Something Is Found, Something Is Lost
By Mitch Berg
A while ago, I wrote a post about Gordon Lightfoot. As the comment thread wound on, I noted a moment in my past:
So there’s a Lightfoot mystery; while driving across southern MN in about 1988 or ‘89, 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 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…
As often happens with these things, I didn’t have to wait long for a completely unbidden answer:
The Gordon Lightfoot song with “big guitars skirling like bagpipes” sounds like the title track of the 1983 album “Salute”. The album has since been released on CD.
Dave, Melbourne, Australia.
So I went out, and found the song. Dave in Melbourne was right; “Salute” was the song. Mystery solved.
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.
And on the other, I thought “kids today are missing something”.
Today, with the internet, anyone can see or listen to anything, pretty much anywhere. Most questions can get answered in less time than it takes to formulate the question. The world has gotten very, very small. 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 about?
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 from places outside my hometown. 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.
And all of it was ephemeral – little audio shooting stars that flashed across the ether to my memory – and very, very low-fidelity, just the way God and Marconi intended radio to be. 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.
Which, it seemed sometimes, I was.
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 audio searchlight in the dark – are some of the most intense memories I have of those years. 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.
And for a kid who was 19 before he saw a city bigger than Fargo, it was the stuff that launched a thousand dreams.
Maybe I’m being provincial or curmudgeonly – I’ll cop to it – but I don’t see that happening with an IPod.
August 4th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Good post, Mitch. Van Morrison wrote about this 30 years ago:
I heard the voice of America
Callin’ on my wavelength
Tellin’ me to tune in on my radio
I heard the voice of America
Callin’ on my wavelength
Singin’ “Come back, baby
Come back
Come back, baby
Come back”
Van heard it coming over the Irish Sea, you heard it in North Dakota. I heard it in Wisconsin. I sometimes wonder if my kids are hearing it.
Of course, I write this on a computer that has iTunes and nearly 6000 songs of my choosing….
August 4th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Mitch wondered: “I sometimes wonder – what do kids wonder about?”
Whether porn star tits are real or fake. Also, how do you erase the History cache again?
August 4th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
AC, it’s what do KIDS wonder about, not you.
Oh, wait. . .
August 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I never understand nostalgia posts like this one. What do today’s kids have to remember?
Their first trip to Pirate Bay and being absolutely overwhelmed by the fact that they have to scroll for pages before finding a single band they’ve ever heard of before. Succumbing to peer pressure and downloading something everyone else is downloading that’s not on the local radio and then discovering it’s the greatest music you’ve ever heard and no, your parents have never heard of the band.
Or downloading something everyone else is downloading that’s not on the local radio and then discovering it’s the greatest music you’ve ever heard and discovering that yes, your parents have heard of Miles Davis.
Meeting a new friend and trading iPods with them for a day and having your world rocked by listening to what rocks someone else’s world.
I would think most teens would also remember the time they heard their dad wonder about a Gordon Lightfoot song and then downloaded some rare and long out of print Lightfoot albums for pop’s listening enjoyment.
Kids today won’t have any shortage of memories, but best of all they’ll have their own memories and not just the same memories as everyone else their age.
I don’t even own an iPod, and I’ve figured out that much about them.
August 4th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Your lucky you could get WLS.
I could only get KFAR 660 AM out of Fairbanks, and the 50 kilowatt Gospel Voice of the North KJNP (King Jesus North Pole) if I wanted to hear the “Far North Gospel Song and Hymn Time”.
Concerts weren’t even a remote possibility unless you wanted to fly outside to Seattle, although Savoy Brown and Kiss played at my highschool in 1974, and Chuck Berry made to Fairbanks in 77
August 4th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
As one of the Bands you’re supposed to hate but don’t, Everclear, stated on their bouncy AM Radio:
The VCR and the DVD
There wasn’t none of that crap back in 1970
We didn’t know about a World Wide Web
It was a whole different game being played back when I was a kid
Wanna get down in a cool way
Picture yourself on a beautiful day
Big bell bottoms and groovy long hair
Just walkin’ in style with a portable CD player
No, you would listen to the music on the AM radio
Yeah, you could hear the music on a AM radio
Radio impacted me in a big way as well. I didn’t grow up in a rural area by any means, but Radio was conduit, that could take you all over the world.
