My Soundtrack: The College Years

It just so happened that the transition from high school to college for me and my classmates paralleled the end-transition from the 1980s to the last decade of the millennium: from glam to grunge. The hair bands stopped teasing their bleach-blond tresses and let them tangle and return to their natural color. I contemplated attending class in my pajamas. I love how the world imitates my life.

This is not to say that as the 80s turned into the 90s, I caught up to the music of the age ... that didn't happen till the 2000s and I haven't gotten there yet.

The soundtrack of my college years was greatly influenced by my friends and my weekly attendance at various fraternity parties across campus. Though I surrounded myself with people who had similar backgrounds and experiences, the collection of music that came to that collaborative table could not have been more varied despite the fact that it consisted of at least 98% rock and 2% everything else. From one end of the group, we had an obsession with U2 & REM while another person built their collection around Men Without Hats and Pet Shop Boys. Add to it my 60s retro collection-slash-Bruce-slash some few 80s MTV gems and throw in a few (several) drunken frat parties blaring dance classics such as Joy and Pain and Baby Got Back.

The songs that take me back to those days, like Joy and Pain, each have their individual memories attached so that when I hear the songs, I can propel backwards to that moment, that person, that time. I actually only own one of these songs, relying otherwise on the radio to transport me randomly.

I am not a Led Zeppelin fan. Chalk it up to being inundated with Stairway to Heaven throughout most of my high school years. I have a teeth-clenching reaction to that song and will leap tall buildings to turn off a radio when I hear those first few notes. Given this extreme reaction, I expected that I disliked all of Led Zeppelin and never bothered to buy any of their records. Until TKE.

TKE, Tau Kappa Epsilon, was a favorite frat of mine at Knox. I had been involved with TKE since freshman year when I in my yellow VW Rabbit helped kidnap 8 naked pledges and a shoe. Did I mention the yellow VW Rabbit? ... that comfortably held 3?

TKE wasn't as famous for their parties as, say, the Phi Delts were, but I enjoyed them ever so much more; I attended as many as I could which, to tell the truth, was probably all of them. At a Phi Delt party, you would hear Joy and Pain and be crushed on the dance floor while trying to keep the beer in your cup. At a TKE party, you would hear Misty Mountain Hop as you strolled through the empty dance floor from one conversation to the next, upstairs through the various rooms and eventually settle into an Indian squat up on the top floor bobbing your head the entire time.

In my opinion, Misty Mountain Hop is the finest of the Led Zeppelin catalog. Yes, the bulk of this reason is because it takes me back to TKE. That's what art is. It takes you back to something you fondly remember because you spend all of your time moving forward and you need something to take you back every now and then.

When Misty Mountain Hop comes on the radio, I am back to being 20 years old with schoolgirl crushes and little responsibility (honestly, looking back, I could have taken a little more responsibility but that's not the kind of taking me back art does for me) and a Saturday night that could go all weekend. These days, by Saturday night and the weekend being half over, I'm already anticipating Monday but back then, Monday was a million beers away.

College wasn't all classes and frat parties. Often, my friends and I would congregate in a room or a suite (or an apartment Senior year) and talk, nurse beers, listen to someone's CDs. Two separate friends owned the Billy Joel Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2 CDs. Often, these CDs would be in the carousel.

Coming into college, I knew Billy Joel for Piano Man, a song I don't like much more than Stairway to Heaven for the same reasons, some poppy 80s tunes he wrote after Christie Brinkley actually fell in love with him (oh to be an unattractive, wealthy man), a few songs I like very much such as Pressure and Allentown and not much else.

A favorite song on these CDs for many of us was Captain Jack. While not my favorite on the CDs - that would be Scenes From an Italian Restaurant - this is the song that takes me back to those conversations and relaxations so long ago. I was told the song is about cocaine and the lyrics bear that out. Perhaps in college, that was more akin to our lives though none of us ever strolled down that road. But the nihilism that is suggested by heavy cocaine use isn't rare among late teens/early 20s kids and with or without the expensive habit, that nihilism is what always attracted me to the song and still makes me smile when I hear it now, when I am far less self-absorbed. I enjoy remembering the carefree parts of college most, I think. And if I were ever to have a kid, which is not in the plans but God has a funny sense of humor sometimes, I would insist s/he have a few of those years themselves.

