Beach Boys (from) Holland
Flashing back on the first album I ever bought
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapse readers! A hearty welcome to all you newcomers, and a sweat-drenched Presley-an “Thengyuhverymush” to all my paid subscribers. I really appreciate your continued support for this here thang!
Back when I first launched this Substack, I wrote the following:
For about five or six years now, I’ve also been toying with the idea of a musical memoir of my adolescence — a turbulent and confusing period in which my life and sanity were truly, to paraphrase Lou Reed, saved by rock and roll (and AM radio pop, and disco, and new wave, and heavy metal, etc.). I’ve already penned a few chapters for the book, but I need a kick in the ass to get going again, and I think launching this Substack will definitely give me one.
Jagged Time Lapse has definitely succeeded on that score. So far, this Substack has inspired me to put down chapters about my first used record store experience, the first concert I ever paid my own money to see, and why Jimmy Buffett’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was one of the first singles I ever bought, among others.
These pieces may take a slightly different shape whenever I’m finally ready and able to compile them into a book; but in the meantime, my paid subscribers get to witness (and hopefully enjoy) as I wrestle with this work-in-progress. And here’s the latest chapter, most recently teased in Jagged Time Lapse Poll #2…
It has often been said that we gravitate to the music we heard in our childhoods out of nostalgia. And it’s true, a song or album can indeed trigger comforting memories and associations from younger days, even if said song or album isn’t something you would have run out and bought back then, or would necessarily dig upon hearing it today for the first time.
I’ve compiled several Spotify setlists crammed with hundreds of pop hits and semi-hits from specific years in the second half of the 1970s — like this one from 1978 — knowing full well that some of the stuff I’ve included will make me gag whenever it comes up on shuffle. But I’ve put these playlists together with the specific purpose of transporting me back in time to the years where I’d spend most of my free time listening to AM radio, years where sitting through songs I didn’t like was part of the deal.
But I think there’s another reason that we are drawn back to (or sometimes never let go of) the music of our youth: We are never more sensitive to the power of music than when we are as children and adolescents. Before our ears were dulled and satiated by countless hours of listening, before our hearts were protected by multiple layers of self-imposed defenses, before our brains began intellectually processing what we were hearing, we were completely open to the visceral and emotional impact of the music itself. And many of us music lovers find ourselves returning decades later to the sounds that once blew us away, in hope (consciously or otherwise) of getting that same visceral/emotional “hit” off of it.