. Next time I saw them, I was 30 and being paid to photograph the show for a music publication. As 45 approaches, I plan on seeing them again.
Today, music easily unleashes a wave of nostalgia and an iPod is something to be handled with emotional care. I grew up in the reasonably well-to-do suburbs of Jersey. That's not to say we were wealthy, but certainly comfortable. The towns I lived in — to the best of my memory — lacked any significant people who weren't white and was completely devoid of people who were poor. Looking back on my teen years, I should have been oblivious to the rest of the world, but in truth, I was never more outraged than when I was in high school. I woke up. I realized I was privileged. I realized that my government (this was the Reagan years), was funding destabilizing wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, recklessly destroying lives for some bizarre ideological reasons that had little to do with reality. I realized the gap between the poor and wealthy was expanding. I watched the transition from Carter's recession to Reagan's "recovery" and realized what mainstream media wasn't talking about: That large portions of America weren't getting a piece of it. That the economic measures that defined a recovery failed to take into account how it impacted the poor and the middle class. This realization hit me when I was 17, and I was disgusted.
But to turn to "Spirit of the Radio":
Invisible airwaves
Crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle
With the energy
Emotional feedback
On a timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price ---
Almost free...
When I was a teen, reality came into my world via the radio. No, it wasn't public radio or some radio news documentary. It was music. I caught the tale end of an error where adventurous DJs still had the ability to play what they were passionate about. It was Dan Carlisle on WNEW FM coming into my room at midnight and saying "Meet Iggy and the Stooges." It was WBGO introducing a kid in the suburbs to Gill Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson's "Winter in America." It was the end of an period where major labels took risks and radio stations weren't driven by corporate-controlled play lists. The world was coming to me through a stereo.
The DJs and the artist they played were my heroes. They were my grounding in reality. They were the ones who started me on the path to music journalism. And some 15 years later, when I began writing about music, I was driven by the passion to return the favor they did for me: to turn people on to music they'd otherwise would have never heard. Over the 12 years I wrote about music, it never brought me a lot of money. But every time someone thanked me for exposing them to a new sound or an artist thanked me for really taking the time to "get" what they were doing, I counted that as a victory.
But back to high school: Over the following years, I would march on Washington, write letters, get involved with progressive organizations, and set out to change the world. I would later come to realize that no one really cared what a teenager thought about world events. I was angry, frustrated, and unshakingly idealistic. I was determined to change the world if I had to do it one person at a time.
The danger of an iPod is that it carries the entire soundtrack to your life. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. The music of your youth is loaded with years that have flashed by faster than you ever imagined, lost innocence, and the realization that things are never as simple as they seemed. For me, it carried the hardest realization of my life: You don't get to change the whole world, only your small piece of it. It's a sobering thought, but it makes you think many, many times about how you treat the people whose lives you do impact.
As the ride progressed, in the MTA's typically sluggish style, I realized that my values where the same, but my idealism was gone. I understood a lot as a teenager, but I didn't understand the luxury of outrage. The beauty of being young is two-fold, at least for those whose families have enough money to provide for them: a lack of responsibility and little enough experience on this planet to see how justice is beaten down again and again. It's easy to be outraged when the majority of your day isn't spent busting your ass to earn the money to pay the bills. It's easy to be outraged when you still believe you have the power to change the entire world. It's not that I'm no longer appalled by the injustice of the world, just that the energy to be outraged had been largely beaten out of me. That realization in the sad part of nostalgia.
One day, when I was still in high school, I turned on the radio around midnight, but Dan Carlisle was gone. There had been no farewell broadcast, and I never knew where he ended up, though I imagine it was some station in some other part of the country. His time was passing, though. The days when DJs could get away playing Iggy and the Stooges were coming to an end. I would become a music journalist in the mid-90s, and I would see the major labels unravel under their own greed. I would turn off my radio, and turn to friends and colleagues for new sounds. I would turn to the internet and the many cool, devoted people who still worked in the music industry because they loved music more than then despised the industry. And as I finished my ride home tonight, I wondered where Dan is now, and whether he knows that he brought the world into the sheltered bedrooms of a teenagers many years ago.
For the words of the profits
Are written on the studio wall,
Concert hall ---
Echoes with the sounds...
Of salesmen.