The one song that I expect will always draw me back to college and I hope we play every time we reunite is Layla by Derek and the Dominoes.

Speaking of self-absorbed - we suspected, while in college and I think not entirely jokingly, that our group, self-titled Idiots, was being filmed as a reality show by aliens. Now, this seems like less of a leap these days in which 60% of the shows on TV are reality shows but back in 1992-1993, the only reality show on TV was MTV's The Real World and none of us really watched it ... television in college is both a luxury and a waste of time; I didn't own one and rarely watched until Senior year when Jen Clark moved into my room with her TV and all I remember watching is the Waco showdown.

But we were half-convinced in our narcissistic group-think that we were so fascinating, we must be television fodder to someone, somewhere. Thus, The Idiots. Thus, the theme music, Layla. Not the whole song, just the instrumental portion that is also in the Goodfellas scene where all the bodies of Jimmy Conway's former colleagues are turning up. I've always enjoyed that irony, by the way.

What that piece of music has always meant to me (besides dead mobsters in pink Cadillacs and freezer trucks) is friendship. I had some of the greatest friends in college and while there were plenty of bad times with them, I couldn't have had good times without them. Paraphrasing Aristotle, one cannot have the good without the bad and vice versa. Without bad, it is impossible to discern or define good and good relationships need bad times to be really and truly good. That pretty well sums up my college friendships and even after. And I cherish them more for it. It has been an honor to see these friends grow and learn and love and live. Layla reminds me of that every time I hear it and inevitably puts a smile on my face. And inevitably makes me sit up straighter and smooth my hair ? just in case the aliens are still watching.

Okay, so apparently that worked

Google has provided me a way to blog from work without being blocked at work (stealthy iGoogle, how I love you!)

Of course, I still have to worry about people walking up behind me (stupid cubicle, how I hate you!) so I can't exactly posit out the meaning of life but hey, beggars can't be choosers, now can they!

I will get back to the ultimate soundtrack, I swear.

My Soundtrack

Got to thinking about this as I finally acquiesced and purchased an album I have been dying to have on my iPod the last few months. Everybody has their own soundtrack, the songs that they truly, truly love and the songs that speak to them. Well here are mine:

in no particular order other than slightly chronological ...

"It's Raining Again"

My teenage years gorged themselves on MTV, I think I can claim having been in front of the television as it first kicked on with perhaps one of the most 80s sounding songs of the 80s: "Video Killed the Radio Star". I definitely remember spending my summers and afternoons after school with the VJs of channel 26, MTV's home on Tulsa cable. I was an air-guitar wonder, thrashing through years of great pop hits as face-painted singers ran through Indian bazaars on the tv screen.

When I hear Supertramp's "It's Raining Again", I am instantly transported back to the dark-ish living room of my childhood, propped up on elbows in front of the wildly colorful videos flashing on the screen less than three feet from my face. While I neither danced nor air guitar'd to this particular tune, it is the one that always brings me back to MTV before it became anything but Music Television.

"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)"

Bruce Springsteen was my first huge celebrity crush - another thing I owe to MTV. When I first saw the "Dancing in the Dark" video with him in a white t-shirt and pegged jeans, a guitar strapped around his beefy upper body and those beautiful dark curls held up from his face with that trend-setting red bandanna ... well, let's just say, I hit puberty at 99 miles per hour that very second.

Looking back, I never really liked the "Dancing in the Dark" song, nor very much on that seminal 80s album Born in the U.S.A. If there is a pattern to life, then my discovery of this hunk began in order for me to find Born To Run, a solid #2 or #3 on my top albums of all time. The story laid bare on that album is quintessential Bruce Springsteen, a man who came from totally normal and made sure he landed both feet in totally normal (with that one badly-placed sojourn into celebrity when he briefly married the briefly famous Julianne Phillips - her cameo in his video for "Glory Days" ruined that song for me).

