Songs That Rock

Casa d'Chernaik East
Glencoe, Illinois

Two weeks into the trip, I had to have Jon cut me off.

In some circles, record buying is a far more addictive habit than drugs, booze, sex, and politics all rolled into one. By the time we settled in the booth at the diner in Santa Cruz, I was beginning to sweat uncomfortably. I sat hunched nervously over a notebook, twitching occasionally and scribbling lists in a jagged scrawl that, upon inspection by a priest, was deemed paranoid psychotic. We were on our way to San Francisco, home to some of the better stocked, better run record stores in the country. The lists plotted out where my next fix was going to come from. If one source wasn't available, another surely was.

The trip has done nothing but make things worse. Early on, Jon introduced me to a game invented by our friend Rachel entitled simply "Songs That Rock". The rules of the game are thus: 1.) When it's his turn, the player selects a song that rocks from a CD or tape that is present. 2.) The player plays it for the others present. 3.) Repeat ad infinitum. It's an uncomplicated game and works fiendishly well for car trips, allowing different songs to shine in different locales. Old Parliament-Funkadelic, for example, is oddly effective for high-speed desert driving, while Soul Coughing seems to be most potent in the neon-stained air of more urban settings.

The game feeds the addiction in several very major ways. First and foremost, it makes the listener acutely aware of the power of an individual song. These are small fixes, and have the potential to be far more powerful than most extended pieces of improvisation, mostly for their brevity. At its best, a piece of a music will bring the listener whole into its world. A perfect song is a self-contained little package - a self-extracting archive - that contains everything: the world's rules, boundaries, customs, and all. It shows the world, but it doesn't explain it. After listening to it, one comes away with the feeling that he was, for the duration of the song, elsewhere. His minds blinks in the silence that follows.

Songs That Rocks has a built-in buffer for this. No matter how nimble, it will likely take the person in charge of the CD player at least half a minute to cue up the next song in the rotation. Sometimes, the silence just works its way into the game as a necessary part, as essential as the songs that surround it. And while a good song will retain its effectiveness forever, able to bring the listener to the same emotional space each time he listens, it sends the listener on a quest for more.

Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads is a rush, some powerful combination of flying and swimming, mountains and tsunamis washing over me in waves of clean light, tossing me and purifying me. Eric's Trip by Sonic Youth is a cyclone of noise, completely enveloping and oddly soothing; on top of it is the voice of self-awareness at its most lucid, managing to perfectly capture those moments when every bit of chaos seems to reveal itself as part of a greater order without losing their momentum. These are the worlds that I want to go back to, over and over and over. As far as I can tell, there's a universe without boundaries.

Playing the game, the listener becomes acutely aware of what he doesn't own and, therefore, worlds he can't get to yet. Much of the success of the game depends on the flow of songs and, more importantly, the mood: the right songs for the right moments. In one of our early match-ups, Jon realized that there was a song he wanted to play, wanted to hear, that would've been nearly perfect -- except for the fact that he only heard the song once in the background in a movie and didn't own a copy of it per se other than the brief taste of it that lingered somewhere in his neural receptors. The next place we stopped - Boulder - Jon went on a search for the song: Dry The Rain by the Beta Band.

Sure enough, it rocked. It became one of the most constantly played songs on the whole trip. After a few days, I was completely won over, and will likely try to track down my own copy of the song when Jon and I go our separate ways later this week. One is exposed to dozens of new songs. At least with Jon, whose sense of these worlds seems to be quite highly evolved, many of these songs have stuck: the sweetly morose After Hours by the Velvet Underground, Perfect Day by Lou Reed, the Passenger by Iggy Pop, Yellow Brick Road by Captain Beefheart. All of these songs are perfect.

By Santa Cruz, the connections between these songs were becoming apparent. I began a list. Starting with True Dreams of Wichita by Soul Coughing the list progressed further by association. One song linked to another. Everything seemed to fit into some larger system. All of the songs made me equal parts giddy and depressed, overrun with bittersweet melodrama. In the end, there were almost 20 songs on the list, and the list continues expanding each day. Each one of these songs makes me feel a very certain way. The more I listen to them, the more I want that feeling, that rush, to be my base-level of consciousness. I want to always feel like I'm in those worlds -- or, more precisely, that world.

In "Be Here Now", Baba Ram Dass/Richard Alpert explores the same dilemma from the perspective of a once devout proponent of psychedelic drugs. "I was aware that I didn't know enough to maintain these states of consciousness... I couldn't figure out how to socialize this thing about the new states of consciousness," he wrote. Ultimately, Dass/Alpert stumbled into a community of Buddhists and began to use their methods of consciousness expansion as a way to internalize the lessons of psychedelics. If one is to believe him, he was eventually able to access the same spaces allowed to him by chemicals.

I don't doubt him, but it's - quite frankly - not for me. At the same time, I sense that there might be a way to internalize these worlds. On the right day, it might be possible to close one's eyes and - with the right trigger - simply be in the same space. So far, though, I have no idea how to do it. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. The closest way I have to do it is to think of the refrain of Once In A Lifetime - "same as it ever was... same as it ever was... same as it ever was..." - and breathe deeply. I can almost get there, the taste on the tip of my tongue.

All of this smacks of utter wishy-washiness. After all, these are songs we're talking about, not mantras or anything with a proved holy significance. Are they more than just songs? Do they transcend the blips of 0s and 1s encoded on the discs? Are they really eternal? Or do they just become weighted down with subconscious associations and obviously loaded symbols? Is Songs That Rock a holy practice or just the last recourse of a hopeless junkie? What's the difference?

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. He greatly appreciates stock tips, mystic advice, fortunes from Bazooka Joe comics, visits from augurs, dream interpretations, and anything else that might be used to explain.