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Slave to the Traffic Light

by Alison King

Traffic lights change color more than once per day.

This may seem like an obvious statement, but when I was four years old I had a reality-smashing epiphany when I realized this simple truth.

During those four years of my young life I had spent many days riding in cars. And as I started to become conscious and look around I realized that our car stopped when a light in front of us turned red. There would often be a line of cars behind us at the stoplight, but usually it seemed like we were the first car in line. When I first noticed this, I thought, Wow. Aren't we lucky to always be the first car in line? I hate waiting in lines.

Eventually my thoughts strayed to the abstract, and I started wondering what it must be like to be one of those consistently unlucky drivers who always ends up at the back of the line. I tried to imagine myself in one of those cars, to sympathize with the plight of those not as fortunate as myself. For it seemed that my parents' car was truly blessed in the eyes of the great traffic deity in the sky.

Until one day, we pulled up at a traffic light. It was a day just like any other, with a red traffic light just like always, and once again we were the first car in line. But I was paying attention extra hard that day, trying to crack the mystery of our unbelievable driving luck, and I saw something different. Far ahead of us, another traffic light was visible. And while we were waiting for our light to change, that distant traffic light changed from green, to orange, to red, to green again.

Eureka.

At that moment I realized that traffic lights change all day long. At that same moment I also realized what a supreme idiot I was for not noticing this before; the answer had been right in front of me every time we pulled up to an intersection.

This was only the first of many head-slapping realizations in my life, but I think of traffic lights every time I have a stunning recognition that alters my perception of life as I know it.

These realizations grew less frequent as I got older, however. By the time I got to college, I thought that I was clean out of traffic light moments. Until I bought a used CD in the summer of 1992 that looked like an orange.

I was into collecting music at the time, making eclectic mix tapes of a hodgepodge of bands, the musical equivalent of patchwork quilts or collages. The texture of the music was important, the flow of the tape from one song to the next, the surface qualities of each song, some funny sounds here and there. I liked songs under two minutes because you could squeeze them onto the tail end of a tape. I was into lyrics and vocals. So when I brought home Picture of Nectar, I liked it right away. Apple toast bedheated furblanket rat - surreal, I thought. The Mango Song made it onto a few mix tapes.

Later that fall I encountered a recently re-released copy of Junta. This I really liked. My friends began to play it constantly. It fell into the background of everything we did, and gradually wove its way into my brain, a demented Dr. Seuss funhouse soundtrack. And then one day, the light changed.

Divided Sky started up, the same as always. Psychedelic Christmas jingle-bell opening. Just exactly the same as I'd heard it a thousand times before. But on this day, for some reason, I was paying attention, anticipating the chorus so I could sing along. Until I noticed something different.

I noticed the bass riff, a happy counterpoint to the twinkling piano, noodling away in the background, something I'd never heard before in all the hundreds of times the album was played in my presence. "Did you hear that?" I shouted, and started the song again, turning up the bass. Yes, this was the same Junta CD we'd always had. No, no one had dropped it into an alternate reality while we were at lunch (though this was a popular theory). Had that sound been there the whole time?

This epiphany set off a chain reaction. Soon we were re-listening to every song on Junta and coming up with equally amazing discoveries. What was the bass player doing on You Enjoy Myself? How was he interacting with the guitarist, or the keyboard player? What was going on in that ridiculous Fluffhead crescendo?

Traffic light moment: Why had I never listened to the *music* before? In the space of time it took for Mike Gordon to noodle down the frets of his bass and come back to meet the sleighbells of Divided Sky, the way I listened to music was transformed completely. I saw now that my previous understanding of music was only a fractional part of the whole. I stopped ignoring long instrumental stretches of music - hard to imagine that at one time I found them boring. (Another mental slap on the forehead.) In February of '93 I went to my first Phish show, which introduced me to Chapter Two of my new musical epiphany: what happens when musicians perform live together, and music is created on the fly? How do four people appear to share a brain for three hours of music, to make something greater than any of them could make alone, or in the studio?

Phish was an on-ramp for me into a new musical dimension, a lesson that you can listen to music without really listening to it - possibly my brightest traffic light of all. Because learning to listen to music in this way has taught me that if I don't pay attention, I may be missing other things in life. And maybe if I use that same high-powered attention I use when I listen to music, I'll discover even more mind-melting truths in the future.

I'm still usually the first car at a traffic light, by the way. But I'm happy to report that I understand why.

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