"Rosalita" comes from his even earlier album, The Wild, The Innocent, The E-Street Shuffle. This is a song made for an air guitar hero such as myself. The video eventually run sporadically by MTV consisted solely of concert footage which was just fine by this lusty girl. I can't imagine they ran the entire song which clocks in at 7:05, far too long to hold the average viewer's attention but whatever version they showed, however long it played, it quickly soared to the number one spot in my Springsteen countdown. And I would be entirely remiss if I didn't mention the miracle that is Clarence Clemons, the saxophone god who wails through this entire song. Most bands use a saxophone as a bridge instrument, but Clarence Clemons can't wait that long to play.

"What a Piece of Work is Man"

This song helped me get extra credit in my 11th grade English class, thus boosting me up to an A for the semester. Using Shakespeare's speech from Hamlet, this is a lovely, lilting song on the Hair soundtrack immediately following the chaotic "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" (take weapons up and begin to kill/watch for long-gone armies driting home). The song doesn't follow the speech perfectly, it starts in the middle with What a piece of work is man/how noble in reason/how infitine in faculties/in form and moving/how express and admirable/in action how like an angel/in apprehension how like a god/the beauty of the world/the paragon of animals ... and then skips upward in the speech with I have of late/but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth ... then skips even more forward with a sentence fragment: this goodly frame/the earth seems to me a sterile promontory/this most excellent canopy/the air look you/this brave o'erhanging firmament/this majestical roof/fretted with golden fire/why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. With this chunk long-memorized (my mom has been playing that record my Whole life long), the order and rest of that speech earned me the highest extra credit in the class. See, music can teach you things, wonderous things.

There is so much more, truly, but I won't get to that just yet. Suffice it to say, these three take you through my childhood, for the most part. Later on, eventually, I will do my best to take you through the next phase.

Slumdog Millionaire

Yep, I'm back

I actually have something to blog about tonight/tomorrow morning/this morning.

I have just returned from seeing one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen ... I know the word-of-mouth on it has been phenomenal and I can't disagree. Not one little, teeny, tiny bit.

Slumdog Millionaire deserves, but I'm sure won't get, the Best Picture Oscar this year. Hands down. Not that I've seen any of the other choices or even know what they are for I am not nearly the devotee as my friend Mel. But I'm still 99% sure SDM must be the very best of them all.

The storyline you can get elsewhere so in short, it is a love story. Set in India - Mumbai, to be exact. Yes, that Mumbai.

The story starts near the end, as the best ones often do. There's no harm in letting the reader/viewer know that the main character has survived long enough to at least make it to the most interesting part of the entire tale. I am always very interested in the journey, sometimes moreso than the destination.

Jamal Malik is a contestant on India's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. His success on the show is surprising, given his upbringing: he and his older brother Salim are orphaned at a young age in the Mumbai slums where lives begin and end under a patchwork of tin roofs blocking the alleys and aisles from the sun. Jamal's ability to answer the increasingly difficult questions posed to him on the game show stem from the various experiences and lessons of his nomadic youth. Of course, it is assumed he is cheating but he has a compelling story for each answer he gives.

The love interest, Latika, is another orphan who falls in with the brothers after a massacre of the Muslims in their ghetto. The three young children run familiar paths past friends and neighbors and just ahead of the nightmares with bats and fire.

While Jamal becomes obsessed with Latika, Salim becomes jealous of the easy connection the two share. Life for the three of them is fraught with panicked separations and tearful reunions. Salim follows an unsurprising path in the hard world they inhabit while Jamal always seems to think his way in and out of the box.

You know ... just your typical love story. Set in India.

Where this movie breaks entirely away from the pack is in the filmmaking. This well-written gem is wonderfully directed and beautifully shot with a soundtrack that pulses to the beat of the running feet throughout several scenes (escape is a running theme). The actors, all three sets of them, are no sloths at their trade. Dev Patel as the adult Jamal has the perfect face for this character: mostly brooding with a rare, shy smile.

I expected quite a lot from the movie given the reviews I had heard and read and I am so relieved that I didn't end up with unrequited high hopes. This is a run-don't-walk kind of film that mere words cannot properly portray.

Don't grab your coat too quickly once the final scene goes still ... in Bollywood fashion, the end credits begin to roll as the cast dance to an Indian pop song in the middle of a train station. I heard a couple of snickers in the audience behind me, but you know what? I am of the opinion that all movies should end with a full cast ensemble song and dance. I would certainly see more movies in the theatre if that were the case.