Tuesday, January 18, 2011: TWOfer Tuesday - The "Music Is A Time Machine" Edition

It is with a heavy heart that I blog the first selection of todays TWOfer Tuesday.
I had planned on blogging Gerry Rafferty's super hit "Baker Street" many weeks ago, well before his death on Jan 4th. I won't do any sort of retrospective tribute here, there are href="http://www.spinner.com/2011/01/04/gerry-rafferty-baker-street-stealers-wheel-dies/">many to be found on the web, written by people far more insightful and knowledgeable than myself.

I will stay with my original idea for this blog, which focuses on the evocative power of music in our lives, as that is as fitting a tribute any artist of his caliber deserves.

My original idea was an exploration of the idea of music being a time machine.

I don't mean that in any literal sense, not in the sense of cavorting around time and space in a TARDIS. No, I'm talking about that feeling of being instantly transported to another time and place in your mind when you hear a certain song, or smell a certain food being cooked. My first girlfriend wore a very specific perfume and for many years after we broke up, I would get a scent of it from someone in a mall, or grocery store, and immediately flash back to our times together. Not just fleeting glimpses, either, but full fledged visions with depth and texture and meaning to those experiences.

There are two songs that, for me, take me back to my childhood. Suddenly, unwillingly and without hesitation. Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street and Gary Wright's Dream Weaver.

Dream Weaver was a hit in 1976, and Baker Street climbed the charts in 1978. I would have been 8 and 10, respectively.

I have a friend the same age as myself, and we have this ongoing discussion: being born in 1968. are we children of the 1970's or 1980's? I contend that, while my younger years were spent in the 70's, my truly formative years are firmly grounded in the 1980's. He disagrees, noting that most of the nostalgia we covet, tv shows especially, come from the 1970's. It's an ongoing debate, but I will concede this: there is no song from the 1980's that effects me as viscerally as these two selections.

There are contenders, sure. Rod Stewards Young Turks comes to mind as a song, for reasons I cannot wholly understand, takes me back. Gypsy by Fleetwood Mac as well, again for unknown reasons.

But even those songs have nowhere near the power to evoke memory like my two chosen selections. When the saxophone kicks in on Baker Street, I am 10 years old, I have on my Husky jeans and am riding my banana seat Schwinn bike through the streets of my suburbs. When the opening dream-like synths start Dream Weaver, I'm transported to a holiday our family took to Mt Whitney in the summer of 1976, and the camping lodge had a jukebox and this song was playing constantly. Suddenly I have that awkward tuft of bright orange hair I had as a kid, I'm wearing a t-shirt with an iron-of of a very cool Dodge Van and my sister still had her dark green VW Bug with the NORML bumper sticker and her post hippy clothes. Gerald Ford was still president, CD's hadn't been invented yet and the world was sure to end in Mutually Assured Destruction.

No other songs take me to those places. No other tunes are so effective in bringing out details of sights and sounds and feelings of my youth.

These songs, these mini-masterpieces of pop songcraft, these are my time machines.

What are yours?