“I think the most lecherous song in our lifetimes is ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ by Chuck Berry,” Rodney says. “You’ve got this adult lusting after a sixteen-year-old, almost a predator. And the song exists as a pivot tune between innocent rock and roll—like ‘Rock Around the Clock’—and a kind of perverted sexual lasciviousness. The lyrics themselves are innocent of course, but every eighteen-year-old boy and sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl knows exactly what this dirty old man is talking about. ‘All the cats wanna
dance
with Sweet Little Sixteen’ is a metaphor of course. And we now know enough about the man who is Chuck Berry—I mean, the guy who later put a hidden camera in his bathroom is the guy who wrote ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ And of course all the chords have that flat seventh, which is diabolical sounding.”
Many people report that music triggers memories long ago buried, and this seems especially true of popular love songs. This may be a modern phenomenon, and from what we now know about the neurobiology of memory, it is a product of the way that human memory works. The prevailing view among memory theorists is that nearly every experience we’ve had is encoded in memory; the trick is getting it
out.
What you want in a retrieval cue—jargon for the thing that helps you pull a memory up from your brain—is something uniquely associated with a time or place or event.
Pop songs, because they are typically played over and over again on the radio for a short period of time, make ideal cues for this, as do smells. A song like the national anthem or “Happy Birthday” can certain trigger memories, but a song you haven’t heard since you were fourteen years old is more likely to trigger deep, buried memories.
“In that first moment when we’re sexually attracted or romantically attracted or both, whatever song is there in the background takes on an absolutely important meaning and that meaning will never ever vanish or fade,” Jonathan Berger says. “And I think what that is saying, is that there is always a long game. There’s always an ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t get it’ that persists all the way through life. I have this strong memory associated with Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold.’
“I was in high school and I was working that summer; my best friend and I had a job of delivering things to construction sites. I used to hide the brooms and shears behind the closet and jump into the car with him and we’d go off and look at girls and cruise. And that was the song. There is this absolutely sheer emotional teenage attachment to that song that’s never ever gone. The recording just drips with energy. She distorts the mic and it’s that beautiful warm analog distortion. And you can’t really tell what all the instruments are, they’re so distorted. And you just feel like you’re in the Apollo or something. So it’s an exciting track. And it revolves around love lost and broken love promises—all she’s left with is the ring he got her, the ‘band of gold.’ ”
I posed the question earlier of why evolution hit upon sound in general and music in particular to help us communicate deep emotions such as love. The answer lies in music’s ability to serve as an honest signal, to hold memories, and to move us neuro-chemically. Consider the question from another angle: What if evolution could discover a way that you could stick in your loved one’s thoughts even when you’re not around, creating a strong emotional tie in your absence that includes just the right mix of neurochemicals to promote feelings of comfort, fidelity, and trust, and raise your loved one’s mood all at the same time? Evolution would have to draw on existing structures through a series of minute, tiny adaptations. It would want to tap into a primitive motivational system if it could. It should play on a balance between fears of abandonment and comfort in togetherness, between love and lust, and it should stimulate the higher cognitive system with a sense of play, order and reorder, figure and reconfiguration. Music does all of this for us, and love songs imprint themselves in our brains like no others. They speak of our greatest human aspirations and loftiest qualities. They speak of setting aside our own ego and desires in the service of something great—of caring about someone or something more than we care about ourselves. Without the innate ability to have such thoughts, societies could not be built.
Each of us is the end product of thousands of years of a genetic arms race to determine which genes will survive. Genetic real estate is expensive—only those genes that help us in some way are likely to keep their chromosomal homes, otherwise they are crowded out.
Each of us is selected for finding babies cute, for being able to attract a mate and avoid predators, for finding fresh fruit tasty, for appreciating artistic representations of the world, and so on. Sex doesn’t intrinsically feel good—those of our ancestors who enjoyed it are those whose children lived to tell about it. We’re also selected to find abstract thought and imaginative thinking to be enticing, appealing. Recall Dawkins’s mantra: No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!
