In-Flight Entertainment

An audio flashback to the (or at least my) golden age of air travel

“There’s no place like home for the holidays,” goes the old Perry Como Christmas chestnut. And while I’ll concede that the song has a point — especially since staying home for the holidays involves significantly less hassle than traveling — very few of my childhood Christmases were spent at home, and I kind of preferred it that way.

Sure, we had a couple of nice Christmases in Ann Arbor, but the ones I spent visiting family in Los Angeles, New York City, Milwaukee and even Tuscaloosa, Alabama had a special magic to them, in part because we had to get on a plane to get there. Air travel in the 21st century may be a barely-endurable ritual of inconvenience, unpleasantness and low-level degradation, one that’s virtually guaranteed to further diminish your faith in humanity and corporate America alike; but back in the 1970s, there were few things I loved more than flying.

I was completely fascinated by the wide variety of aircraft we flew on, from creaky old Douglass propellor planes to the unimaginably luxurious Boeing 747s. But I also loved airports — the travel posters and brochures at the departure gates, the different airline logos (which also appeared on the “wings” pins the flight attendants handed out during the trip to young passengers like myself), the new car displays in the terminal walkways, the ever-churning baggage carousels, and even the occasional glimpse of a famous person. (One of my grandfathers introduced me to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the Milwaukee airport, and I once watched my other grandfather schmooze with both George Jessel and Dustin Hoffman before a flight from LAX to JFK.)

The air travel experience seemed so full of energy and optimism, and gave me a thrilling glimpse into what I saw as a romantic world of jet-set sophistication, a world which offered a plush and gleaming antithesis to the brown rice and browner corduroy of my 1970s college town existence.

In-flight music — specifically the vaguely exotic easy listening stuff they piped in through the audio system embedded in your armrest — painted a big part of this picture for me. I didn’t really care that much about music yet, but even in those days I responded powerfully to it; I vividly remember spending much of our December 1973 flight from Detroit Metro to LAX listening to the same 12 or 15 Christmas carols over and over through one of those plastic headsets with the white rubber ear tips, and spacing out blissfully to the sound of Bing Crosby singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” while watching our jet’s glinting silver wing slice through the clouds. From then on, the first thing I’d do upon boarding a cross-country flight was pull out the airline magazine from the seat pocket in front of me, and look for the pages that listed which songs were playing on which armrest channel.

This was, in retrospect, where my love of easy listening — and my associations of it with cocktails, vacations and various other “classy” forms of leisure — began. It would be another decade or so, however, before I realized that I’d been listening to the likes of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass and Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 during these flights, and a few more years after that before I’d cop publicly to actually liking (and even loving) that stuff. By the 1980s, when I was actually buying records and wearing my taste in music on my sleeves and lapels, most of these artists had been firmly lumped under the heading of “muzak,” the province of thrift shop bins and squaresville parents everywhere. Only, my parents had been into stuff like Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel when I was a kid; even they were too hip for the Tijuana Brass. But I wasn’t…

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Late last year, I bought a reel to reel tape deck as a reward to myself for surviving my brutal final months in North Carolina and my equally trying relocation to New York. I’d been wanting to investigate this arcane and obsolete musical format since the late 1990s, when a friend informed me (and subsequently demonstrated via a window-rattling playback of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”) that officially-released R2Rs of an album often sounded bigger and better than even first generation vinyl pressings, since R2R tapes didn’t require the kind of compression on the music that it took to keep vinyl from skipping. “They’re the closest thing you’ll get to what the artists heard when they were listening to their final mix in the studio,” he told me.

I was intrigued, but diving into a new format requires cash and commitment, and I’d only recently bought a vintage jukebox as it was. (I miss that gorgeous Wurlitzer 2800 every day, though at least we had a good 10 years together before circumstances forced me to sell it.) But nearly 25 years later, I felt ready to take the plunge…

Of course, by waiting a quarter of a century to do so, I’d completely missed the opportunity to snag vintage R2R tapes on the cheap. Most R2Rs of well-known rock and jazz titles are now highly prized by audiophiles, and thus way out of my financial league. Luckily, the easy listening stuff I fell in love with as a kid is still pretty affordable — and sounds fantastic on R2R — so my tape collection has thus far veered pretty heavily in that direction.

A few months back, I discovered that quite a few R2R tapes actually exist of complete three-hour music programs that were used for commercial airline flights of the 1960s and early ‘70s, playlists typically compiled in conjunction with one particular record label or another. My mind verily boggled at this discovery, but I was immediately put off by two factors: For one thing, these tapes are rare and thus generally pretty expensive; for another, all of the track listings I found for them were either way too heavy on the showtunes for my taste, or clearly trying too hard to offer “entertainment for the whole family”. The Four Tops doing “Mame” followed by Elmer Bernstein’s “Love Song from Mutiny on the Bounty” — or, say, Duke Ellington’s “Royal Garden Blues” followed by Sam the Sham’s “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” — just wasn’t the kind of smooth in-flight flashback I had in mind.

And then I saw an eBay listing for American Airlines Astrovision Popular Program No. 38. “Thrill to American Airlines’ 64 Selection Popular Stereo Cruise-A-Long,” the cover read; and once I realized that all 64 of these tracks were compiled from the A&M Records catalog of the mid/late 1960s — a label whose music of this period truly captures the easy essence of idealized air travel for me — I was thrilled, indeed.

Okay, so I could do without the Jimmie Rodgers cuts, and I could definitely do without hearing anything from Fiddler on the Roof ever again. But this tape was so otherwise overflowing with easy gold — Burt Bacharach! Herb Alpert! Brasil 66! Antonio Carlos Jobim! Wes Montgomery! — that I just had to have it. The price was higher than I would have preferred, but after a few friendly email exchanges the seller offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse.

I went ahead and bought it, and then completely forgot about the transaction as life provided a variety of other distractions. The tape arrived just a couple of days after the sad and sudden passing of my cat buddy Otis (huge thanks again to everyone who helped defray the final costs of his care by purchasing a paid Jagged Time Lapse subscription), landing on my doorstep at a moment when I was feeling completely heartbroken and thoroughly exhausted by grief.

And, as the fates would have it, American Airlines Astrovision Popular Program No. 38 turned out to be the medicine I absolutely needed — a veritable time-trip back to the musical womb, with nearly every song delivering a restorative sense of warmth and comfort and joy. Instead of killing an entire bottle of wine and/or an entire pizza, as I might have once done in such a sorrowful mood, I just laid back on my couch, closed my eyes and soaked up the music, imagining I was watching the sun set over the horizon from my oval window in the sky. (I briefly also tried to imagine Otis sitting on my lap, then remembered that the poor little guy fucking hated to fly.) And when my in-flight program finally ended, I felt renewed and content in a way that would have seemed utterly unimaginable just a few hours before.

While I can’t promise that this music will have the same effect on you — and while Spotify streaming certainly lacks the warmth and presence of a reel to reel tape — I’ve compiled a playlist for my JTL readers with the same exact running order as American Airlines Astrovision Popular Program No. 38. Well, almost; the Baja Marimba Band’s Watch Out LP is missing from Spotify, for some reason, so I substituted versions of those tracks by Astrud Gilberto, Arthur Lyman, Al Hirt and other period-appropriate artists…

I offer this playlist up in thanks for your support and patience this past week and a half; starting today, we’ll be getting back to a more regular schedule here at JTL. Now, if you’ll just step this way to the gate, your flight is ready to board…

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