Where in your life do most of your favorite songs suddenly become the soundtrack? Be it love, heartache, victory or challenge, the marks left by musical poets make their way through your system quicker than Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol or a fresh order of hot French fries smothered in chili and cheese.
A program director once explained to me that the average radio listener’s most memorable collection of tunes is connected to their final year in high school—a life event that requires no cash to get back to, no friends to quickly gather or gigantic hardcover books with wacky quotes from people you no longer know.
The thin scratches of a musical poets pencil or pen meeting a sheet of paper envelopes your imagination into seeing pictures a camera could never capture.
Footloose, Dirty Dancing, Grease and Saturday Night Fever revolutionized what we feel within the walls of being inside by means of taking subjects fed by negativity and turning it into a reason to dance. Seriously, peel away the tunes from each of these films and your nicely designed mask to which you hide behind will be delivered the 5 o’clock news.
Picture Walter Cronkite delivering these stories:
A Midwestern city was shattered today when school officials and religious leaders vigorously reinforced their plan to ban young adults from dancing. Students have chosen to protest what elected officials believe is the best way to keep their city free of unruly behavior. As one official said, “Dancing leads to bad things.” Which has been proven true three states south at Lake Lure where a young woman who became pregnant participated in an illegal abortion. In California today teenage drag racing is responsible for a bad crash on the cities concrete river bed. Reports from the Los Angeles Police Department say the Grease Lighting race reveals a growing problem within the ranks of rival high school gangs. And finally, was it suicide or accidental? Drug abuse and alcoholism could be the reason behind last night’s bridge death. A small group of young partygoers admitted to leaving their vehicles to play on the bridge when without notice one of them slipped falling several feet to the river below. Witnesses say he wasn’t dealing with life in a way of proper acceptance and elected to take a leap of faith.
Ouch!
Bruce Springsteen penned out:
One step up and two steps back.
It's the same thing night on night
Who's wrong, baby
Who's right?
Another fight and I slam the door on
Another battle in our dirty little war.
When I look at myself I
don't see the man I wanted to be
Somewhere along the line I
slipped off track
I'm caught movin' one step up
and two steps back.
Where does your soundtrack begin and does it have an ending? Within the avenues of music being readily available has your selection of sound evolved with you?
My senior year in high school can’t be documented because it was blanketed with the extremely early stages of a radio career. While the world was jamming to April Wine’s Say Hello and Joe Walsh’s Rocky Mountain Way, I was spinning Eddie Arnold, Charlie Pride and Faron Young on a local daytime station KOYN.
Instantly radio people are shot into a different zone which zaps our personal soundtracks completely off the map. Our life events are nothing more than radio stations. Ask me about Madonna and I’ll give you a 59 hour story about my journey south from Montana to Carolina to do radio. Throw on Culture Club and I instantly latch onto everything that was KOOK radio. Bob Seger got me in big trouble one night because I played two of his songs back to back and the program director was still up to hear it. Baby Got Back puts me at a radio station club appearance and I remember thinking, “Wow this would be a great tune for our station.”
If Springsteen once complained about having over 500 television channels but nothing to watch…I must admit the juke box in my heart barely has enough room to skip…sadly each tune played only invites radio memories. Boston’s More than a Feeling into Foreplay and Long Time bought me nearly 15 minutes to run outside the radio station to play Frisbee. Anything from Def Leppard shoots me back to the night I was on the air talking to listeners about Joe Elliot’s car accident. I can’t play Time from the Alan Parsons Project without crying because that was the night a caller with suicidal thoughts was linked to the police department and I kept playing the song on the air to calm them down.
Music isn’t just music; it’s the fuel that sends our engine down the highway. What makes it special rarely has anything to do with anyone but ourselves. After thirty years in radio I still reach for the knob to crank it up like a teenager. I sing so loud buzzards circle the car begging for me to drop. Discovering Jason Mraz, John Mayer, Beyounce, Pitbull and T-Pain makes everyday a summer day.
As for a soundtrack? Call me Mr. Conceited but my favorite tunes are still those that somehow slipped from my writing hand onto a clean sheet of notebook paper then somehow ended up being recorded but never shared. Which is why I try to convince so many to write; there’s something about the way we speak from the inside out that makes everything that surrounds us worth holding onto another day.
Your life will change the moment someone reads a piece of poetry back to you. Don’t judge their delivery…just breathe. Music begins with the right notes…those you take when life events become part of your legacy.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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