My Musical Epiphany

Stop laughing. I mean it.

I’d heard of them, of course. More times than I care to remember. I figured they were mythical or sensationalized, like G-spots or 100mpg engines. I’m a slow learner sometimes. Like, I just recently listened, really listened to Iggy’s Lust for Life. Hey, man, where’d you get that lotion? Of course I’ve had it in the ear before. That was kind of an epiphany, I suppose, not that I really learned anything from it, but it’s kind of amusing to picture that Royal Caribbean cruise commercial where the Modern Guys (and girls) are on the climbing wall – yeah, you’ve had it in the ear before.

But, I digress, as is my wont. I take my dog for a walk most mornings. Most of the time my 11 year old son comes along as well. One particular Friday, I decided to carry along my Walkman as well. See, it was my birthday and I’d been promised decent radio tunage. Let’s set the stage: it’s dark, really fucking (that’s for the Girls Who Say Fuck, may they rule forever) dark, the few lone lights shining are just absorbed by the blackness; it’s cool enough to make me wonder how long I can keep doing this in shorts and a t-shirt and there’s nobody around except me, Austin and Pawli. Austin knows how to keep a companionable silence. And Pawli just likes to sniff. So, I slip on my headphones and try to find the radio station in the dark. Did I mention that it’s really fucking dark??? The Hand of Fate takes mine and I roll that dial right into WSEV. And there’s the Epiphany: (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais. On the headphones, in the dark, with the dog and the boy. Midnight to six, man! It was absolutely perfect. Perfect for the darkness, perfect for my mood, perfect for walking the dog at an almost aerobic clip (something I’m sure Strummer never imagined). It’s a Perfect Musical Moment. And it’s my birthday. And it’s got nothing to do with nostalgia and longing for the Good Ole Days and Lost Youth.

I have a love/hate relationship with the radio. Remember that old Carpenters song? When I was young I’d listen to the radio, waiting for my favorite song…? That was me, with my green ball transistor, sitting on my orange fuzzy bedspread in Van Buren Missouri, trying to tune in John “Records” Landecker from far away WLS. May I never hear Stairway to Heaven again. And there were the College Commuting years, with Phil Williams and Worm Watch ’84. Too bad he was ripping off John Boy and Billy – when I heard them, I couldn’t listen to you anymore, Phil. No one likes a thief. Not that kind of thief anyway. There were the Silent Years, when I really didn’t listen to anything except my kids and sometimes my husband. As the millennium waned, I started tuning in again. And I found that the awful country station, that I’d been held hostage to for school closing/snow day information, had been reprogrammed to something called Today’s Best Mixx – for some reason, I’m picturing Sir Mix-a-lot here (Baby Got Back!) – and for a while, everything was groovy. The occasional Elvis, the Frolicking Fridays – enough bones thrown to keep me listening.

But, like the mythical hoop snake that feeds on itself, it couldn’t last long. Nothing spoils like success, right? The ads reached critical mass, the edge went out of the music (not that there was a lot, but for a while all that 80’s crap was fresh again), and the banter became infomercialized.

Now, I’m not a total idiot. I did graduate from college, even if it was a state school, and I managed one of them there Phi Beta Kappa keys while I was at it. I realize radio is not there for listeners; it’s there for advertisers. Like funerals aren’t for the dead, but for the living. But it’s symptomatic (there’s a big word for ya!) of the Great Bell Curve of Modern Culture: a handful of the incredibly excellent, a smattering of the astoundingly awful, and a vast seemingly limitless supply of the mindlessly mediocre. I won’t name names. Taste is in the eye of the beholder, or something like that. Everybody finds the stuff that speaks to them and I don’t mean that in the Son of Sam sense. Or maybe I do. Maybe Satan is telling America to listen to crap. Or maybe a whole lot of folks don’t mind listening to crap. And yes, I’m a perfectly ridiculous person with a size XXL ego and a big mouth who does own one Billy Joel album (it was a gift! from my mother!) but refuses to drown in the Sea of Bourgeoisie.


Anyway, what I found out, in one Perfect Musical Moment, out in the dark, out of the dark was this: I’m not dead yet. There’s lots of perfect moments, musical and otherwise, still to be had. And those moments are enough to keep me passing the open windows.


That’s pretty damn epiphanic, ain’t it?