Talk about a revolution on the carousel.

Written by Christopher Pentecost on February 10, 2024

Like a whisper…

It’s funny. I’ve talked about having ADHD, being semi-unable to focus, having issues with school and people, and how growing up the way I did focused a lot more on me being lazy, not up to doing work, just wanting to laze around. Sounds like I was raised by Boomer parents. It’s weird. But what I find most puzzling about my upbringing is how my memory works, how things will come up and remind me of distant thoughts, unimportant events. How anxiety can bring out events based in embarrassment, intrusive thoughts. It’s very interesting that I may not be able to focus on a task when someone’s walking by or something drops, or can’t focus on something when there are a lot of other moving parts, but I can hyper-focus on remembering things that seem almost branded into my memory on my brain.

One of those memories is of my grandfather. I was his only grandson, and as much as all of the grandchildren had time with him, I always had the sort of feeling that maybe I spent more time with him than most. I definitely was one of the ones who stuck up for him, one of those funny kids who say the darndest things. My parents always told me about the time when I was like maybe 2 years old, and Grandma was giving Grandpa hell for not doing something that he said he would do, and then all of a sudden I chimed in, as to give Grandpa a break. Maybe me talking back to the matriarch of the family kind of endeared him to me.

My main memory of my grandfather was sitting in the basement of our family home, the house I grew up in before my parents moved when I was in high school. He would always come down in a pair of (to use a more ancient term) slacks, a button-up shirt, and a sweater over top, usually one of the sweaters my mother would have knitted, so a lot of the times they were burgundy with patterns of gray and beige around the upper chest. He would come down, eat a couple of pieces of toast and jam, have a cup of tea. After his second cup of tea, he would go out for a walk. We wouldn’t see him for a couple of hours. This man could walk from one part of London to the other and back again just because he could. Something that I have found I’m able to do. I find an interesting solace in it being quiet, or just being in nature, or just being where the wind is the only sound that you hear minus all the cars and the honking.

He would come back, and he would go downstairs and sit in the basement. Truth be told, this must be a family trait of all males that we relegate ourselves to the basement because that’s where my office is, that’s where my dad’s office is, and that’s exactly where my uncle’s office is. So we’re groundhogs, great, at some point, we’ll see our shadow, and it’ll be in early spring. He was the only man allowed to smoke inside the house. I remember him smoking Export A’s from the blue pack, a smell that continuously reminds me of him because when I would go down into the basement to sit with him, listening to whatever he was listening to, there would always be a 6-inch cloud of secondhand smoke just floating below the ceiling. You would go down there, go through the fog, and you would see it just hovering over the basement. He would be sitting down there on one of the couches that we had. It was an older couch, definitely a product of the seventies. It was very orange, yellow, and patterned. Some of you by now are getting images from your own house. He would sit down there, quiet, and I would sit with him. Probably the only time as a kid that was ever that quiet. I was in awe of the man. Sometimes he’d be listening to things on my dad’s stereo, a lot of the times it was old radio dramas, and old radio comedies, especially Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers.

I think this is where I get a portion of my love for witty comedy. I’d sit there and listen to the jokes, and when he would chuckle, I would chuckle, and it would sort of give me sort of the Cole’s notes of comedy at that time, which would then resonate later to when I found old TV reruns of The Little Rascals. It meant a lot to me to have that time with him, even though we couldn’t really converse like adults. It was just nice to be able to sit and have someone spend that time with you and to try and connect with you across even a generational divide.

My grandfather would always come up either for Christmas or New Year’s every year, and at least some time in the summer. That’s if I wasn’t sent off to Montreal, so I got to spend time with him. He was always willing to take me to the mall, get me a cookie, or take me to a restaurant and grab me a plate of fries. And I was always willing to go for a walk, something that I would, in my teenage years, do more with my mother after he had passed away. And currently these days, if I do go out for a walk like that, I usually just throw my headphones on and listen to music.

The Grammys were held last weekend, and this is where this post sort of comes from. One of the songs that was mainly featured and has since been featured in a lot of social media is “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. A song about life, finding someone, loving someone, and the trials, tribulations, and successes that come from that is what I take from the song. People have interpreted that song in many different ways, and I think that’s a good way to see art because not everyone should take the same thing from it. We should always view or listen to art as individuals, and maybe a common theme will come out of something, but that’s neither here nor there.

