`Memory Cedes Its Place to Analogy'

Save for its portentous, thesis-like subtitle (let’s blame it on the publisher), Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, by Geoffrey O’Brien, is an essential book for those who grew up in the era of rock, and for whom, for better or worse, it remains a muted echo in our lives. O’Brien’s credentials, high and low, classic and pop, are impeccable. He’s a poet, a movie and music critic, and editor-in-chief of The Library of America. Much of his prose defies classification (The Brower’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading), but his first published prose volume was Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. He’s a cultural gourmand with taste.

I bought and read O’Brien’s book when it was published three years ago, and ever since have dipped into it randomly the way I read a familiar book of poems. It amounts to a history of popular music from the listener’s perspective – a male listener born mid-century in the United States – and does not pretend to be musicology or “rock criticism.” It is to pop music what The Arcades Projects is to 19th-century Paris, sans Baudelaire and Benjamin’s Marxist gibberish. It is a core sample of an emblematic American life. Besides being an enthusiastic listener, O’Brien was blessed with a grandfather who had a Depression-era dance band, a father who was a Top 40 DJ, and a brother who was a rock drummer. Speaking of the music his parents listened to, O’Brien writes:

“Memory cedes its place to analogy: it is no longer a question of what happened but of what could well have happened. In the same way that pieces of their possible lives are depicted in old photographs and postcards – the town, the street, the cars, the entrance to the mine, the bridge under construction, Armistice Day at the local school – the rhythm and lyrics of their lives are incised on vinyl, waiting to be revived in the imagination of their descendants. It is the parallel world of song. There is a reality of sound that survives in the form of artifacts, that can be reconstructed week by week, session by session.”

By plumbing his own memory, O’Brien taps into a generation’s collective memory of music and more. Into the mid-seventies, I date the years according to books, of course, but also by albums and songs. Nothing evokes the past with such precision and vividness as music:

“Our record collections are libraries not only of lost sensations but of lost ideas, lost theories about the nature of things. A fragile metaphysic – the gossamer speculations of a stretched-out and mostly pleasurable afternoon – was sustained, perhaps provoked, by certain chord changes. Now all we have are the chord changes. We value them inordinately because they are connected to something even more valuable that we can’t quite have but can only approximate through this token, like the uniquely suggestive bit of driftwood carried home from Montauk so as to import the seaside to Second Avenue. The effect is all the more frustrating because most of these ideas and understandings were never spelled out in the first place. They hovered in the air around the record player. There was perhaps a smile of mute assent, mute because it did not seem necessary at the time to speak. Instead we communicated through our selection of tracks, like in the Godard movie where the quarreling lovers carry on a conversation by pointing to the titles of books.”

I remember with disturbing clarity the soundtrack of my first weeks as a college freshman in the fall of 1970. My roommate and I listened to Blonde on Blonde, Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits and Bitch’s Brew, Joe Cocker’s cover of “Cry Me a River,” George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, The Band’s Music from Big Pink and The Band, Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire, Smetana’s Má Vlast, Leoš Janáček’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the inevitable Beatles, Stones, Cream, Hendrix, among other things. By being eclectic, we were being conventional for the time. Several years ago, back in New York, I heard the Cocker song over the PA in a grocery and promptly told my former roommate, who has lived for almost 30 years in Denver. He still has the original 45 we listened to mailed me the garish pink cover.

Music, the most insubstantial of arts, lingers stubbornly in memory to soothe or torment us decades later. In O’Brien’s words, “Music drowns out sound, or drowns out self.” And, “Silence is what was just interrupted.”

And, even more memorably: “As death approaches, even the mention of Bach or Mozart can be a profound palliative, however brief the effect. To evoke even the idea of their music is to bring timelessness and freedom into a room defined by time and necessity.”