{"id":4755,"date":"2009-08-04T11:44:48","date_gmt":"2009-08-04T16:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4755"},"modified":"2009-08-04T11:56:37","modified_gmt":"2009-08-04T16:56:37","slug":"something-is-found-something-is-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4755","title":{"rendered":"Something Is Found, Something Is Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago, I wrote a post about Gordon Lightfoot<\/a>.\u00a0 As the comment thread wound on, I noted a moment in my past:<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s a Lightfoot mystery; while driving across southern MN in about 1988 or \u201889, I heard a song in the distance on an AM station out of Long Prairie; it was late at night, and the music was slightly garbled and distorted by atmospherics, but I heard a Lightfoot song from the era that sounded, in the distance, almost like a Big Country song, with what sounded like big, skirling guitars keening in the background almost like bagpipes. It was one of those moments you only<\/em> got on AM radio; a little four minute ephemeral snippet of beauty that disappeared (seemingly) never to return again. Or so it seems, having looked for close to 20 years for the song\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As often happens with these things, I didn’t have to wait long for a completely unbidden answer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Gordon Lightfoot song with \u201cbig guitars skirling like bagpipes\u201d sounds like the title track of the 1983 album \u201cSalute\u201d. The album has since been released on CD.<\/p>\n

Dave, Melbourne, Australia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So I went out, and found the song.\u00a0 Dave in Melbourne was right; “Salute” was the song.\u00a0 Mystery solved.<\/p>\n

And on the one hand, it’s cool; I got a 20-year-old mystery solved with less effort than it took to think about it.<\/p>\n

And on the other, I thought “kids today are missing something”.<\/p>\n

Today, with the internet, anyone can see or listen to anything, pretty much anywhere.\u00a0 Most questions can get answered in less time than it takes to formulate the question.\u00a0 The world has gotten very, very small.\u00a0 And I have no idea what it’s like to be a kid from age, say, seven through 17, today with access to pretty much everything, everywhere, I sometimes wonder – what do kids wonder <\/em>about?<\/p>\n

One of the signal experiences of my early-mid teens, growing up three doors down from the edge of the earth in rural North Dakota, was getting hold of my first radio, and carefully tuning around the dial to find news, sports, music, accents, sounds…stuff<\/em> from places outside my hometown.\u00a0 Dialling the twitchy little radio very, very carefully, I heard about shootings in Minneapolis (via, what else, WCCO), concerts in Chicago (via WLS and WBBM), unintelligible Spanish nighttime show conversations from Juarez (XEROK), weather in Denver (on KOA), corruption scandals in Cincinnati (WLW), and above all, music.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And all of it was ephemeral – little audio shooting stars that flashed across the ether to my memory – and very, very\u00a0low-<\/em>fidelity, just the way God and Marconi intended radio to be.\u00a0 Everything was washed through a layer of AM frequency compression and clipping, mild (hopefully) static, and occasional atmospheric harmonics that made it seem that I was listening to transmissions from another planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which, it seemed sometimes, I was.<\/p>\n

And the sounds of music via AM radio – flat, mid-rangey, with a garnish of high-end fuzz and the occasional wave of high-pitched static washing across it like a bright\u00a0audio searchlight in the dark – are some of the most intense memories I have of those years.\u00a0 I associate it with almost everything from those years; discovering the world, friendship, love, boredom, antsiness, intoxication, loss, late-night burrito missions, leaving; for every one of those, I can recall a night in my room or in a car out on some prairie road, tuned in to WLS or KFYR or KOA, with some song in the background, more poignant and memorable for being scratchy and distorted, as much a part of the memory of the situation as the situation itself.<\/p>\n

And for a kid who was 19 before he saw a city bigger than Fargo, it was the stuff that launched a thousand dreams.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’m being provincial or curmudgeonly – I’ll cop to it –\u00a0but I don’t see that happening with an IPod.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago, I wrote a post about Gordon Lightfoot.\u00a0 As the comment thread wound on, I noted a moment in my past: So there\u2019s a Lightfoot mystery; while driving across southern MN in about 1988 or \u201889, I heard a song in the distance on an AM station out of Long Prairie; it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}