We Walk Through the World
Flashing back to that brief moment when R.E.M. was my favorite band in the world
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
As I mentioned back when I launched this thing, one of my intentions with Jagged Time Lapse was to motivate me to get cracking on my musical-memoir-in-progress — and to share bits of it with my paid subscribers, whenever I have a new chapter that feels ready for an audience.
I don’t yet have a working title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence — a period of my life which coincided with some of the greatest music ever heard on AM (and FM) radio, as well as some of the absolute worst.
All the previous chapters I’ve completed for the book — like the one about why Nigel Olsson makes me think of Mormons and Chief Dan George, or the one about why Spyro Gyra’s “Morning Dance” reminds me of head lice, or the one about or the one about how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high — can be found in the Jagged Time Lapse archive, which also contains a ton of free reads on a wide variety of music-related subjects.
If you’d like to read these posts (and also have full access to the JTL archive), just five bucks a month or $50 a year will get you all the written “Dan Epstein content” you can handle, and will support my writing in the process. Sounds like the proverbial “win-win,” right? Plus, a paid JTL subscription gets you full access to the monthly CROSSED CHANNELS music podcast I’m doing with my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher. You can listen to a preview of our seventh episode below — our eighth will be along in July!
When I first conceived of this memoir project, I figured that it would begin in 1978, the year I began buying records, and end in early 1981, a time when I stopped caring so much about contemporary pop hits and started trying to catch up on all the punk and new wave records I’d been too young to appreciate (or even know about) back when they were originally released.
But playing archaeologist in my own brain has disinterred some profound earlier musical memories, like the connection between Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly,” acid casualties, cheap steak and The Guns of Navarone, and the recent news about R.E.M.’s brief “reunion” churned up what feels in retrospect like a pretty important musical memory from the end of high school. Do they belong in the same book? I’m not sure, and I’m likewise not sure that I’m psychologically ready to revisit enough high school memories to form a coherent bridge from early 1981 to the summer of 1984, when this following chapter takes place.
Still, writing it scratches the same itch as the previous chapters did for me, and it feels good to remind myself of how much I genuinely loved R.E.M. once upon a time. If you’ve dug my earlier writings along these lines, hopefully you’ll dig this one, as well…
It’s a Sunday morning in early June 1984, and I awake with my head spinning woozily — not from any overindulgence the previous night, but from the sheer accumulated intensity of the past week, which has included my graduation from high school.
Or maybe I’m still shaking off the hangover I accrued at my class’s graduation party, when I celebrated that milestone by getting stinking drunk on a bottle of gin that my older friend Jim slipped me as a graduation present. Helping me finish it was a girl from my class that I’d had an unrequited crush on for years, who then proceeded to make out with me on some Indiana sand dune until the sun came up in a particularly unkind fashion…
The days since then have been a complete blur, with me buzzing from ending my high school career on such an unabashed high note, but also trying to dig out of the avalanche of confused and heavy emotions that have hit me over the last week — a task made more difficult by the fact that our apartment has been filled with members of our family who’ve flown in from out of town to proudly bear witness to my receipt of a high school diploma. Much as I love my Grandpa Fred, it has been awkward sharing my small bedroom with him at a time when I desperately need some space and solitude; it’s especially awkward the evening of my graduation, when I try to slip a packet of condoms from out of my desk drawer and into my jacket pocket without him noticing. I feel guilty about wishing that he wasn’t staying in my room, and kind of sad knowing that I am no longer the little boy who was the apple of his eye for so many years.
Making my head swirl even more uneasily today is the fact that, unlike all of my graduating friends, I won’t be attending college this fall. Thanks to a winning combination of stubbornness and overconfidence, I aimed my college applications far higher than my good-but-in-no-way-exceptional grades and test scores had warranted, and was thus summarily rejected from every school I applied to.
At a large public high school, this wouldn’t be a big deal at all; but mine is a small private school filled with high achievers, one where “Where are you gonna apply?” has been a regular topic of conversation since halfway through sophomore year. By now, everyone knows where everyone else is going in September, and the only other kids in my class that aren’t heading straight to college are the two or three who’ve enlisted in the military. Everyone’s immediate future is effectively mapped out, except for mine, and come fall I’ll have to start the whole college application process over again.
I’m a good enough actor to deliver the line, “Actually, I’m taking the year off” with a convincing touch of devil-may-care insouciance to the various parents and younger students who ask me about my college plans during our school’s post-graduation reception, but I’m having a much harder time convincing myself that I’m not a failure. After about twenty or thirty of these conversations, Jim’s surreptitious gift of gin comes as especially welcome.