Nostalgia jukebox
I punch the presets on the car radio with machine-like precision – <FM1> punch, punch, punch, punch, punch <FM2> punch, punch, punch, punch, punch <repeat> – snuffing out the morning DJs and their gabfests, the carnival of fast-talking ad men, the vacation giveaway contests, the public radio pleas for money. I am in search of just the right song. And what is that song? I don’t know myself. It isn’t this one: Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man.” Or this one: Sheryl Crow’s “The First Cut is the Deepest.” The songs that I discard are gone after just a few notes. That’s all it takes to tell: too soft; too hard; overplayed; too syrupy; I used to like it, but now I hate it; I used to hate it, and now I kind of like it, but I’m still not in the mood; never should have been covered; a good song that is now a car commercial (ruined!); just heard it on another radio station three minutes ago; what is she, like, sixteen?; surely no one in the world likes this song. On and on the rejection list goes. It is amazing, really, the gigahertz-speed selection process that takes place in my head as I march across the radio dial. Decisions made in fractions of a second. It occurs to me that I could be using the radio’s scan function to do this, but I don’t like it. The pause time is too long. It probably only parks on each station for a second or two, but that seems like an eternity when you have known for many hundredths of a second that you don’t want this song. I could put a CD in the player, I have a good sound system in my car. For me, though, the urge to surf the radio is all about looking for songs I haven’t heard in a while or, in many cases, songs I don’t own – songs that I’ve always liked, but never enough to buy the CD. It’s all about surprise; I want to be surprised. punch, punch, punch, punch, punch Finally, there it is. The right song. Or, at least, the right song for this very moment. It’s not a great song. That’s an important point. The right song doesn’t have to be a particularly good song. Sometimes what makes the song just right is that it is tied to a memory. The moment you hear the song, you are transported to another place, some other time in your life. You can’t resist going there. It is out of your control. This song falls into the “great memory, bad song” category for me. It is called “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees. Hey, don’t judge me. I’m sure you’ve got a song just like it in your nostalgia jukebox. The year was 1979, the heart of the disco era. The event was spring break of my junior year in college. The place was Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The scene: Six college kids, sunburned, still tired from driving 20 hours straight from D.C., cruising Ocean Boulevard at sunset, the radio turned up loud...night fever, night fever, we know how to do it...returning the stares of the girls on the sidewalks, the balmy sea air whipping through the open windows of our behemoth RV...night fever, night fever, we know how to show it...trolling for coeds in a rented Winnebago and thinking it doesn’t get any better than this…
Here I am,
Prayin' for this moment to last,
Livin' on the music so fine,
Borne on the wind,
Makin' it mine.
8:59:50 PM  Stories
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