Love in all its various forms is ultimately about caring—caring so deeply about another person, group, idea, or place that we would be willing to sacrifice our own health, comfort, and even life for it. One hallmark of great art is the amount of care that we sense has gone into it. When people scoff at modern painting, their typical objection is that it looks as though the painter simply threw paint on the canvas
with no care
. We find ourselves drawn to art that looks as though the artist struggled with it, put a great deal of thought into it—
cared
about it. In visual art this can be because of the obvious time it takes to create an impressionistic or photorealistic painting. One of the most engaging art installations I’ve ever seen was by the artist Michael C. McMillen, who created, from tens of thousands of pieces, a 1950s suburban garage /workshop inside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The detail and care put into it is what was overwhelmingly impressive to me and viewers I stood alongside that day.
In music, many of us respond strongly to the caring of the musical artist for the medium of music—through the textural layerings of Pink Floyd or the Beatles, or the sheer technical skill of instrumentalists such as Keith Jarrett and Cannonball Adderley. In this book, I’ve endeavored to include examples from music all over the world. Although my main argument is that there are six kinds of songs that have shaped the history of human civilization, I am not so reductionist as to say that there are only six individual songs that matter; rather, I believe that the breadth of music and human musical expression is what is most impressive. Although the important functions of music can be described in these six categories, the specific ways that people from different musical cultures have found to make music are very diverse.
I co-taught a course at Stanford in 1991 called “Technology and Musical Aesthetics” with Bob Adams, a mechanical engineer friend. The course reviewed the history of musical instrument design from ancient Greek water-driven pipe organs to the newest digital synthesizers. In considering those technological advances that had had the greatest impact on music, Bob and I agreed on two as far and away more powerful and influential than any of the others. It wasn’t the discovery of equal temperament or of amplification, not the technology to make keyboards. First was music notation, which allowed for musical works to be preserved, shared, and remembered. The ancient Greeks had the oldest system we know of, and modern notation (more accurate and clearer) traces its development to five to eight hundred years ago.
Second was the innovation of recording, first on wax cylinders (the Edison phonograph), then on acetate and vinyl, later on tape, and now on CDs and digital files. But regardless of the format, I believe that recording was truly one of the most influential developments in the entire history of music making. The reason is that the act of recording fundamentally transformed the way that people thought about performances. A song could be performed only once, and that exact performance could be played back over and over again, theoretically an infinite number of times, and all around the world. The recording could be played in places the performer wasn’t, and even after the performer was no longer alive. More importantly, the recording introduced the idea of a “master performance,” a single canonical, iconic version of a song. Although groups like Phish, Dave Matthews Band, and the Grateful Dead made careers out of performing songs differently each time they play (something that is de rigueur in jazz), the standard way of thinking about popular music for the past fifty to a hundred years has been that a single “official” version of the song exists. This is the version that entire communities learn, and it results in a collective sharing of music on a truly unprecedented, global scale. And recordings have become their own distinct aesthetic objects, with a sound and auditory sensuality all their own. I’ve had a lifelong love affair with recordings, and I see them as an art form in themselves.
In describing the world in six songs, I’ve intentionally avoided becoming distracted by questions such as “What are the greatest/ most popular songs of all time?” or even—to me as a musician—the more interesting question of “What are the most
influential
songs of all time?” (They aren’t necessarily the same question of course.) The most influential song of all time, by definition, I think, would have been the first song that one of our ancestors heard another person sing or play, and that got stuck in his head, making him want to sing it back again through the perception-production system that evolution had endowed him with. In our own lifetime, the blues from the early 1900s—whatever the first blues song was is lost to history—may earn the prize, having spawned or at least influenced jazz, R&B, gospel, rock, metal, bluegrass, and country. Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire,
often regarded as among the first atonal pieces (1912) had an important impact on classical music, which in turn influenced later twentieth-century jazz, rock, and experimental music. But here, I’ve been more interested in the broad, long arc of musical history, going back tens of thousands of years, than the workings of the past century, although whenever I could I’ve tried to choose examples from the last century to illustrate points, in order for us to have some common ground.
