There were three things that most occupied my thoughts after I put down my LEGOs and became a teenager: music, books, and girls (yes, in that order). In my mind, and at an early age, I wove these together into a complex and often naïve narrative through which I came to understand myself, until eventually the music became more diverse, the books more complex, and the girls women. I even came to understand rhetorical devices such as prozeugma. Many, many years later, and I find myself with the music, the books, a wife and a kid, and a Bayeux Tapestry that I hardly knew I was creating—perhaps one not so epic as the story of early English history, but certainly historical in its own way.

Of course the Bayeux tapestry is embroidered and not woven, so not really a tapestry at all strictly speaking, but who am I to quibble with convention or to avoid stretching a metaphor to meet my needs?

The warp and weft of an historical narrative are invariably complex, and we weave our own patterns with the materials at hand. I wove my teen years together in the America of Ronald Reagan, his “Evil Empire” rhetoric and smiling movie prop face gleaming into living rooms where all of its citizens of a certain age were still putting the trauma of the Vietnam War and 1970s economic despair to bed while their children begged for Atari 2600s and wondered why men who looked like Dolph Lundrgen wanted them dead. Maybe the adults of the 1980s can be forgiven for believing Reagan beat down the Berlin Wall with his own fists after scaring the Soviet Union into disintegrating before our eyes. All of 1980s America—its people, its music, its art, its politics—seemed to be flailing about in an attempt to grasp hold of anything that made sense. The children of 1980s who went on in the 1990s to manifest mass disaffection as cynical and distrustful Gen-Xers should also be forgiven. We were working with the materials we had at hand.

But the music, oh the music. We could look back at the 80s and say much of the music was bad—lacking the idealism and experimentalism of the 60s, the bitchin’ Camaro guitar bravado of the 70s, the raging malcontent of the 90s—but we wouldn’t only be unfair—we’d be inscrutably wrong. As Thatcher and Reagan tried to suck the last drops of frivolity and joy out of the carcasses of their citizens, the fair response was a music that said, “Fuck it, let’s have a party.” Or for others, “Fuck it, let’s burn it all down.” The first time I ever felt like I was partying was in a Best Western in Washington D.C. in 1983. It was there, on a class field trip we had waited all of 6th grade to experience, standing meekly against a wall in a dingy-carpeted multipurpose room, that I first heard Prince and the Revolution. “Little Red Corvette.” The album 1999 had been released the previous October, but it took seven months and getting myself 380 miles from home for it to reach my 12-year-old ears. And like many a revolutionary, I was definitely not ready when this call to sex-fueled arms came on, loaded as it was with oblique references and innuendo. But the revolution beckoned me nonetheless, and I would soon happily devour any of its doctrines I could get my hands on.

It isn’t as though I suddenly realized music existed when I heard Prince sing, “A body like yours oughta be in jail/‘Cause it’s on the verge of bein’ obscene/Move over, baby, gimme the keys/I’m gonna try to tame your little red love machine.” But up to that point the music I heard was largely the country and western (and sometimes doo-wop) preferred by my father or the bland 70s soft rock my sisters collected in forgettable stacks of 45s. My last pre-teen year would mark the beginning of a divide between their music and my music, and much of the 80s still lay out before me like a deep ocean I would soon dive into with no fear of drowning.

My parents grew up in the impoverished hills of Southeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Great Depression. My mother was one of the last of the lost generation, born half-way through America’s participation in WWII and a couple of years before boomers started piling up in maternity wards for the next twenty years or so. My father, a bit older, was born during the first Roosevelt administration (Franklin, not Teddy). Elvis Presley’s first recordings on Sun Records were made way down in Memphis while my dad passed his time in an 11th grade classroom, where, if his yearbook the following year is to be believed, he likely caused nowhere near the stir Elvis soon would: “Quiet, smiling, and friendly! Although Bill seems rather hard to make friends with, we know him as a steady member of the class.”

The blues and R&B that fed the invention of rock ’n’ roll, and the invention of Elvis, surely didn’t penetrate into the Appalachian hills, so those kids in Nelsonville likely had no idea what was about to hit them. Years later, my father told me the first time he ever heard Elvis was when “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” came on the car radio while he and his friend were cruising around town. That single had been recorded the summer between his junior and senior years and was released just before school started back up. Imagine being seventeen-years-old and hearing the not-yet-famous Elvis Presley for the first time. Whatever the reason, “That’s Alright,” released a year before, had not yet made it onto the WHIZ or WATH airwaves.

