Soundtrack

Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25.

It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music and the events happen at a time when your brain is filling in a lot of important space with events that matter to you – and, given its evocative intensity, the music that’s going on at the time.

If I ever got to be a phenomenally wealthy mad scientist, ,one of my experiments would be to pay a family to raise their children around nothing but some absurd, archaic genre of music – say, John Philip Sousa marches – through their twenties, and measure to see how many events, first dances and first crushes and first kisses, they associated with marching music.

Anyway, about this time in 1985, my brain was getting stuffed with the consequences of my following up on my drunken promise to move to the Twin Cities that I’d made about a week earlier at a college homecoming dance. And for the next two weeks as I tried to fill in the many blanks of my half-baked “plan”, my still-growing brain drank in the music that was going on around me, on the radio, on my boom box, and (when I got to the Cities) on MTV, which I finally got to watch.

And to this day, I hear one of those songs, it brings it all back. I hear one of the songs burned into my cortext from that era on an overhead or the radio or at a bar, and I still smell the must of autumn building, of the harvest coming in as I worked my roofing and siding job, the feel of the wind as I drove my barely-roadworthy car to MInneapolis, the “exhilaration” of my first rush hour on my way to an interview.

The smell of fear, the feel of the tingle of hope, and the shiver of taking a huge leap.

I’ve had a theory that the period from 1977 to about 1986 was one of the best periods of all time for popular music.

It might be because it was a fact. Or it might be because it’s associated with that most searingly immediate period in life, adolescence through leaping out into the world.

Why choose?

At the risk of indulging in nostalgia, I’m going to indulge in some of the rewards of nostalgia.

17 thoughts on “Soundtrack

  1. Last night we had a 30 minute drive home. Other than the abbreviated version of Thriller, Jack FM was on a roll playing music from my 16-24 years. I was enjoying myself. My wife, OTOH, thought half the songs just played sucked. She’s 10 years older than me, so those songs came out when she wad outside your proposed window.
    Just another anecdote for you to plot on your data set.

  2. When I was in school, I blew my savings on a kickass stereo with kickass speakers for party time and kickass headphones for quiet hours. Long since gone.

    Now, I listen to music on my tiny, tinny cell phone. I’ve shopped the high-end stereos and they’re just not as good, the tweeters are limited by Dolby and the “woofers” don’t move enough air to be worthy of the name.

    The expert salesmen insist I am mistaken because the human ear can’t hear what I remember hearing and the technology today is so great It’s indistinguishable from live performance so shut up and buy it.

    No.

    I know all the words and can sing ( badly) the tune, but it’s just not the same. And I miss it.

  3. Big
    I’ve found some high end Pioneer, Onkyo, & Kenwood amps and Bose speakers from the mid 80s in thrift stores that deliver much better sound than the current tat in Best Buy.

  4. That period 1977-1986 is also the time when recorded music went from analog to digital/electronically recorded and generated. Music is a creative field anyway, and with all the new equipment and techniques coming available it was an intense time of experimentation. CDs came out. The echo effects pedal based on a looping analog recording tape was superseded (not replaced) by digital delay. Vacuum tubes became rare in stage amplifiers and audio equipment, though have die-hard adherents still. And now the most powerful music creation tool is computer software on a PC. So human age dependent cognitive prefrontal cortex development, memory pinning, AND technology driven for that particular era. Loaded with great music.

  5. While I was stationed in Okinawa, I bought my first adult stereo system. It was about 35% less than if I would have purchased it here in the states. I had saved almost my entire six months of pay, which was just over $900. Four channel was all the rage then and was going to “revolutionize” the sound industry, so that’s what I bought. I had a Sansui QRX 4500 tuner/amp, a pair of Bose 901 Series II speakers, a Dual turntable and a TEAC reel to reel tape recorder/player. When I got back to Grand Forks, I started to buy LPs at the PX, which were about $1.98 until 75 when they went up to $2.07. I still have the LPs, over 200 of them, with a variety of music, primarily the likes of Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, early Genesis and for some reason, probably because I liked one song on the album, Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. Funny though. A couple of years ago, I sold my entire stereo system to an audiophile for $800. He really wanted those Bose speakers. The TEAC reel to reel no longer worked, but he was confident that the could fix them. I had about twelve reels of my mix tapes that I threw in for him.

  6. Dolby was supposed to take out the hiss and pops from vinyl by cutting off all the sound above some arbitrary level. That’s why Mannheim Steamroller made expensive LPs – so we could hear those sounds. Dude, use your Diskwasher, leave the music alone.

  7. To Mitch’s point, the music of our youth truly does stay with us. Some friends are retired and living in Florida. When I visited them last Winter, they took me to a bar/restaurant to play “Singo,” which is Bingo but with songs. The host plays a clip, you recognize the song, you stamp your Singo card if you have the song title, winner gets a free drink.

    The place was PACKED with geezers. The bar was coining it, big time, playing songs of the 60’s and 70’s. Two different games – one for Country/Western and one for Rock – to give different crowds a chance to win. Everybody singing along, badly, uncaring, because Let’s Move Before They Raise The Fuckin Rent!!!

