Zapruder Point
Consumer/Songwriter

1. Before I even knew who they were, The Mac had a foot in the door. Like every other American household in 1979, mine had a copy of Rumours. Alongside Rocky Mountain High and Bridge Over Troubled Water, it provided my pre-musical years a steady diet of pop.

2. A few years later, it was my money that got the seven inch of “Hold Me” onto the stereo. Better yet was the flipside, “Eyes of the World,” a Lindsey number with a classically unhinged solo at the end, and what I would later recognize as a trademark attention to production.

3. The following fall I developed my first crush–a hopelessly unrequited one for a “new girl” who quickly climbed the social ladder away from me. (I was also fat.) “Gypsy” was my song for her, the arpeggio rain of guitar notes after the last vocal washing me in exuberant sadness–just like the people dancing in the video.

4. “Real” music–you know, the kind they don’t play on the radio–came in high school and college, leaving The Mac in the dust of my memory. But then at a strange gig in Raleigh, when I was 22, this band The Ashley Stove closed with a cover of “Tusk.” They had a marching-band bass drum and a trumpet, and it was about the coolest thing ever.

5. Courtney Love claims to have modelled that third Hole record after “California pop.” That doesn’t make sense to me, but at least two of the songs off Whiskeytown’s Stranger’s Almanac sound extremely Rumours-influenced. I hear of an underground record where Camper Van Beethoven cover Tusk in its entirety. Mac-shaped patterns like this sprout up everywhere, and an abiding respect forms within me. I get Rumours again, and it’s a perfect object. (Except for “Oh Daddy.” That song’s terrible.)

6. Lindsey does that insane solo verion of “Big Love” when the Mac reunites in 1997. Watching it on video, the guy looks possessed. This is not a touchy-feely oldster reunion, I think. It’s something more substantive.

7. In Chicago, I get Tusk, and the genius is unleashed full-bloom into my conscience. Half the songs sound like reliably tuneful Mac, but then these crazy ranting looney jams pop up. These are strictly Lindsey’s doing and so I must eventually investigate Out of the Cradle, his then-most-recent solo album. It’s overlong and sort of a knob-twiddler’s dream, but some songs are amazing–including the single, “Countdown.”

8. Subsequent visits to Lindsey’s website and an interview in MOJO confirm my suspicion that gear-headedness was not only the problem with Cradle, but it threatens to devour any future recording projects, as well. It makes a certain amount of sense. When you’ve had a hand in one of the best-selling albums of all time, you have enough money to buy as much equipment as you could ever want–but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

9. So it was the most pleasant surprise at the tail-end of last year when I picked up Under the Skin, Lindsey Buckingham’s fourth solo album. Most songs here were recorded in hotel rooms while he was on tour with Fleetwood Mac–just guitar and vocals. The confessional lyrics meld perfectly with the naked simplicity of the music–he talks openly about the frightful responsibility of fatherhood, his murky place in music history, and the ache of regret generally. What I hear in it is a man struggling with the fact that stability can still shake like a boardwalk at high tide. The suite of eleven songs ultimately resolves in a wistful-yet-up note, but not without a few unnerving yelps and paranoid whispers along the way. And now, still in the first year of home ownership, I really appreciate that.

In college, I dated this hippie chick for a few weeks. Let me rephrase that. I dated this girl who hung out with a whole lot of hippies. Let me step back, try again. Heather was in this sort of “frat for hippies,” a hyper-inclusive student organization that was granted specific housing and whose members weren’t all that big into bathing. But my God, were they ever big into Poi Dog Pondering.

I think it’s because Poi Dog was a mostly acoustic band with like 25 people in it. In that way, they were similar to the Polyphonic Spree, only sonically soaking up the shadow of early R.E.M. rather than the Flaming Lips. (Camper Van Beethoven might be a good parallel, too, for the uninitiated. But anyway.) Organic instruments aside, with the Pondering clan, the hippie proof was strongest in the lyrical pudding. Check the forced, crack-o-dawn whimsy in this chorus: “Breakfast, good morning everybody / Sun’s up, have a slice of toast and jelly.” It’s giddy, it’s silly, it’s what less sensitive folks would call “gay.” Accordingly, my rock ‘n’ roll friends back home hated it.

But talk about perfect timing. Freshman year I privately mourned the idea that my mom was no longer part of my morning routine. But sophomore year, I was having breakfast with THESE FINE PEOPLE! They fed me cigarettes and loaned me Camille Paglia! They loved and accepted EVERYONE! To be honest, all the inclusiveness was suspect and creepy, but if they were a cult, it was a cult with a loving embrace, and “Toast and Jelly” was their Dream cast in Sound. And besides, what’s wrong with an overt blast of happiness? I’ll bet this was what Stipe was going for with “Shiny Happy People,” only he overshot the goal by three chords and two minutes. Sweet!

On Poi Dog’s debut, “Pulling Touch” directly follows “Toast and Jelly,” and its easy strum and boy/girl harmonies flow in direct opposition to the former’s group-chorus and jump rhythm. Accordingly, this song was (though Heather wouldn’t know it now or anything) “ours.” After all, I might have breakfasted with THE CULT, but I awoke to Heather alone. Still, “Pulling Touch” doesn’t score any lower on the lyrical crunch-o-meter, serving up the cloyingly sensual imagery of a hippie in love: “Are you the cup that I hold by the cheekbones? / I pull you close and I drink you up.” Can’t you just smell the incense? Can’t you FEEL the 10:30 class you’re blowing off to snuggle?

Wow, it sounds like I don’t like this music. (And for the record, I am being totally inaccurate in depicting Heather as any kind of “hippie.” She bathed frequently, and was totally cool, and so were her friends. So there.) Fact is, when either of these songs make their way to my headphones, I smile. In a vacuum, I’m sure this music wouldn’t fall into my heart as easily as it did under those circumstances. But that’s the point–there’s never a vacuum. The music grafts itself into the fabric of memory like patchouli infusing a sweater. (Sorry.) But seriously–that Poi Dog Pondering record was a part of her, and so of course I wanted it to be a part of me. And luckily, it still is.