My musical tastes were shaped by a childhood spent growing up in the Northern California of the 1960s. In my own idiosyncratic view, three contemporary, Western musical artists who represent the very peak of love songs are Alex de Grassi, Guy Clark, and Mike Scott.
There are certain musical events that changed the way I would hear for the rest of my life. The first time I heard the Beatles, the first time I heard a Cannonball Adderley solo, and the first time I heard the acoustic guitarist Alex de Grassi. Tom Wheeler wrote in
Guitar Player
magazine, the bible for serious guitarists, that Alex’s technique is “the kind that shoves fellow pickers to the cliff of decision: should I practice like a madman or chuck it altogether?”
Alex’s compositions and playing ability are extraordinary from a technical standpoint, but more importantly, they move me to tears of joy and sadness, and sometimes I can’t tell the difference. As “Another Shore” (from
The Water Garden
) plays, happiness, melancholy, tranquillity, exhilaration, awe, and appreciation fill me all at once. His compositions reinforce a conviction that music really is, as Tori Amos says, the voice of the universe. And it sometimes humbles me in seeming to be a voice that I can understand but not speak.
Often, listening to Alex’s records, I am overwhelmed by the realization that I know nothing about music at all. If I somehow get pulled out of my listener’s reverie and reclaim some of my self-awareness, something inside me says I will never be that good! I cannot imagine what I would need to do to bridge the gulf between Alex’s writing and mine; between his guitar playing and mine; in general, between his musicianship and mine. It’s an odd feeling because I think that I can imagine how the gulf between me and, say, Tom Petty or Neil Young could be bridged; I know I’ll never be as good as they are either, but the chasm at least seems bridgeable with a reasonable and understandable course. Paul Simon told me that a truly great artist in any medium is one whose influences and ideas are opaque to the audience, someone who seems to have tapped into something entirely different from the rest of us. And that is Alex. Alex cares deeply for music and for the guitar, and spends thousands of hours perfecting his composing and playing. The love shows.
I think of Guy Clark as a craftsman. What he does with melody and with lyrics are something to marvel at, because he does it with such
economy
. If you look at fine furniture, it’s not always the piece with the fancy carvings that you like, it’s something that’s just elegant because of the lines of it, the understated beauty, and that’s how I feel about “The Randall Knife”—and indeed his songs in general. Like a fine carpenter, Guy takes great care in constructing his songs, going over and over them until they’re
just right.
You can tell that he loves the process, that he loves songs, and this is reflected in the evident care he takes in all aspects of the song: the writing, the performance, even the recording.
“The Randall Knife” is a story about a father and a son. The father has died, and the son is talking about the death of the father, and in a sense the song symbolizes both the
death
of the relationship and the
birth
of the relationship. Obviously, there’s the
physical
death of the relationship as the father is no longer of this world, but you hear in the song a real transformation in the narrator’s perspective that leads you to believe that the relationship with his father is now only
beginning
.
My father had a Randall knife
My mother gave it to him
When he went off to World War II
To save us all from ruin
If you’ve ever held a Randall knife
Then you know my father well
If a better blade was ever made
It was probably forged in hell
My father was a good man
A lawyer by his trade
And only once did I ever see
Him misuse the blade
It almost cut his thumb off
When he took it for a tool
The knife was made for darker things
And you could not bend the rules
He let me take it camping once
On a Boy Scout jamboree
And I broke a half an inch off
Trying to stick it in a tree
I hid it from him for a while
But the knife and he were one
He put it in his bottom drawer
Without a hard word one
There it slept and there it stayed
For twenty some odd years
Sort of like Excalibur
Except waiting for a tear
My father died when I was forty
And I couldn’t find a way to cry
Not because I didn’t love him
Not because he didn’t try
I’d cried for every lesser thing
Whiskey, pain and beauty
But he deserved a better tear
And I was not quite ready
So we took his ashes out to sea
And poured ’em off the stern
And threw the roses in the wake
Of everything we’d learned
When we got back to the house
They asked me what I wanted
Not the lawbooks, not the watch
I need the thing he’s haunted
My hand burned for the Randall knife
There in the bottom drawer
And I found a tear for my father’s life
And all that it stood for