    Pro Tip – make sure you have a diverse team. I knew many of the WDJY songs but never listened to metal. You should have seen the former stoners’ eyes light up when Zeppelin came on.

    Extra bonus – the 20-something young ladies working as servers wore bell bottoms, sandals, tie-dyed shirts a size too small. Yeah, coining it, big time. Definitely going back this Winter.

  8. I would tend to agree about musical associations. My story involves my college summer break as a rent-a-guard for the graveyard shift at a special materials fabricating plant. My partner and I took turns doing the rounds and manning the guard house. Needless to say, manning the gate was an exercise in utter boredom. We kept the “progressive” rock radio station on the entire night trying to stay awake. As you would expect, their play list repeated several times over the eight hour shift. To this day my head returns to that guard house in the black of night when ever I hear “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc.

    As a humorous aside, the rent-a-guard agency was so desperate for bodies that, after a brief interview, they issued me a uniform along with a Smith and Wesson with it’s gun belt, ammunition and holster. No background check at all! My roommates were dumbfounded when I waltzed in exclaiming “look what I got!”

  9. TJ: all true, except for the tube amp thing. Marshall, Vox, Orange, Hiwatt, Mesa Boogie, some Music Man, most Fender, all tube amps.

  10. A few weeks ago I ran across a youtube of Buck Dharma and the rest of the current BOC lineup playing what looked like a wedding or other celebration, it was shot in the late teens. Dharma’s voice was still the same as it was back in the 70s.
    I guess that means that despite the band’s reputation, he lived a pretty clean life.

  11. I was born in 1970, I am a “Child of the 80s”. My favorite pop music is roughly from 82/83-89. I distinctly remember in 1986, when WLOL 99.5 did their “Top 100 hits of 1986” countdown at the end of the year, I wrote down every single one. I liked 86 of those 100 songs. I’m one of the rare people in my generation who wasn’t entranced by grunge or rap/hip hop. So other than a few random songs here and there, I really don’t care about 90s or later pop/rock

    My dad was born in 1942. His favorite music is the era of the soundtrack to American Graffiti (the first one). The Beatles? He couldn’t care less about them or anything following them.

  12. Big, you just did not spend enough money AND you were NOT looking at high-end equipment. High-priced maybe, but not high-end. I used to go to CES every year and spent at least day every time perusing Hi-Fi exhibits. If you have $240,000 to spend on an amp (you need two for stereo) you can put together a killer system. Of course, you’ll need a $500,000 pair (bargain!) speakers to go along with those amps. And yes, they DID sound fantastic. But the main thing is – a clear path from source to speakers – none of that Dolby and THX and other crap. Even volume is controlled electronically at the source – not a single pot in sight. And a DAC unit to translate digital into analog for amplification and speakerification. And if you want all analog, you can get a turntable that is larger than most dining room tables, to play those old dusty records. And yes, Virgina, there is a huge audible difference between tubes and transistors. I have Audiolab digital datasource (with built-in DAC) going through passive PS Audio pre-amp, feeding ancient Audio Research tube amp (made in Maple Grove) and onto ancient Spica speakers. As straight a path as possible without any coloration. BTW, I already replaced valves in the amp at least once and drivers in speakers as well. It beats my all digital tv surround sound setup by a mile, although I do have ancient MartinLogan electrostatics for main on it and they do help a lot to improve the sound. So yes, Hi-Fi exists, and it is glorious.

    So, while I agree with Mitch on association theme, I disagree with subsequent discussion that quality of sound is driven by association with crappy digital-age reproduction of sound waves. Unless human otolaringial physiology is mutating and we can no longer discern good from bad.

  13. jdm, I don’t doubt what you say, but it doesn’t apply to my budget. I’m recalling the days when a “stereo” consisted of tuner, turntable, “bookshelf” speakers which sat on the floor, possibly a tape deck, all on a young man’s budget. The days before CDs were invented and the best quality sound was master press vinyl played on a belt-drive platter with an Shure cartridge. The days before Dolby infected every step of the recording process, slicing off the brightness at the top of the glissandro. I can hear it in my mind, but not on my speakers.

    Or maybe it just seems that way. Maybe the summers weren’t really warmer, the sun wasn’t really brighter, the beer wasn’t really colder, the music wasn’t really better and the girls weren’t really sweeter. But that’s how I remember it all.

    And I miss it.

  14. I totally agree with you Mitch. For just one example, when I hear Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum, my wayback machine goes into hyperdrive. Too much to explain but it fits the dopamine receptors in puberty theory rather well.

  15. Bigman, I inherited a Bogen receiver (ca 1962) from my uncle. The Klipsch speakers I bought in the 80’s died, and the new ones I bought aren’t anywhere near as good.

    Now, I only use the rig for playing vinyl. My phone plugged into a Bose docking speaker sounds as good as I can reasonably expect Pandora to sound.

  16. Blade;
    I’ve been playing my iPhone play list on a Sonos system. It’s surprisingly good. In fact, even a couple of friends of mine that are pretty snobbish on sound systems, thought they sounded good.

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