"I said I'm falling..."

Lee in the Chrysalis, via David’s Vindaloo authorblog, ponders the question, “What song brings you the best memories?” A bit of a redundant question for me, as music has been THE cerebral map for where I’ve been: it is the essence of memory for me. Tomorrow I will not be able to tell you today’s breakfast, but even the shaggiest of shameless goofball tunes, I am more than likely to have an immediate flashback to place and time. Take for instance something as ridiculous as the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” which in no way should take up the slightest nano-space in anyone’s anatomy, but if ever that song (god forbid) pops up on an oldies station, there I am right back driving across the new St. Mary’s Hall campus, calling hell and damnation down on the infernal song for the first time. Santana’s “Incident at Neshabur” and I am back in Marilyn Green’s house in Jackson, dancing with the lithe Paula Duke and no, in this case, I am not calling down anything but one big swoon.

But, I realize the question is not about memories, but BEST memories. (Not that PD isn’t a best.) As with Lee, it’s a bit of a challenge to narrow things down, but I let my mind wander a bit, went you-tubing and found a few for different reasons, though they all in themselves seem to be addressing memory (and memoir) as their theme.

First up was Dylan with “Tangled up in Blue.” Slow learner that I am, Blood on the Tracks was my conversion album, easily a dozen years after most folks had taken him in. Friend Steph, as usual, the guru. Timeless man-consciousness wandering a life of her and not her and intimations of her, and with my own tangled up in Mary blue through all my tangle and the eventual forecasting of the blue woman in whom I am now (and I think always was, living through to the finding of her) tangled—well, of course this song is ripe for the pickings. I wanted Bobby singing the song himself, and if you go to this link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvBkbPEoeAI), you can see his Desire / Rolling Thunder Revue-ness laying it down, much as I did in 1976 at the Tres Leches Municipal Auditorium, through a magnificent 4 hour concert.

I was a tad shy about linking someone else’s cover (gadzooks! someone else covering the hymn to blue?), but I made a new friend this morning, Ms KT Tunstall, and actually found her chops quite good, after you get past the slight inanity of her take on Bobby himself. Girl has some serious cojones: I watched another round of Promethean audacity as she covered the Grand Diva Ms Chaka’s “Ain’t Nobody.” I commend that also to your souls.

Next up is Scorpio sister Joni’s Hejira, which owned my turntable for several months in 1976, back in my very cool apartment on Joliet, here in Tres Leches, Joni’s road meditations and sublime dark forest segueing into her gorgeous “Song for Sharon.” Memory incarnate, particularly, at the time, the excavations of the solace of solitude. I had still not entirely arrived in this world, as I think at times, Joni still has not yet: she was a most helpful guide.

The Mighty Van Morrison, perhaps more than anyone, should be in this mix, as his spiritual sojourn through the 80s crashed right in on my lonely and fearful agnosticism with his Lion’s roar. But, for the life of me, I could not tube my way to a decent vid of “Sweet Thing” or “Coney Island” or what have you. It was Van’s music that walked me through a terrifying time when I was fretting through the pre-decision to forge off into my own private practice in New Orleans. Fretting? I was terrified.

Finishing with the Sting-er and the Soul Cages album, his sublime meditation on his father and father’s death. And on Newcastle, his home town, for that matter. It is a magnificent album: I got to see it performed at the UNO arena in New Orleans, and shivered (as I always did at home) when I heard the wash that opens this beauty. I was birth-fatherless from age 5, and God-fatherless through years of wandering: this song helped round me back.