Auld Times

Auld Lang Syne will fill the airwaves in a couple days. The song itself is part of the nostalgia it is intended to evoke. We resist updating the old-fashioned Scots lyrics because that is not the way we heard it in our youths. Besides, we get the gist of it as is.
 
We all know how a song can stimulate the memory of a special place, person or event. Most of us can experience that not just from a few but from hundreds of songs. There are several though (besides the Robert Burns ditty) that might come to my mind on New Year’s Eve but seldom anytime else. Oddly, most of the ones of that sort on my list I don’t even like very much, if at all. But they pop into my head as the clock runs out in the current year. A non-exhaustive sample:
 
In the Mood  performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My mom loved to dance (especially after a scotch and soda, but without one as well) and my dad wasn’t bad at it. (I did not inherit this trait: I dance like a wounded buffalo.) She had little trouble talking him into it, commonly in the living room in the presence of company. They had dated during WW2, so my mom’s most frequently (but non-exclusively) preferred dance was the jitterbug. Her record of choice was typically a Glenn Miller album, and In the Mood was the first track. She never skipped it. It is actually a pretty good number, but I heard it so many times growing up that I was sick of it as an adult – until recent years and only on New Year’s Eve. It transports me back to when my parents were half my current age and dancing in our living room.
 
In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. On a clear night it was visible from the ground. My dad thought this was the start of something important so he made a point of taking my sister, my mom, and I (and the dog for some reason) out to the driveway on a very clear night. I’m guessing a local radio station must have mentioned what time the satellite would pass overhead. It came and went on schedule. Just to impress upon us further the memory of this (I was not yet 5) my dad announced firmly, “OK, we’ve seen Sputnik.” In 1958 the novelty song The Purple People Eater  about a space alien playing rock’n’roll became a hit; at age 5 I loved it and played a 45 of it repeatedly. Even though this was months after the driveway viewing, the song and that event are tangled in my head somehow; I cannot think of one without the other. The song is silly and I seldom think of it except at the very end of a year.
 
Having a sister two years older was a huge advantage in matters of pop culture right up through high school. This was especially so because Sharon was pretty hip for her entire life. She was always in step with the times, which I by nature was not. Because of her, I nonetheless was introduced to social trends and artists (Bob Dylan, for instance) when they were still cutting edge. Left to myself I would have missed them until they were passé. This started early. Sharon (b. 1950) loved the Everly Brothers for a few years straddling 1960. I would play her 45s of them, and particularly liked the 1962 Crying in the Rain. Once again, it is not a song I play as an adult at any other time, but I might just do so on the 31^st. It reminds me of my sister. Hi Sharon.
 
Janis Joplin’s I Need a Man to Love is the second track on the Cheap Thrills album, which came out in 1968. I liked Janis from the get-go, and still do, but she grew on me more and more between 1968 and 1970. (Our psyches and tastes often evolve a lot between age 15 and 18 – mine did.) Initially, I Need a Man to Love was not one of my favorite tracks on the album. A prep school buddy named George (a troubled young man, but surprisingly insightful at times) told me to give it a deeper listen. He said it was undefensively soulful. I did. He was right. All of Janis evokes an extended era in my mind, but of course that track also reminds me of George. He died of HIV related illnesses two decades ago.
 
The Commodores – Easy. This is a song about which I had and have no strong feelings as a song. I neither like it nor dislike it. In the 70s I never played it on purpose but didn’t change the station if it came on the car radio either. I would react the same today, though one seldom hears this number anymore even on an oldies station. The reason it is memorable for me is that my 70s girlfriend Angela once sang it (with radio accompaniment) in the passenger seat of my car as we drove to NYC. I don’t know why. I didn’t interrupt or ask afterward. We all sometimes do things that are hard to explain. That memory sticks with me and makes the tune a possible New Year’s Eve play.
 
Time after Time by Cyndi Lauper. In 1984 I owned a property on Schoolhouse Lane with two small houses on it. I moved into the smaller cottage and rented out the other. It was the first real estate actually in my own name. The first home that is really yours tends to be special in a way that later ones are not, and I accordingly put a lot of work into it – not all at once but steadily. The grounds in particular got attention: I installed decorative 2-rail fencing, reworked the driveway, and planted blue spruce to delineate the northern boundary line. On the cottage itself I replaced exterior trim and repaired the back deck, which had seriously dry rotted in places. I recall Cyndi Lauper’s song playing on the radio while I worked on the deck; I cannot hear the song without remembering feeling at home in that home. Incidentally, the official video of that song was filmed nearby; the train station scene is in the NJ Transit train station in Morristown. Am I a Lauper fan? No, not really though I don’t dislike her either.

My old Schoolhouse Lane cottage

Frank Sinatra Fly Me to the Moon. A night club in the 1990s, where someone important to my life worked, closed every night playing this number on the sound system. The relationship that this song evokes would require a book rather than a paragraph to begin to describe. So let’s just call it intense rather than characterize it any other way here.
 
That’s one per decade (OK, two in the 1960s -- three counting when I most commonly heard In the Mood) up to the 21^st century. I’ll leave the next three for another blog someday – maybe.
 
Once again, not one of these is a favorite song on its own terms (though I do like the Joplin number). My general taste tends more to bluesier and/or harder rock. But that is not the point, is it? The point is a memory – maybe a good one, maybe a bad one, but a poignant one either way.
 
There are also entire genres of music with a nostalgia factor. I’ve grown to like much 1940s fare far more than I did when my parents played it on the stereo for instance. I see I’m not alone in that with groups such as the Postmodern Jukebox covering songs such as What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve, charted by Kay Kyser in 1947. In the case of people as young as that, they are nostalgic for an era they never experienced. True, I wasn’t around in the 40s either, but the music definitely was in the house when I grew up.
 
So, December 31 – on which I plan a quiet evening – I may not only hear Auld Lang Syne but some unfavorite yet special tunes from my youth. Perhaps also, some Kitty Kallen and Harry James. Then on January 1 to welcome the new year I’ll try something new.
 

Postmodern Jukebox – What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?