But my father was no fan of Presley or of rock ’n’ roll in general. He often claimed there was no good rock music made after 1959, and even then, he really only listened to vocal groups that could only be marginally called “rock.” “The Great Pretender,” by the Platters,—a truly fine song, but not rock ’n’ roll—was as hard as my father ever got. I suppose everybody gets old and complains about the music of younger generations, but most people don’t do that at the age of twenty-three. So I grew up with a lot of classic country and western albums around—stuff I love to this day—and the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll were subtle but still present. Especially the sex, as in Jim Reeves’ hushed phone call to his paramour, who happens to be entertaining another man in “He’ll Have to Go.” Or sex and violence, as in the ballad of a cowboy—transfixed by a woman named Feleena in an El Paso watering hole—who dies at the hands of a posse after killing her (Boyfriend? Husband?) in a jealous rage, sung about in the lifting, lilting harmonies of Marty Robbins, Bobby Sykes, and Jim Glaser.

When I was in my early teens, technology was, as it is now (and as it has always been), directly connected to consumption, as well as a key to developing a sense of freedom. Of course, technology is also a kind of prison, especially now, but more on that elsewhere. When I was very young, I enjoyed visits to my grandparents, who still owned an old Victrola and stacks of heavy, brittle 78s long after those were no longer in common use. But I was born into the heyday of the long-playing album rotating sonic masterpieces at 33 1/3 rpm. In between the popularity of the 78s and the introduction of LPs, 45s held dominance, and you could go out and get one of those on the cheap with two songs—the A-side and the B-side. The A-side was usually the song the record company was really trying to promote, but just as often, the B-side was the better track despite often being considered inferior filler. From the late 50s through to the 70s, 45s were the technology that drove radio stations—at first AM and then FM—and, therefore, influenced listening and popularity.

Music recording during that period was generally geared toward producing singles, and whole albums of brilliant songs were not even something anyone aspired to. Until. . . Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. The three Big Bs of the 1960s, each of which helped completely upend how popular music was written, produced, distributed, and consumed (I say popular music because other genres, particularly jazz, already had a tradition of LP releases—John Coltrane’s Blue Train came out in 1958 and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue in 1959, for instance). But in the midst of rock ’n’ roll’s evolution from edgy beginnings in songs like Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” and Link Wray’s “Rumble” to the girl groups and Motown soul and R&B that dominated the early 60s, Dylan emerged in 1962 with a self-titled debut that would kick-off a 65-year career of never recording successful singles. Although it’s hard to believe gum-popping teenyboppers weren’t eagerly dancing to his cover of Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die,” Bob wasn’t exactly made for American Bandstand. But the Beatles and the Beach Boys were, if only for a short time. Both started out recording singles that were essentially stitched together into various album configurations, but by 1965 both had joined Dylan in producing whole albums of songs that, though not yet conceptual, hung together coherently and cohesively—the Beatles with Help! and Rubber Soul; the Beach Boys with The Beach Boys Today! and Pet Sounds (it seems the announcement of emerging musical maturity required an exclamation point in 1965).

Between the release of these albums and the kick-off of my own musical journey, 33 1/3 rpms came to dominate, and FM radio came into its own, playing longer and more sophisticated songs along side those that had been the foundation of rock ’n’ roll. But technology does what it does and moved forward. In the 1970s, 8-track tapes (which would sometimes change tracks right in the middle of a song) and cassettes appeared, and players for both began to show up in cars and home stereos. Although 8-track tapes—which were about the size of a small book—were satisfying to click into the welcoming maw of a car stereo, they did little for the aesthetic purity of the music. However, it was on days sitting in my dad’s car outside our house listening to his 8-tracks that I discovered George Jones singing “Why Baby Why” and Lefty Frizzell singing “Saginaw, Michigan,” as well as a few dozen other classic country hits that I’ve happily carried with me in the nearly 50 years since. Like all great songs (and great books), those hits created worlds you could pass through and discover unfamiliar people and places that seemed both a million miles away and right next door.

