Boomer Music-The View from the Moving Train

As part of the pig in the python, that is as just another boomer passing through decades of the American experience, I am in a sense riding on a railroad from the cradle to the grave.  Bonus points will be awarded to you if you started humming either a 51-year-old James Taylor song or a 50-year-old Leo Kottke tune after reading that previous line. This is a post about boomer music occasioned by my morning rides taking my son to work.  I am referring to my 23-year-old son who has yet to obtain his license and who seems kind of adverse to ever getting one.

 

Each day when we head out, the lad plugs in his iPhone to the car stereo and begins a kind of carpool karaoke. Each day I am serenaded by old music from Pete Seger protest songs to Irish songs about the troubles to classic Appalachian ballads about ghosts, trains and mine disasters (and sometimes all three in one, e.g., the Miners’ Silver Ghost).  Sometimes in a moment of wild revelry my son picks a Pandora Channel called 60s Folk Radio.

 

60s Folk Radio is an odd mishmash of songs.  Songs playing there are from artists like, Tom Rush, Cat Stevens, Chad and Jeremy, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Donovan.  To me such content breaks down as 50% soft pop and 50% actual folk music.  But I am not writing to quibble about the rubric used by the overlords at Sirius XM who now own Pandora but something I have experienced often in recent years, the shift in narrative perspective due to my advancing age.

 

This morning Child’s Song by Tom Rush came on.  This is a song from Rush’s eponymous 1970 album.  The first time I heard Child’s Song I would have been fourteen. Fourteen yeah, I was fourteen with a burning desire to be moving out and moving on from my little farm town in southern New Jersey, mosquito filled hell swamp that it was.  (Sidenote: Child’s Song was written by Murray McLaughlin, a Canadian singer/songwriter who turned bush pilot when his concert profits ran a tad low). The lyrics and tone of the song are of conflict, sadness and regret.  Here are a couple of samples of the lyrics:

 

Goodbye momma goodbye to you too pa

Little sister you'll have to wait a while to come along

Goodbye to this house and all its memories

We just got too old to say we're wrong

 

Got to make one last trip to my bedroom

Guess I'll have to leave some stuff behind

It's funny how the same old crooked pictures

Just don't seem the same to me tonight

….

Thanks for all you done it may sound hollow

Thank you for the good times that we've known

But I must find my own road now to follow

You will all be welcome in my home

 

When I was fourteen, I sang along to each of these words with vigor.  I was constrained, I was repressed, I was dismissed, well at least in my mind I was.  So much angst and energy was bubbling up in me.  Amazing I did not blow out the screen door of that house on Mill Street and disappear. But those songs they fueled my passions and my wanderlust.  In a sense these songs were my sacred texts, my Bible as it were.  Eventually my aching to go would be fulfilled when I shuffled off to a university a third of the way across the country.

 

That was then.  Now, I am sixty-five for butt a few more weeks. The wood frame house I grew up in has long been sold. John C. and Dorothy Todd are long dead. Twenty-seven years have passed since I made that last trip to that bedroom.  My last trip to that room was on a cold weekend in winter. Mom had died and we were cleaning out the house to sell it. Somehow as I walked over the vinyl flooring listening for each of the creaky boards whose locations I knew by heart, the house seemed 100 times smaller than when I was growing up. On that sad weekend the paint seemed more faded than I ever remembered and the house smelled of oil heat. I was forever gone from that place but there was still an aching inside of me.  For what I wasn’t sure.

 

We didn’t know at the time my wife’s sour stomach was not just indigestion.  Zantac wasn’t going to alleviate the morning sickness from the pregnancy which would result in our first son’s birth.

 

Now I pay a mortgage, the insurance and the utilities for a house that I share with my wife and adult children.  When I look at my life now, I remember the angsty pimple faced kid emerging from the passions of the turbulent sixties. He was a tall skinny goofy kid who roamed that place with a burning urge to be gone.  He made his father’s life hell with his consistently confrontational stances. Yeah, I was an ass to my folks.

 

But when the lyrics come on that say, “Thanks for all you done it may sound hollow,” and “I don't know how hard it is yet mamma when you realize you're growing old,” I get it.  I really get it. Part of me is glad that before he died, I got to say thank you to my dad for all that he did for me and all that he endured for me.  I can chuckle a little bit when I remember him bringing home the anonymous posts that were tacked to his office door at the plant after I got thrown out of high school for streaking. They were tasteful pictures of flashers and copies of the front-page news article from the local paper discussing the event.

 

A long time ago I was on the train where all the stops seemed to be ahead of where I was.  My ticket was a nonrefundable half price student fare good for one of the cheap seats. Where the train was going was not at my direction and most of the choices seemed to be in the control of other people, not me.  But now that journey is slowing down and the train will at some point in the next few years arrive at the station.  I am however riding in a better compartment.  I understand the urges I felt then and I appreciate the love, care and compassion my parents had for me.  Child’s Song from where I am now is not an anthem demanding departure and separation, but is rather a meditation on how life places us in family roles that invariably must be demanding but also quite necessary.  

 

Child’s Song is not the only tune that shows me how life has changed my perspective.  Uh, when the youngest sings at the top of his lungs the youth’s part from Cat Stevens’ Father and Son oh how the knowing melancholy seeps into my soul.  Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen is quaint now and no longer anthemic. Listening to Neil Young’s Old Man and Stephen Still’s 4 + 20 both remind me of the shift in perspective that aging has brought. 

 

Who knew the singing poets of the sixties were oft times capturing the seven ages of humanity without even being aware they were doing so?