Page Two

It took me a couple of months to realize that I had largely stopped listening to music over the past few years. I have music on all the time, playing CDs or the radio when I work in the office, write at home, or for any number of situations where it provides background.

But I had stopped spending time just listening: performing no task other than concentrating on hearing music. I probably spend more time actually listening to music in my car than anywhere else.

This came home when I bought a car at the end of last year. It had been a long time since the tape player had worked in my old car, which meant tapes or plugging in the CD adapter were out. It was only the radio.

The new car has a CD player. Without realizing it, I found I was listening closely to album after album. Releases I had dismissed I now fell in love with, finally, by really listening, coming to get them. I bought lots of new CDs because I knew I would listen.

This brought me back to how much I used to love listening to the radio in the car when traveling. There were a number of years when I felt I was mostly in motion. Years I traveled back and forth across America in beat-to-crap cars – not romantic road warriors like those they drove in On the Road, but family cars from the New Jersey suburbs, usually the model that had been around the longest. Back then, even a tape deck was rare; it was just AM radio – not even FM. Good stations were hard to find when you were moving, and then their signals faded – in some cases almost immediately, mostly in less than a quarter of an hour.

My memory of driving across the continent was not the Neal Cassady archetype: James Dean clad in jeans and a T-shirt, fitting perfectly on his angled frame. The steering wheel in one hand, the foot pushing the gas down to the floor with force, the front seat area highlighted by glowing cigarettes, the tube radio and the sharp light of the panel in front of the driver. Instead, it is of me hunched over one steering wheel or another, slowly, bathed in a sickly yellow light, turning the dial, desperately looking for a station playing anything vaguely interesting. That's "turning" – this was before push-button scan and search was available.

Once a station was found, I'd relax; but often before the song was over, I was leaned forward again, turning as I searched.

The same songs played on most of the stations: a very limited selection, over and over. It was not just a matter of hearing them constantly on the same station; for the most part, stations across America shared the same limited playlist. Across New Jersey and Connecticut, you might hear Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" almost constantly as one station faded out, another faded in, and they were all playing the same songs. At the time, there were just not that many cars and trucks on the road in the hours between midnight and dawn. The car invariably was making some kind of serious noise. The texture of the night, the blackness of the sky, the emptiness of the road was completely dominated by the radio, by the bits and pieces of songs heard from a smorgasbord of stations as their signals grew weaker and stronger. Sometimes you'd encounter the same station 50 miles ahead as you came around a mountain range. The night was owned, the tone of the drive set, and the meaning made by what was playing on AM radio, with most stations we listened to featuring Top 40 rock/pop or country & western.

Most of the time, this sucked. But sometimes it was golden. I remember driving from Cleveland west and through the long night of the endlessly flat Kansas landscape as Van Morrison's "Domino" played again and again on different small stations with precious little range. On one drive up the East Coast, just as consistently, it was Harry Chapin's "Taxi." Especially if the station was playing the long version, I could sit back, drive, and relax, not having to be turning the knob in attempts to catch a listenable station.

My friend Phoeb (mentioned a couple of columns back in one of these music-and-life meditations) and I used to drive up and down the Palisades Parkway north of the George Washington Bridge with the car's radio set to five different stations. We were constantly battling, aggressively pushing buttons to switch stations. I wanted to listen to white-boy rock on WABC and its ilk, while she kept pushing the Harlem soul and rhythm & blues stations.

Aimlessly, endlessly driving was the main fixation of suburban life for a good while, and during that whole time AM radio dominated. You'd suffer through lousy songs and wait expectantly to hear the most exciting new ones again.

Usually, in that latter case, it meant you kept addictively switching the radio between stations, hoping to catch the new song playing. Obviously, this could be annoying to others who happened to be in the car and were not nearly as interested in hearing this song.

Our friend H was beautiful, smart, well-adjusted socially, and academically successful. She knew just as much about car engines (later working as a mechanic) as she did about fashion. As with a number of the young ladies my incredible dorky geek friends and myself found ourselves running with at this time, H was also unusually fond of and integrated into our community's juvenile delinquent community. These girls had long hung out with hoods: car freaks, would-be criminals, criminals, hustlers, and dedicated rock & rollers.

Guys older than us, with slicked-back hair, black leather jackets, and souped-up cars, were regularly pointed out to us with the comment "He used to be my boyfriend." In my case, this always made me very nervous. My friend Steve, who was dating H, never worried.

As a group, we once wandered into a pool hall in a sleazy part of a nearby town to kill time. H, in her most gentile bourgeois mode, looked like a naive first-day student teacher who had gotten lost on her way home from school. Except for her mouth, which had a life of its own. She began commenting on the different pool players critically, but with humor, and not unkindly. Still, her continued mocking got to them. Finally, a winner at one of the tables challenged H. She didn't even hustle, outside of pretending to be unfamiliar with the stick and asking a few questions about shooting.

She ran the ball all afternoon. Although she didn't look it, she had been hanging out in pool halls for years. Watching their faces was almost as pleasurable as admiring her skill.

One day, my friend B and I were driving around with H in some high-powered, much-admired car. She picked up two friends of hers: one gay, one straight, both looking not at all like the middle-class heroin dealers they were. They told stories all afternoon of delivering drugs to the stunning, expensive houses of doctors and lawyers who were their clients. Later, we picked up another friend: a bank teller who looked as straight as anyone could and used smack a couple of times a week, though she wasn't addicted. There was something suffocating about the stories; morally corrupt, they portrayed a hollowed-out world. Now, these women were friendly – we were with H – but they were very tough.

Unfortunately, John and Yoko's "Give Peace a Chance" had recently debuted on New York City radio. Both B and I were determined to figure out the words; we loved the chanted parts especially. So we wanted to hear it again and again.

This time, we were also on the Palisades Parkway. The women were talking of friends, of dealing, of romantic relationships, and a lot about drugs. B and I in the front seat, with H driving, kept constantly pushing buttons, going from station to station, looking for "Give Peace a Chance." The dealers, at the same time, in the same tone, suggested we stop changing stations and leave our hands off the radio. They froze the air and our hearts. Sometime later, we stopped to let one of them off. I got out of the car and rolled on the grass, not really moaning as much as trying to get over the deepest of dizzy spells, one that knocked me off the ground more than it filled my head.

Driving along, we were always discovering new songs and new groups. A couple of years later, driving through the South on my way to Texas, I started to hear my friend Phoeb's song everywhere. The first time I heard the song, I told her it sounded like every other song written in New York. The last time I saw her, I asked when her album was coming out and how it was going to do. In answer to the latter part of the question, she took me into the bathroom, flushing the toilet as she answered, "Down the crapper!!"

The record company didn't really promote it, but deejays discovered it. We had just headed out on a long, all-night drive when we heard "Poetry Man," by Phoebe Snow, on the radio for the first time. We thought, in light of her take on the situation, it had to be a fluke. Then we heard it again and again, all night long, on one little station after another. This, we knew, meant something. More important, many times that night, as we hit the beginning of the song, we settled in, knowing that for at least the next three minutes, there would be music we loved playing inside this car that was making its way though the night.