I’m not sure when this happened, but at some point my desire for current music evaporated. It was scary, because it was one of those things that made aging hard to deny. “All that racket sounds the same to me,” my mother used to say. “It’s too loud.” We’d all roll our eyes. Wherever she may be now, it’s her turn to roll the eyes because I do not know the difference between Cold Play and Green Day and Third Eye Blind, and I don’t really care. I think Beyonce is to music what leaf blowers are to horticulture, and I’m one of the only homos I know who doesn’t own anything by Madonna recorded later than 1987. Speaking of racket, since I’ve lived in Portland for 15 years now I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I still don’t know what the hell the big deal is about Nirvana.
My friend Luci and I got together for dinner last week. We went to a place in the neighborhood that has a wheelchair ramp leading to the front door. The ramp was installed the day after I fell out of the place and onto an unforgiving sidewalk at about one in the morning after drinking excessively with a couple of my brothers. Luci and I sat near the front. We ordered a pizza – this place has the best I’ve had in Portland, which isn’t saying much, but still – and got to talking about the nursing shortage, Facebook conversations, organizing a food co-op, a girl I’d gone to grade school with who could make her eyelids flutter like hummingbird wings and whose name was Caveat. A group of guys shot pool a few feet from our table, the burly, somewhat mannish woman who’d taken our order went outside for a smoke, someone at the bar laughed a loud, throaty laugh. The faint drone of other conversations was punctuated only by the clinking of ice cubes.
And then, the music.
In the summer of 1979, Teddy Pendegrass released a song called “Turn Out the Lights.” Three decades later, in a restaurant a block from my house, without the use of electronics or four-letter words or a line of designer jeans, that recording rearranged every single molecule in the building for five minutes and 56 seconds. Arranged above, or below, a beat that will not take no for an answer, a deep baritone voice, simple lyrics, strings and drums, that song says “we’ve got business to tend to, you and me,” in a way today’s technicians can only dream of. During the seduction last week, I looked around the restaurant and realized I was among some people who know the ins and outs of hedge fund management and some others who I’d bet have secret compartments in their wallets where they keep the bail money. I told Luci, rather crudely, about the effect that song had on me when it first saturated the air waves in Saint Louis when I was 13 years old. We sat quietly for a few minutes, Luci and I, listening. During the few minutes of that song, everything changed around us: the way people stood, their faces, the shots attempted on the pool table. Thinking back on it, it reminds me of the way people describe accidents: really quick according to the clock, but drawn out in other ways.
The thing about washing machines and cell phones is that when my parents bought appliances, they expected them to last, and they did. This summer I learned that it’s cheaper to buy a new refrigerator than to have the one you own repaired. Ditto with the cell phones. From what I’ve heard cell phones are obsolete the minute they’re purchased. After a year, they’re decrepit, prepped and ready for the landfill. Listening to Teddy Pendegrass sing about the lights last week, it occurred to me that the reason music from that time has staying power in a way that today’s crap doesn’t is because it was made to last. I could very well be in denial, but I don’t think my inability to appreciate today’s music is a symptom of aging: I think today’s music doesn’t enter my bloodstream the way older stuff does is because it’s as cheap and easily replaced as the rest of our symptoms.
One final thing about Teddy Pendegrass. Entering his name in a search engine yields very little. There was the accident in 1982 that left him paralyzed, the foundation he started, a few chronologies of his releases and pictures of his very, very hot body that were shot at concerts prior to 1982. Finally, I found an interview he’d done with a paper in Chicago, where a theater was about to stage his life story. In talking about his public persona before and since the accident, he said, “You can’t get me off the Internet.” At that point, I took his words to heart, shut the computer down and headed for what we used to call the record store, where I got him the old-fashioned way.
My friend Luci and I got together for dinner last week. We went to a place in the neighborhood that has a wheelchair ramp leading to the front door. The ramp was installed the day after I fell out of the place and onto an unforgiving sidewalk at about one in the morning after drinking excessively with a couple of my brothers. Luci and I sat near the front. We ordered a pizza – this place has the best I’ve had in Portland, which isn’t saying much, but still – and got to talking about the nursing shortage, Facebook conversations, organizing a food co-op, a girl I’d gone to grade school with who could make her eyelids flutter like hummingbird wings and whose name was Caveat. A group of guys shot pool a few feet from our table, the burly, somewhat mannish woman who’d taken our order went outside for a smoke, someone at the bar laughed a loud, throaty laugh. The faint drone of other conversations was punctuated only by the clinking of ice cubes.
And then, the music.
In the summer of 1979, Teddy Pendegrass released a song called “Turn Out the Lights.” Three decades later, in a restaurant a block from my house, without the use of electronics or four-letter words or a line of designer jeans, that recording rearranged every single molecule in the building for five minutes and 56 seconds. Arranged above, or below, a beat that will not take no for an answer, a deep baritone voice, simple lyrics, strings and drums, that song says “we’ve got business to tend to, you and me,” in a way today’s technicians can only dream of. During the seduction last week, I looked around the restaurant and realized I was among some people who know the ins and outs of hedge fund management and some others who I’d bet have secret compartments in their wallets where they keep the bail money. I told Luci, rather crudely, about the effect that song had on me when it first saturated the air waves in Saint Louis when I was 13 years old. We sat quietly for a few minutes, Luci and I, listening. During the few minutes of that song, everything changed around us: the way people stood, their faces, the shots attempted on the pool table. Thinking back on it, it reminds me of the way people describe accidents: really quick according to the clock, but drawn out in other ways.
The thing about washing machines and cell phones is that when my parents bought appliances, they expected them to last, and they did. This summer I learned that it’s cheaper to buy a new refrigerator than to have the one you own repaired. Ditto with the cell phones. From what I’ve heard cell phones are obsolete the minute they’re purchased. After a year, they’re decrepit, prepped and ready for the landfill. Listening to Teddy Pendegrass sing about the lights last week, it occurred to me that the reason music from that time has staying power in a way that today’s crap doesn’t is because it was made to last. I could very well be in denial, but I don’t think my inability to appreciate today’s music is a symptom of aging: I think today’s music doesn’t enter my bloodstream the way older stuff does is because it’s as cheap and easily replaced as the rest of our symptoms.
One final thing about Teddy Pendegrass. Entering his name in a search engine yields very little. There was the accident in 1982 that left him paralyzed, the foundation he started, a few chronologies of his releases and pictures of his very, very hot body that were shot at concerts prior to 1982. Finally, I found an interview he’d done with a paper in Chicago, where a theater was about to stage his life story. In talking about his public persona before and since the accident, he said, “You can’t get me off the Internet.” At that point, I took his words to heart, shut the computer down and headed for what we used to call the record store, where I got him the old-fashioned way.