And I hear you – what holds wonderment for a child today, when answers to almost every question that can be asked are a Google search away.
What did our parents think about the information available to us, that was unavailable to them?
August 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I never understand nostalgia posts like this one. What do today’s kids have to remember?
You apparently don’t understand ’em, all right. I didn’t ask “what do they have to remember?”. It’s “are they missing something?”
The answer, to some degree, is “yes”; perhaps mysteries aren’t as inscrutable as they were when answers are a click away; ephemera aren’t as ephemeral; fleeting moments are preserved in the wayback machine. Which isn’t to say there aren’t mysteries, ephemera and mental shooting stars – they’re just different.
I have a hard time picturing a kid in North Dakota today feeling as isolated as I did thirty years ago, at least physically and socially – not that that’s a bad thing. But when you’re stuck on a desert island, seeing a ship in the distance means a lot more than if you live by docks in Duluth.
August 4th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Try growing up halfway between Des Moines and the Twin Cities eight miles from the nearest town with a library. Despite the internet my nephews and nieces feel just as isolated as I did. The internet doesn’t answer all questions, especially when you’re not sure what it is you don’t know.
Yes, I stayed up late at night with my hand on the dial trying to keep Little Rock’s KAAY (?) tuned in. Last winter I spent a similar amount of time trying to track down working feeds of the Timberwolves games online. At every stage of my life there was something I wanted that was just barely available.
As for the mystery of it all, that would be the improperly tagged songs you go nuts trying to figure out the artist for so you can find more of the same, or the stupid Japanese cartoon you love but can’t translate the name, making it impossible to find online.
I’m not knocking your nostalgia, I’m just remembering how little I cared about my dad’s nostalgia for stuff like lard toast and polka music. I do not feel particularly deprived because I’ve never had lard toast or learned to polka. And my dad never asked to hear what was on the transistor radio I had plugged into my ear as much as possible.
Kids live in their own world. We have ours. You remember distant radio stations, they remember trying to download manga on a dialup account.
August 4th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Here you go:
http://tinyurl.com/m9ncsf
And in the NYTimes no less!
August 4th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
The legend lives on from the Twin Cities down
To the small town they call Des Moines, Iowa
Nostalgia Gis said, is for wingnut brain-dead
Cause he hates lard toast and polka music.
August 4th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
You need another syllable in the last line, AC.
Change ‘lard toast’ to ‘lujtefisk’.
BTW, in less than one month I will be leaving my Volcano hideaway for a vacation on an island in Gitche Gumee, the Shining Big Sea Water. I tell you the Superior coast of Northern Wisconsin is America’s most neglected vacationland. Beautiful white sand beaches and 42 degree water is an interesting combination.
August 5th, 2009 at 12:15 am
I love and hate the North Shore, Terry. I go up there, but no matter how beautiful it is it always brings back memories that color the moment.
Back 30 years ago we did a week’s backpacking in Canada only to come out to the shore of Superior. We were a mess: it had been hot and humid all week, we’d bushwhacked much of the way scouting out a new trail, and the creeks we crossed were too slimy to bathe or wash in.
So there we come out near Thunder Bay but still far from civilization, hot, muddy, sweaty and stinky. It was in the 90s and humid.
And there lay Superior sparkling in all its pristine glory.
And 44 freaking degrees.
And our rides wouldn’t let us get into the cars without getting cleaned up.
That was the quickest and most painful bath I’ve ever taken.
