I have been packing. Most people who have ever moved from anywhere to anywhere else in their adult lives know how much packing sucks. I, fool that I am, having spent five plus years in this here flat, had forgotten. Yes, it’s true that when I got home from the big long trip I did a lot of cleaning out of closets. Yes, it’s true that I’ve got a lot of receipts from the Brown Elephant, but still. I’ve got 35 boxes of books, and I’m not even done packing those.
Anyway, after I spent about ten hours clearing out and packing up my “office”, during the last hour of which I watched President Chimpy‘s travesty, I really really needed a drink. Initially, I told myself that when I got home I’d write something about the press conference, but really I can’t find any way to make it funny – can’t find a way, in fact, to make it anything other than mortifying on every conceivable level – so you’ll be happy to learn that this is not what I’m going to write about. Instead, I thought I’d share a moment.
After the wretched press conference, I went to Coz‘s open mic, which was great as always (thanks again for that Furs track). After the house band disbanded, the jukebox came on, as usual. I was finishing my drink when Red Rain came on, and I was suddenly transported back.
[insert ripply camera effect here]
Way back in the dim and misty (1986), when the world was young and so was I (14), I went with my mom to visit some friends and family in Germany. It was the summer before the So tour, but I didn’t know that at the time (though it was the next concert I saw, less than a month after we got home). Growing up in our house, it was pretty much classical music or nothing, and it was only since age 12 or so that I’d been introduced to anything else – primarily punk and underground stuff, as my friends were equal to me on the misfit level. At any rate, while I’d heard of him, Peter Gabriel wasn’t really well known to me. So there I was, at my mom’s friend’s house. It’s a killer three flat-ish building in Esslingen, which isn’t far from the Alps. My mom’s friend lived with her husband on the second floor, and her daughter Evi and her husband Habi (who were in their late 20s/early 30s) lived on the ground floor. Somehow I was given keys to their flat and allowed to hang out down there on my own. Being a teenager and therefore prone to brooding, and furthermore missing my boyfriend at home, whose denim jacket I wore no matter what the temperature that summer, I took the opportunity to rifle through Evi and Habi’s record collection. I decided pretty quickly that Kate Bush was awesome, and I was getting pretty fond of their old Harry Belafonte records, and then I came across the Peter Gabriel. Melting Face appealed to me instantly, particularly Family Snapshot, although I don’t know that I had a clue at the time what that song was about. Security was good too, but a little over my head, musically speaking. And then I put on So. I turned up the volume and wandered out into the garden, listening.
What I remember is the first time I felt music really wash over me – Mozart had made me laugh, and I always got the brooding of Beethoven and the melancholy of Brahms, but this was different. There was this completely transcendent, overwhelming and inexplicable feeling that everything would be okay somehow. That the pattern I was a part of was so much larger than me, just as the music I was hearing was so much bigger than the voice singing it. That while I couldn’t understand it, I could bathe in it. The sun was a solid, palpable thing on my skin. I understood the moment I was in as I understood me, on a level that I wouldn’t be able to put words to for years and years, that I still sometimes struggle to explicate. There I was, in the broad light of day, a grin on my face and tears rolling down my cheeks – and I had no idea what I was even listening to. But in that moment, something changed.
I am to this day a big proponent of politics in music. Not because of the pretentious fucks who get all preachy with it, but because I am a poster child for the ability of music to engage a growing mind in such matters. Before that day, I swear I never thought for even half a second about the politics or the history of the world around me. Before I heard Biko, I didn’t even know who he was. Until I figured that out, it never occurred to me that MLK by U2 was anything more than a beautiful lullaby. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I grew up in a cave or anything. I had the benefit of parents who’d lived through WWII and a rich background in literature – it just had never occurred to me that any of that could really touch me, that I was a part of it, and it of me.
When you’re young it’s easier in a lot of ways to cast the world in your own image – though that’s the trap as well, isn’t it? What music showed me was places to go, both inward and out, and things to read and discover, and I will never be able to give adequate thanks to the particular artists whose work initially inspired me. Music continues to inspire me, to spur me on, to this day. It’s both trite and facile to say that any given moment changed one’s life, but I can trace so much of who I am back to that moment that I’ve got to say it did. The music moved me. Eventually, the lyrics got me to think in new ways. And who knows where I would have wound up otherwise?
So, instead of bitching about the moments when I look at the world and see nothing but problems and ugliness and Chimpy’s stupid face, I thought I’d share a moment that transcended all the adolescent angst (and believe me, there was plenty), a moment whose memory still transcends. And Peter, whenever you’re in town, I’d still love to hang. I’ll buy.