My love for the song was that I used it as a vehicle of introspection. Through the iconic strumming of the guitar, the melody, to just belting at the top of your lungs during the chorus because you have or want to find a reason and a feeling to belong. And coming from someone who was bullied most of his younger life, I never really belonged anywhere but that song. And its resurgence in popular culture over 30 years since it was first recorded and played still shows that even as the generations differ, we still find some things to come back to. For me, this song recently, this week, has brought up feelings of nostalgia. And it’s amazing what nostalgia can bring up and bring out. For me, it was going back to ’80s playlists, which for some reason with Spotify and Spotify, maybe you can look into this, my algorithm will put some weird ass stuff into certain playlists that have absolutely no rhyme or reason should be within those playlists, but it does help when it’s stuff I like. It’s just weird that a song by The Carpenters ends up in my ’80s playlist. I don’t know why it’s weird, but The Carpenters bring forth memories as well as The Monkees. They bring up memories of my mother. The Monkees and The Carpenters, we had the greatest hits cassette tapes, and a lot of times back when I was in kindergarten, I only went for half a day. So I would go in the morning, and then I’d have the afternoon to spend with my mother at home while she looked after my sister, and sometimes my sister would go down for a nap. My mother would have me help her around the house, cleaning. Sometimes it would be the bathroom; sometimes we would mop the floor. I would help her move chairs, but we would always put the cassette on, and we would listen to the same songs. And so sometimes when I listen to The Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” I can still smell the Ajax cleaning powder as we would scrub the bathtub or the sink to clean it. I’d be wearing some oversized rubber gloves and using a sponge to make sense to clean things. I always also remember The Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays.” It always gets me to remember to sit and take a moment just to enjoy the moment ‘cause even on a rainy day, there’s still reasons to be happy. Every time I hear that song, I smell the rain on grass. I can hear it tapping on the windowsill, and I always remember sitting curled up next to my mother. And maybe it’s because I never really had a lot of friends or just really loved to be in the basement, but I can still smell, touch, taste these memories, which just linger within the back of my brain. Yet ask me what I did yesterday, and I probably can’t tell you. It’s an interesting set of events. I know I went to Toronto; I know I came home from Toronto, but I can’t tell you a lot of the more intricate details of that trip.

There are always those jokes or memes where people go, “You know you’re old when you can smell this image,” and most of the times I can, which is scary in a lot of ways. I may not be fully present in the present, but I tend to be able to deal with a lot of stuff in the past, which sort of helps me in the present. That is a sentence that has way too many “presents” in it. Let me try to explain. With having what I would believe be undiagnosed ADHD and diagnosed anxiety, a lot of the times I tend to second-guess myself or second-guess my abilities. Imposter syndrome is a great word that sums up how I feel a lot of times. And I don’t know whether it’s a lot of self-doubt or I just have a hard time focusing myself forward, that I always seem to circle back. And through my anxiety, I find when I do get anxious, I do revert myself to things like music, as I think a lot of us do. But for me, it’s to return to a time where I felt safe, calm, to an extent, coddled. So I will throw on The Carpenters just to make myself feel a little sad because it brings me happiness.

And speaking of music that brings me happiness, I don’t know how many people did this back when they were younger. I’m pretty sure like it’s a stage we all go through. You throw on an album or cassette of a band you really like, and you just stand in your room, maybe using a hairbrush as a microphone, a hockey stick as a guitar, or just flailing your arms as if you’re the greatest drummer in the world. And you just either sing if you have the ability to not sound like someone murdering a cat or maybe just lip-syncing to the words of your favorite song. I don’t know whether to be ashamed to say that I probably did that way too much as a kid, but then again, I already set up there I didn’t have many friends, but I could always have those images what would have been like five or one up there on the stage performing my heart out, the songs that made me feel alive. And sometimes I had the ability to write out some of what I would assume be some of the greatest concert setlists ever to be performed. Whether it was starting with “Do You Feel Like I Do” by Peter Frampton and then moving into something by the Bee Gees and then off to like some sort of disco hit from Le Chic. Trust me, I don’t know why it went from rock to disco, but sometimes you just got to shake things up a little bit. I still do catch myself a few times when no one’s looking thrown Spotify on, picking a couple of songs, and what would it be like if I was up on stage and did Oasis right after Radiohead? Would the crowd actually be into that? Not sure. Maybe if I followed it up with some Morcheeba or maybe have someone sing Portishead. I don’t know. I find that with having again ADHD that I haven’t lost my imagination. My imagination is still there, and it tends to run a little more these days. But instead of setlist, it’s more along the lines of what would I have done differently with a video. Which, by the way, I wish I was a little more visually artistic because I think I could really apply myself to have been a video director. But again, too many images in my head and not enough resources to make it happen.

I once heard someone tell me that the music you were listening to when you were 17 would become almost like your world. That is the music that you will continuously gravitate to. Luckily for me, at that point in time, we got a pop resurgence, grunge was still a thing, dance was full of bass and actual lyrics, British trip-hop was still a blossoming form of music, alternative music was still pushing some boundaries, and hip-hop was pushing the edges of mainstream. So how is that a good crossroads when I was 17? To add a little sprinkle to that wonderful cake, I was still neck-deep in everything from the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, and all of them music I listened to and grew up with in the ’80s. So I was still embedded in music itself. I find solace in a lot of it, and the fact that, you know, maybe I can’t remember what I did yesterday, but I can pretty much run off a lot of different tunes just by hearing either the opening line or just seeing the title of the song. It makes it hard when you’re sitting with Sirius XM radio, and there’s so many channels to go up and down and check out that the minute you have a song that you’re not really into, you can click a button and then you’ll find you’re halfway through a song that you really like to sing to.

