I think almost everyone has had the experience of listening to a piece of music that transports you back to some other time, place, and experience. There are several such pieces that zap my brain like that, and I occasionally discover a new one. Here are three that get me every time:
Tommy (The Who): Takes me back to 1969, when I was consumed in learning about electronics. I spent many hours in a disused chicken shack that I'd converted into an electronics workshop, building lots of home-designed projects that occasionally worked. I couldn't afford to buy parts, so I scavenged them from old vacuum tube radios and televisions that local repair shops (remember them?) gave me. I played this album repeatedly, on an old Motorola stereo (vacuum tubes and electrodynamic speakers!) that I'd scavenged and repaired...
Kodachrome (Paul Simon): Takes me back to 1973, when I was attending U.S. Navy technical schools in Mare Island (Vallejo), California. On the weekends I jumped into my old beater of a car and cruised north to Yolo County, between Davis and Dixon, to go skydiving. I drove through miles and miles of fragrant fields, windows open and hot, humid air pouring in, and this song playing loud on my cassette deck. Happy times, and this song takes me right back there...
Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple) Takes me back to 1975, when I was a few short miles off the coast of South Vietnam, in the South China Sea, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces. The USS Long Beach (which I was stationed on) was part of a task force that was picking up refugees. We had many ARVN helicopters land on our aft deck, just barely big enough to hold one of the CH-47 Chinooks they were mainly coming out in. Each time one landed, a large working party (including me!) would push it over the side to make room for the next one. While we worked, someone had this song playing in a loop, very loud. It was an eerie scene – frantic refugees (men, women, and children), laden with valuables, running around terrified; multimillion dollar helicopters being tossed over the side like garbage; even more helicopters running out of fuel and landing close alongside (sometimes very close!); and a motley assortment of overloaded boats heading for us. Every ship in the large task force was experiencing similar things; together we took back over 25,000 refugees to the Phillipines. A few notes of that song and I'm right back there in that maelstrom...
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