Three To Get Ready…
A Sunday essay about Sunday drives
On Sundays we’d go for a car ride. No purpose. Just a change of scene. We might visit a relative, briefly. We might be lucky for it to end in an ice-cream, or fish n chips for dinner. But really, it was about leaving the house.
The radio would play hits of the day and a few songs from the 60s and 70s too.
There are three songs I think about. Three songs that take me right back. Three songs that connect me to that car-ride feeling; place me in the back seat.
Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross felt like flying — the guitar floating. I couldn’t speak when it was on. Fittingly, no words. I just sat in the back, staring out at the sky.
Elton John’s Song for Guy — this time piano is the lead instrument. It felt so strange, and old-timey. The car wheels continuing, but I thought I was in a movie. The roadside flashing by like reels from the film.
Ry Cooder’s I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine — slide guitar felt like another car on the road; felt like driving. It would be years before I knew it was a cover, or could even link it to the original (they still feel like two different songs).
There are other great instrumentals that felt perfect for the car — Booker T’s Green Onions of course, and later the Pulp Fiction surf instrumentals, and Ry Cooder’s soundtracks, and now so many classical themes and pieces of score, and the acid-jazz and ambient, and Elvin Jones’ cymbals across A Love Supreme which feels like watching someone juggling while they’re dancing.
But on Sundays, in the 1980s, in a car going nowhere, but containing everyone important to me at the time, I felt held by Albatross, I shared my car-sickness with Song For Guy, and yeah, in the end I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, largely because of songs like that.
Those three pieces of music have nothing to do with each other, but feel like a secret code for future listening. Eight year old me logging them. Thinking deeply, about nothing at all. Transported to the future, via this musical past.
Instrumental in my development.
No words…
