In the Air Tonight: Where Music Takes Us
The other evening, I was streaming a show called The Americans, a serialized spy thriller set in the 1980s, with its requisite pop-punk MTV soundtrack.
One song hit me in particular:
The primal beat of In the Air Tonight, the debut solo track by former Genesis drummer Phil Collins. Most baby-boomers know the opening lyrics by heart.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?
Oh Lord, oh Lord
But what made the song particularly memorable was the epic turn towards the end, once described as “the sleekest, most melodramatic drum break in history.”
The song, and particularly that break, hit me like a sledgehammer, transporting me back to a place I hadn’t been in 35 years.
Music can do that.
That drum riff carried me off on some emotional magic carpet ride of the subconscious mind.
I couldn’t help but smile.
But part of me also wanted to weep.
Suddenly, I was back in San Diego County, somewhere in the long-buried 1980s, driving my Honda Accord down the highway, feeling frisky and free, playing deejay on the car’s stereo system, with my longtime girlfriend and partner-in-crime Betty Jean Whitley riding shotgun in the passenger seat.
Betty Jean was a sassy Southern belle whom I’d met when I was a young reporter in Norfolk, Virginia. She eventually joined me when I took a job in Kansas City and after two years we’d moved to San Diego.
Our relationship was fraught with tension. For years, Betty Jean had wanted an engagement ring, a symbol of commitment I was too immature to give her. Already in my early 30s, I still lived under the delusion that I was “Too Cool To Be Married.”
Still, we loved that Phil Collins song, the mounting tension of the backbeat, working toward that powerful percussive payoff.
The lyrics were angry and vengeful, suggesting a relationship gone wrong, a turn ours would eventually take, but back then we chose to see a different message in that refrain, that somehow something mysterious, unusual and wonderful was in the air.
When we played the song in the car, we both knew what would happen and we looked forward to it, like good news or that first daredevil shot of top shelf Tequila.
Anticipating the precise moment of that drum release, Betty Jean pumped up the volume full-throttle. I kid you not, it was pure musical orgasm, pounding out of the speakers like an emancipation.
With her southern drawl, fire engine lipstick and don’t-mess-with-me nature, Betty Jean played her part to the hilt — shifting into air-drummer mode, imaginary sticks and faux sweat flying, arms flailing, her entire upper body moving to the music as though taken by some wild beat-induced trance.
We eventually got married and later divorced.
Yet I still remember those moments in the car, Betty Jean moving to that Phil Collins beat, as one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
Music moves us in so many ways.
It can make us melancholy for a lost time or person. It can also blast us out of some lethargy, depression or boredom and compel us to get up and gyrate.
Even if we’re all alone.
Whenever I hear 1981’s Dancing with Myself by Billy Idol I am immediately back on the crowded dance floor of some sweaty Virginia Beach nightclub, at last able to forget the girls and take the stage for myself.
For average-looking guys who had to wait out favorite club grooves because no woman would dance with us, this song was a punk-rock anthem of independence and free public expression.
Bill Idol's new chant told us that disco was finally, irrevocably dead. It was an invitation to finally indulge not in any robotic choreographed steps but our own demoniac war dances, even in traditional music venues — as though we were all wearing neck bandanas, gold chains, black military boots and all.
Yeah, we might be lonely losers, without the slightest prospects of making any kind of emotional connection here, but that song legitimized us all.
We still existed, god dammit, and we could dance. We could move.
All by ourselves.
On the floor of Tokyo
Or down in London town to go, go
With the record selection, with the mirror reflection I'm dancing with myself
When there's no-one else in sight
In the crowded lonely night
Well I wait so long for my love vibration
And I'm dancing with myself
Oh dancing with myself
Of course, not all the places the music-memory carpet ride takes you, you really want to go.
Like some acid flashback, some songs bring you suddenly back into the grips of a painful relationship, or stumbling along the highway, drunk and weeping on the day of a friend’s death.
I cannot hear Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s 1974 radio fodder “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” and not become instantly overcome with a sense of weariness, like feeling twinges of pain from a long-lost limb.
That summer, I worked the graveyard shift at a grocery store in Upstate New York and we played the radio all night long over the store’s tinny sound system.
Now I hear that song and I’m transformed back into a bloodless night zombie. It’s suddenly 4 a.m. and I'm bleary-eyed, stocking ice-cold sacks of green beans in the frozen food department or stacking canned dog food in aisle 7, exhausted to the bejesus but unable to lay down.
Listening to those Canadian rockers and their maddening, confounding and utterly intoxicating racket.
I met a devil woman
She took my heart away
She said, I've had it comin' to me
But I wanted it that way
I say that any love is good lovin’
So I took what I could get, yeah I took what I could get
She looked at me with them brown eyes
And said, You ain't seen nothin' yet
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet
Here's something that you're never gonna forget
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet
And you're thinkin' you ain't been around, that's right
So who knows whether the songs I’m hearing today will once again take root in my thoughts many years from now, bringing me back, kicking and screaming, to the year 2020.
Will they make me dance or just make me rueful and sad?
Hopefully, they will compel my heart to soar with the feeling that this time, at long last, there really is something in the air tonight.
Either way, it will be music for my ears, my reaction inspired by the chords of my own precious memories.
Well if I looked all over the world
And there's every type of girl
But your empty eyes seem to pass me by
And leave me dancin' with myself
So let's get another drink
Cause it'll give me time to think
If I had the chance I'd ask the world to dance
And I'll be dancin' with myself
Oh oh oh oh