August 5th, 2009 at 12:21 am
You remember scratch AM Radio from Minneapolis and Chicago and Denver. They’ll remember fighting orcs and having space battles with “buds” from there, and Amsterdam, and Melbourne but mostly on the weekends because of time zones, and chatting about life and music in between casting spells.
That’s about all I’ve figured out. It’ll be both scary and wonderful, because any of them who gives a damn will be able to go a lot farther in what they want to do, but there will be more people who won’t give a damn because they’ll just sit back and enjoy whatever is spoon fed to them.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I think the IPod and the Internet will have their own versions of this (go listen to Basque folk music from Spain online), but you’re right — there is nothing like listening to AM radio from far away. While AM music radio is all but gone (and listening to Art Bell or worse, Sports Talk, is boring since it’s also on every station), there’s still a few great moments. CBC out of Winnipeg and Saskatoon has music and WSM out of Nashville is still the best thing for a road trip in the dead of winter.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Southern Minnesota boys in the 60’s used the one-ear jack on the AM radio to secretly listen to K-double A-Y Little Rock for the GOOD music instead of Mom’s favorite on the Hi-Fi, “Patterns in Music” with John Deremus from KNXR in Rochester.
Even today, just the sound of his voice makes me sleepy.
Hey Terry and Nerdbert – look up the song “Colder by the Lake” it’s about weather in Duluth. A real chart-topper up there, you betcha.
And AC – grudging admission: that was actually pretty good.
.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Beautifully evocative post Mitch.
But growing up is growing up; details change, but the exploration is the same. Finding the world, finding yourself, figuring out your tastes; separating what you really like from what your friends like. Deciding how independent you dare to be, against how much you feel you should conform to be liked.
That doesn’t change.
Do kids have the potential to be smarter today as measured by access to facts? Maybe, maybe not. Wiser? Not so easily come by, as evidenced by the mistakes each generation makes in their lives, over and over and over.
August 5th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Terry wrote:
“BTW, in less than one month I will be leaving my Volcano hideaway for a vacation on an island in Gitche Gumee, the Shining Big Sea Water. I tell you the Superior coast of Northern Wisconsin is America’s most neglected vacationland. Beautiful white sand beaches and 42 degree water is an interesting combination. ”
So, Terry, are you flying in to the the continental US from Hawaii through Chicago, or Mpls? My thought, if the date for the next MOB is not carved in stone, maybe it could be moved back a couple of weeks to coincide with Terry’s visit to the great white north, white sand in this instance.
IF we are on Terry’s itinerary, and IF he cares about matching some faces to names, and IF that would match a date that is as good or better for the others who want to attend. Just thinking out loud…. but it would be a bonus to enable a regular commenter from far away to attend…just thinking….
August 5th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Great idea, Dog. And maybe we can get Rosenberg to throw another Concealed Carry picnic while Terr’s in town. Just for local flavor, you know, do it up right.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I will be spending all of my vacation in the Apostle Islands or visiting family in the Taylors Falls area, so no MOB party for me!
Wife & self will be attending the Minn State Fair sometime over Labor Day weekend. No idea of the date/time yet, but if the KTLK booth is operating I will stop by & introduce myself.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Well, don’t go there – we’ll be at the WWTC “AM1280 The Patriot” booth!
We’re on Dan Patch, about a block inside the main (Snelling) gate, across from the DFL booth. Stop by!
August 5th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Turns out I’ll be going to the State Fair on ‘Cheapskate Day, eg the Thursday before Labor Day.
I won’t be able to see NARN in action but I will still be able to devour many, many corndogs & pronto pups. I tend to spend a lot of time in the 4H building. I wasn’t raised on a farm, I hate gardening, but I like 4H. Weird, huh?
August 6th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Ahhhh, yes, the Apostle Islands, took the wife and kids there a few years back. Great camping and hiking, I didn’t run into any bears, and the sea caves were and the lighthouses… very nice… ended trip early due to forecast of 4′ to 5′ seas…