All throughout the 70s and early 80s I fell in love with music as an art form and with individual songs and artists, but it wasn’t until Christmas 1983 that technology finally allowed me to take the wheel on that musical journey. That Christmas I was given a large gray “device” colloquially referred to as a boombox. My parents gave me the box—which had dual cassette players, detachable speakers, and was about the size and shape of a Fiat—and my sister, Anita, gave me the soundtrack to Eddie and the Cruisers and Bob Seger’s Nine Tonight (Live). I blame the second one for creating a nostalgic tendency in me before I had even turned thirteen—and songs like “Main Street,” with its tale of a narrator lingering outside of a barroom to catch a glimpse of an exotic dancer at the end of the night, make clear Bob wasn’t singing about Gopher Prairie.

An aside: This was also the period when MTV and other music video channels and programs began to dominate the musical media and kill the radio star. Technology changes everything after all. And radio eventually died at the hands of Clear Channel in any case. I won’t write much about MTV here because, having not had cable during the 80s, it didn’t play the out-sized role in my teen years that it did for so many others. It would never matter as much to me as the Canadian channel MuchMusic did a few years later. It was MuchMusic that introduced me to so much of the unusual and alternative music that would carry me out of the 80s and into the rest of my life—bands such as the Pogues, Blue Rodeo, the Northern Pikes, and, I’m pretty sure, even Camper Van Beethoven, which didn’t get a lot of airtime on MTV. If memory serves, it’s where I first heard Sinéad O’Connor as well, and her first album blew me over like a hurricane. Although I try on the playlists I make to accompany these “Mixed Tapes” posts not to over-represent any given artist, I’m tempted to put all of The Lion and the Cobra on this one. That’s an album that will make you feel all the emotions. Sinéad, who the media would later crucify for speaking the truth, made a debut album so sonically exquisite, so lyrically evocative, that the chill is still in my spine almost forty years later.

The best thing about the best music is that it awakens you to something new while still evoking the familiar. I certainly didn’t need Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” to explain my burgeoning desires to me—but it did give me one way of understanding them. Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” gave me another. Much later, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin’” growled out yet another angle on the universal theme. On “A Rainy Night in Soho,” The Pogues told my favorite story of desire: years, perhaps decades, of friendship until two people are in each other’s arms. A love so familiar it’s mystifying.

And all I’m really talking about here is love after all. An argument can be made that all music is about love in content, form, and, one hopes, the motivations for making it. At the very least music exists in order to howl out into the universe and make a connection. I call that love. We did it by rhythmically beating everyday objects together 20,000 years ago. We let the algorithms figure it out for us now, and maybe we’re worse off than when we let DJs and record company execs make the decision. A lot of old heads like me might wax poetically about how it was all so much better back in those days when we were discovering what could be done with a backbeat and a raunchy hook.

Music is hope and music is nostalgia. But nostalgia can often handcuff you to false memories or an idealized past; however, hope is a wager on a future that is better than the present and the past. The tension between these two—past and future—can make the present feel like a liminal space that is to be endured between two otherwise concrete points in time and space. Back in those boombox 80s I’d spend a lot of time wondering about the past (and becoming a history buff) and pondering the future, which even in the Cold War chill of the era seemed to hold such potential—flying cars, eternal sunshine, fresh-faced smiling people, endless music. Only the last one has yet come to pass, miraculously contained inside a little box in our pocket. In the dark of my bedroom I would listen to “Life in a Northern Town” by The Dream Academy, which to my teen ears sounded mysterious, like looking at the world through sheer curtains on a late afternoon in winter. In the song, the narrator tells of a flashing moment with an unnamed man who “never would wave goodbye” as he boards a train (presumably pulling out of the title’s “northern town”). The man had just regaled “everyone” with a story of November 1963, which the listener understands as a bit of poignant nostalgia only twenty-two years after the moments described. At fifteen, those twenty-two years could just as well have been fifty in my mind, yet I was (and still am) always left with a feeling that the northern town was the one I lived in, and that Kennedy and the Beatles are somehow still alive in the liminal space of my present. The extraordinary power of a truly great song is that it allows you to be everywhere all at once—past, present, and future. You get to be nostalgic and hopeful, while also feeling perfectly present in the present as long as the song is playing. You get to have the whole narrative of the universe right there in your earbuds. And you get to know exactly what it feels like for the morning to last all day…

Playlists for this post can be found on Apple and on Spotify.