While we’re on the subject of the sixties. There is nothing you can say to me about this piece of music: nothing. When I hear it I am still sitting in the back of Robin Lasso’s mother’s car, and we are at the gas station, and she has gone in to pay or get us some Cokes or something. I’m actually, if you get down to it, feeling a bit grown up sitting in the car without her, because frankly I’m not very big. This song is playing on the car radio, and it feels impossibly exotic: nothing like this is ever playing at our house, and anyway our mother doesn’t like us to drink Coke.
Robin Lasso’s mother is a different kid of mother from anyone in my family: she doesn’t just drop us off when she takes us to the John F Kennedy pool, but actually comes into the area with us, wearing a bikini, and settles down with transistor and coolboxes and psychedelic beach towels, among all the other mothers who are like her, all in little scraps of bright-coloured cloth, for a morning of sunbathing while we kids swim. It’s just amazing. My mom just drops us off in the old station wagon, with a scarf around her head, and goes home to do painting or something.
This song transports me back instantaneously, I think because it exists outside every other reference point. No one ever plays it. No one reminisces about it or talks about it. Because you never hear it, it has never acquired any layers of additional information or association. It’s like the little apple I have that if you open it up smells just like my grandmother: if you opened it too often, it would run out. The same with this piece of music: it hits me in the solar plexus every time.
Although I can’t relate to this song in particular, I totally know what you mean.
I grew up in Malta where we had Italian TV that showed super-violent manga-type cartoons at 3 in the afternoon.
Thanks to YouTube (oh how I love YouTube) I managed to listen to the opening credits of a couple of them recently and it blew my head off. I was six years old again, highly innocent and painfully confused….I could almost feel the texture of the old sofa I would have been sitting on at the time.
And don’t get me started on smells…suffice to say that Ylang Ylang will forever take me back to meeting my wife!
Well said. Your post helps explain one of the things which makes criticism so difficult, especially when it’s being introduced to…I don’t know what to call them–laypeople or amateurs, I guess. If one were obliged to write a critical paragraph or two about this song, one wouldn’t have much good to say about it. But what does that matter in the face of, “I don’t care. I listened to this as a kid, going to the swimming pool”? Criticism is disarmed before that. One has to change mindsets to change minds.
Simon, yep, same thing. Though the amazing thing about this song, I think, is that no one else seems to know about it, and it never crops up, so it never gets stale… I mean, I only watched this YouTube video once; it’s a hex.
Richard, and that is one of the nicest things anyone’s said to me! I hope it does work, though I guess I’d say it depends on the piece of writing to create something in the reader’s mind which is as compelling as the “critical” thing. Which takes over, even if only imaginatively, as a legitimate response.
I hope in this case that does work, because of the fact that the music in question is SUCH a period piece! With no possible life outside that period. (Though I note that there were several videos. One of them was clearly much more recent – Paul Mauriat was older, and he wore a silvery Nehru-type jacket with a big white standup collar, and looked a bit like that guy from My Favourite Martian. And the audience was going wild. But there were no girl singers. And you see, even this little description is now getting in the way of Mrs Lasso’s car.
Thinking about it, isn’t all fiction – all literature – ultimately an act of criticism, in that sense?
Ah, the memories this song brings…. I was in Seattle the first time I heard this song in Jan of ’68. I was staying with friends whose daughter and I were madly in love with each other. In between semesters during my first year in college . . . it will always be magical to me cause, for me, it was a magical time.