When I say that I had “pre-musical” years, I mean that in the same way as “pre-sexual.” Suddenly, your body reacts when looking at someone you fancy, and it’s not unlike the shock of your heart swelling when you hear a song that isn’t merely nice, but for the first time really speaks to you. For me, these two not-so-distinct events happened at roughly the same period of life–age 10 or 11. And I’m sure a great study or essay could be done on this parallel, but this isn’t it.
So pre-musical for me was mostly the Carpenters and John Denver, these pleasant sounds that just floated from my Mom’s 8-track while she cleaned the house. I’ll always equate Denver’s masterpiece, Back Home Again, with the honeyed light glancing off a freshly-Pledged, perfectly round coffee table while I lounged in the front room of our house on Orchard Road. Both the music and the light were pretty in the same way I must have thought girls were at the time–hazily, theoretically pretty. There was, I’d admit, a nice smell, a merging of colors that soothed the eye–but I wasn’t exactly passionate about it. My attraction was not yet tempered by intent.
Now, I’m not going to say that Simon and Garfunkel, a group some readers would quickly shelve alongside the artists already mentioned, came crashing into my life with the same sort of revelation that usually colors first encounters with, say, Black Flag. Rather, the songs on the duo’s final, grand album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, served as stepping stones between the merely-pleasant and the inspirational. Or, more simply, between my parents’ records and those that I would call my own. Or, more accurately, between my parents’ records and those of my older brother Brian. But whatever. What I’m trying to say is that these were the only songs I smuggled over the border between pre- and plain- adolescence.
Yes: during my handful of aborted, delinquent attempts at jogging, it was “The Boxer” pumping in the walkman, the first song I ever mixed into that dangerous cocktail of physical exertion, music, and thinking about girls not noticing me. Those gigantic drum-whacks after each “lie-la-lie” served my self-flagellating purposes very well. Meanwhile, “Keep the Customer Satisfied” was, by contrast, a silly, horn-laden thing that entertained a glimmer of hope. If you’ve never heard it, think of a slightly less brainless “Walking on Sunshine,” maybe. In my world, “Keep the Customer Satisfied” was the rousing soundtrack to the getting-the-girl montage. I spent an embarrassing amount of time constructing this montage in my mind. Me playing the guitar, her looking away (“One step ahead of the shoe-shine”); me dialing her number, her leaving the house (“two steps away from the county line”); me putting out a burning building with a shovel and dirt; her yawning. No matter: My pimply, sex-starved ass was just tryin’ to keep the customer satisfied.
Other, younger, more dour bands would soon rush in, groups I could more easily and fashionably claim as my own. But in a way, these later musical favorites reversed the order that Simon and Garfunkel had set up, a cart/horse, chicken/egg thing that seems pretty clear to me now: It’s the emotion that comes first, followed by the need for some type of music to voice it, hose it down, or exorcize it entirely. Ah, well. I guess things are just simpler when you’re pre-musical.
