Music of My Mind

Lester Bangs and his music collection

What do songs mean to us? Why do certain songs evoke sense memories so strongly? Where were you when you heard song X?

I was given a jolting reminder of how personal our experience of music can be watching the recent workshop production of "How to be a Rock Critic," the one-man show about Lester Bangs by my friends Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank.  During the show, Jensen-as-Bangs deejays maniacally through a vast catalogue of LPs from the Troggs to Iggy Pop while expressing trenchant, anarchic opinions and interweaving personal experiences from  journals.

One story in particular haunted me. In 1968, Bangs was living next door to a Hell's Angels hangout and witnessed the gang-rape of a woman -- to the strains of "I've Been Loving You Too Long" by Otis Redding (who had just died at 26 in a plane crash).

Bangs was haunted by his inability to intervene. And having heard the story told as the track plays, I am now never going to be able to hear that song again without associating it with that scenario.

Oddly enough, that same Redding song had previously evoked a very different kind of memory for me, personal and tender. It was used in a scene in the movie that was the very first set I ever visited, 1985's coming of age story Heaven Help Us starring Mary Stuart Masterson and Andrew McCarthy. (Song starts around the 1:00 mark)
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The movie's director, Michael Dinner, had himself been a musician (and now directs on Justified and Masters of Sex). I actually tracked down his album Tom Thumb The Dreamer, which was pretty good. (Doing a little research now, I was reminded that his studio band included Elton John's rhythm section and James Taylor sideman Waddy Wachtel.)


When I hear the song, I don't just think of the set visit, which was exciting for a 23 year old reporter, but also all the missed opportunities and heartbreak around it.  The movie, a sweet autobiographical piece originally called "Catholic Boys" by a memorable hippy 40 year old named Charles Purpura, never found its audience; my piece never got published; the magazine I'd written it for soon went out of business. (I did end up profiling Mary Stuart Masterson for New York Magazine when she starred in John Hughes' now-forgotten Some Kind of Wonderful.) 

And then the memory was evoked last year, when I saw the name Charles Purpura again. I was taking over a TV writing class at NYU, stepping in for a professor who had passed away suddenly, at the age of 48, four weeks into the semester. On the office door of the professor who recruited me, Charlie Rubin, was the nameplate, CHARLES PURPURA.

Turns out, after only two other produced credits -- A CBS Schoolbreak special that won him an Emmy and Humanitas award, and a disastrous Justine Bateman/Liam Neeson/Julia Roberts rocker 1988 movie called Satisfaction -- Purpura had settled in to teaching at NYU -- and passed away at 59, in 2005, but his nameplate is too embedded to remove.* [SEE POSTSCRIPT BELOW]

We all have our associations with songs as personal as these, where one opening verse can trigger a host of memories. Inspired by the Bangs show, which spends some time on the Van Morrison album Astral Weeks, I recently dug out Morrison's Moondance and listened to it start to finish -- something I never do any more in the age of iTunes and shuffle.

And I suddenly remembered that it had been my boss's repeated soundtrack when I was building sets as a teenager at a local regional theater. Hearing the less-radio-played tracks of the album brought me right back in a sense memory to that time.

Do you have a specific memory attached to a certain song? Write back in the comments!

Meanwhile, Glad Tidings to all.



POST SCRIPT: After this "went to press," Prof. Charlie Rubin emailed me the following update about the nameplate:

I kept Charlie's name there because he was Mark Dickerman's best friend, and when Mark went to Singapore to run Tisch Asia for two years I inherited Charlie's office which Mark had inherited after his best friend died.  Charlie was beloved by the students.  He had a sign on his door that read STUDENTS JUST ENTER/All Other Please Knock.  His son, Will, might be the most talented kid I've met here (well, tied with 2 others).  I kept Charlie's name on the door because of Mark, and because Will drops in on me now and then.  I also thought it was a respectful thing to do. 

Then last summer they repainted the Department and brought in new furniture and one thing they did was scrape Charlie P's name off, and when I came back, a CR nameplate was up instead.  I had thought that was part of the point in keeping CP there -- I'm well-enough known, and still here, I didn't need a nameplate.  I wanted Charlie's name there.