Karl Klockars

They’re past being in your head.
They’re in your soul.

For better or worse.

Circa Valentines Day, 2002.

Los Angeles, California. My first visit to LA in a long time, visiting friends I hadn’t seen for a few years. “Where do you want to go tonight?” Now, being an afficianado of the rock and the roll, I wanted to go right to the Sunset Strip. Is it stupid and touristy and a ripoff and past its prime and so on? Sure. But fuck it. I wanted to wander the streets where the Doors played, and hang out at all the bars I’ve seen in Guns N’ Roses videos for years. So into the car, and off. We’re cruising through the valley, coming up over the canyon, listening to KRock, and I’m ready to git down and shake my moneymaker. We come over a hill, turn on to sunset and what comes on the radio but Good Charlotte’s “The Anthem.” Noooo! This can’t be what I associate with music history, debauchery, fame and so on! Goddamnit. Every time that shit song comes on the radio it takes me to the Sunset Strip, California. Vice versa. Every time I wear a shirt I got at the Hustler store, I can’t help but avoid getting at least a couple bars in my head for a couple minutes. Damn the luck.

Circa November, 1995 or -6.

Somehow I ended up in a Ford Escort with my then-girlfriend, her twin sister, and her mom, tooling around the western suburbs of the greater chicagoland area. It was early in the christmas season, and I think we were on the way to some resale shop because one of the girls wanted to look for “those cool retro tshirts” that were all the rage. Flipping through the radio, end up on the station that was still calling itself alternative back then. Light snow is falling, some of the first flakes of the winter, sun is going down at all of 5pm, I’m probably full of fast food, I’ve got my first girlfriends hand in mine, I’m wearing some sort of stupid ski jacket or sweatshirt, and coming out of the radio is Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” followed by some tune by Spacehog – remember those guys?- that I can’t remember the name to, but the beginning goes oooh-ooh-ooh-ooooooo ooooh and so on. I can still hear those songs on the radio from time to time, but one of these days I’m going to put together a mix CD of mediocre pop-rock songs from the mid nineties that take me back to high school times. Regardless, something about those tunes are burnt into my head as november, grey, and cold. Which is nice.

Circa July, 1984.

Somewhere in Atlanta. A chicken restaurant I’ve never been to, nor will ever again. Road trip to florida to hang with the grandparents, cousins, and beach. One of the first casette tapes I ever bought with my own money-The Monkees. Daydream Believer still rocks. Oh, and I remember getting a Happy Meal that came in a plastic boat. I ate my fries and burger, jumped in the hotel pool, and swam till the stickers came off the side. I think I was upset about that, but yeah, that’s what the Monkees did for me. Hamburgers still came in styrofoam then. It’s weird things that stick with you.

Circa May, 1998.

It was one of those late nights you can only put together when you’re 18 or so. When drinking is still fun cuz it’s wrong, when anything goes because you don’t know your limits, when your friends aren’t dead and all is right in the world. An early-summer evening, warm, hazy, and getting quieter. I had moved back home from the city, so my friend Chris’s place was the place to be. His folks had moved up to Wisconsin, leaving him to take care of the house while they tried to sell it. Well, “take care of” ended up equalling “have everyone come over all the time, listen to terribly loud music and destroy yourselves, then walk home,” of course. Which was great, while it lasted. On this particular evening, the standard insanity had settled down or it had never happened at all. Maybe it was a Tuesday. That part is lost to me.

Somewhere around 4am, it was a lonely scene indeed. The only person around was this guy, Eric, who listened to a lot of death metal and smoked a lot of weed. Well, Eric was sitting around staring at the startup screen to a starwars playstation game, holding a handle of vodka. Something made him decide to reach over to the CD player and hit play. Pink Floyd’s “The Division Bell,” a little tune called “High Hopes” comes on and it bleeds 4am through pores. Slow, piano, with bells ringing in the distance, vocal harmonies…it’s a good tune, underrated in the lexicon that is Pink Floyd. It’s that late night early morning mix that’s the most valuable when you’re 18 and trying to prove to yourself that you control the world as opposed to the opposite. The only light is the flourescent over the sink off in the kitchen and I’m standing in a virtually empty living room save for a tv, stereo, couch, coffee table, ashtrays, one stoner, and me. And fuck all if I don’t go back to that night every time I hear that damn song. All things fall apart, centers don’t hold, people leave, others join, but for that one moment, it was something akin to a sick, suburbanite perfection that I sat and soaked in for just a second. Endgame.

Circa Anything.

A dark evening, a lonely road, an empty car save for me in the drivers seat and Johnny Cash’s “Spiritual” or “Southern Accents” comes on and I am required by personal law to change the track on the CD unless I’m in a mood to get misty. I remember driving down some west suburban road not long after Johnny’s wife June died, thinking to myself, man. I don’t think he’s long for this world now. I was right. The main line in that song is about not dying alone, and although he had his extended family with him, the great injustice is that June went first.

All I need is a little rain, a lower-than-50 temperature, and either of those songs and all the planets are aligned to have me in a nice emotional stew.

Circa Spring.

Anything loud and with the windows open for the first warm day of the year makes me feel like I’m 17 again and haven’t even acknowledged the fact that I might live past 21. It’s forever, baby, and even if it’s bad rock and roll it’s still loud enough to bug the guy next to you at a red light and that’s all that matters.

A few tunes. There’s tons more, but enough for now. I was going to ramble about other things but the failures of this website have stifled my efforts. A little soul, please? Gimme a tune. A little travelling music. A rock cut…a little jazz. Where are you? What are you doing? Dinner with the fiancee? The last song on the radio before the car flipped? The last song at prom? The first song you heard in high school? It’s burned into your greymatter somewhere, and certain switches are flipped and every time you hear it, you go, “ah. yeah. I remember when…” and then you’re there. I’ve blithered enough at you for one morning. Now go to work. Your tunes? Your memories? They’re in there somewhere.

They say smell is the sense most associated with memory. Maybe with one or two but the ears have a language of their own and it speaks in words of one syllable–easily understood and not soon forgotten. When I wash my hair with a certain strawberry shampoo I’m always reminded of apartment hunting in about 1998 with a friend of mine who’s now dead of heroin but other than that, smell doesn’t have much. Music does. Maybe I just speak different.

Edit: I said, “the great injustice is that June went first.”

I take it back. As much as I don’t like imagining Johnny without June, I dislike June existing without Johnny even more. In a perfect world: housefire, late at night, smoke inhalation, died together in bed, “Ring of Fire” comparisons a-plenty. I know life doesn’t go according to how I want it but at least the burial site in Hendersonville is only a 9 hour drive away. Someday. When I think about it, the widower effect is something I hope I succumb to. But not any time soon.