Maybe the next time we talk about music and memories, we’ll get into how I sort of am able to attribute songs to different people. It’s really weird and it’s odd, but sometimes it’s the only way I can remember names sometimes. But I digress. How I’ll leave you today in this post is: go find something, a song, an album if you can find it. If you love an album, find an album that you can listen to the whole way through. I’ve had a lot of people on my social media come through, and it’s always the same question: what’s an album that you can listen to the entire way through and not skip a song? Well, I’ve got a few, but I’ll give you my top five. And these are, for me, albums that, for me, open up doors and ways of thinking, and some of them you can just get lost in the sound, whether it’s the strings, whether it’s the guitars, whether it’s just the sound of the voice. I’ve always found these albums to be some of the greatest just to listen to the entire way through, and I don’t do that often. I don’t usually listen to an entire album, but these ones I can put them on and listen all the way through without skipping a song. In my opinion, these are some of the best albums ever written, in no particular order.

I’ll start with number five: “Rubber Soul” by The Beatles. This one will go really well with number four, but from the opening riff of “Drive My Car” through John Lennon burning a house down in “Norwegian Wood” to talking about love, Michelle, some girl, and a life at that point still in its relative infancy, that really isn’t a bad song written by any of The Beatles. Highlights for me are both the tracks by George Harrison: “Think for Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone.” But this goes straight into number four, The Beatles’ “Revolver.” These albums were released back to back, and the reason why I really like both of these is that you can play them back to back and see the transition from The Beatles’ pop rock playing live music to moving into the more experimental stages. You can see them grow, you can see them evolve, and you can see it through the music. From the opening licks of “Taxman” through the passionate song about unpassioned people in “Eleanor Rigby,” through the “Good Day Sunshine,” “For No One,” and the psychedelic finisher of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” you see the evolution of a group that shows the opening of their potential. My favorite song off of this album: “She Said She Said.”

Now on to number three, and not to be too frank with this one, but it’s Pink Floyd’s “Meddle.” Now, for many people, this album would be, I would say, difficult for the average listener, mainly because the entirety of side B is one song. But in my opinion, it’s probably one of the best laid-out songs by Pink Floyd, and that would be the 23 minutes and 32 seconds of “Echoes.” The entire first side is almost a suite of different moving genres, almost as if you were traveling through Europe back in the ’70s. From “One of These Days,” which is just an upbeat rocking tune, through “Fearless,” “Seamus,” which is just a bluesy old tune about one’s dog, the light, airy “Pillow of Winds,” all the way to sitting on a beach in San Tropez, the album gives you a sense of movement leading up to “Echoes.” And yeah, it can kind of get a little weird with the whole seagull thing, but ultimately, if you just sit back and chill, it really does just take you somewhere. And you can guess “Echoes” is my favorite tune on this album.

Following this, number two: “Girlfriend” by Matthew Sweet. Beyond the main title track of “Girlfriend,” a lot of the other songs on this album give the listener just what I would say is a fun alternative experience. A lot of the songs are introspective, a lot of it opens up for things about relationships and how people interact with each other. And what I find is that from the beginning of “Divine Intervention” to the ending of “Nothing Lasts,” you kind of get a sense that this is an entire relationship from start to finish. And this may tell you more about me and how I see relationships before I was married. But my favorite songs on this one are “Divine Intervention,” “Girlfriend,” “You Don’t Love Me,” and “Your Sweet Voice.”

Which then leaves us to my number one. I was introduced to this band in 2006, just after they came out, and I was given their CD burnt from the husband of a coworker, and it’s the self-titled debut from She Wants Revenge. As most of you read my last post, new wave is a favorite genre of mine. These guys took new wave into and beyond the alternative mindset with the starting of “Red Flags and Long Nights.” You sort of get that feeling that you’re going to listen to something sort of semi-epic, but you’re really holding out for everything to continue to move, and then you get into the droning voice of Justin Warfield and his almost monotone feeling that this could be ball house if they were just a little bit more dancing. Followed up with songs like “These Things,” one of my favorites out of control, which is just almost like they took something from a diary of mine and put it to music. And my favorite song on this one is titled “Us,” which sort of reflects on relationships past. But I always look at it as reflection on life lived. And for me, it’s not always about one person, it’s about the plethora of people that have come in and out of my life. All of these albums I can listen to from front to back, no skips.

As the side, I should find a way to wrap this up. And if you couldn’t tell, the beginning was sort of open-ended slightly. I did that for a reason. One of the other albums I didn’t want to put Pink Floyd on the list twice, but their album “The Wall” is a no-skip too. Comes in a close 6th, but I find there’s a weight that one that doesn’t make it as enjoyable as the rest of them. But we started talking about Tracy Chapman, and I figure we should leave it with Tracy Chapman. And so, I hope you’ve enjoyed this, and maybe you can take this and go out, maybe to your local record store ‘cause I know record store day’s coming up, and get yourself a new album. Maybe one on the list above, or maybe one that you remember from your childhood. And then you can listen to it, feel all those things that made you feel good about buying it in the past, and then maybe take that positivity out onto the streets to share with people. And maybe, just maybe, we can all sit around and talk about a revolution. That sounds…

Photo by Mink Mingle on Unsplash