Grooving

By Rick Horowitz

She's doing it to drive them crazy.

She's a teenager -- of course she's doing it to drive them crazy. Hour after hour, day after day, the noise comes booming from the boombox in her room -- those ragged voices, those yawping guitars. Finally, when her mother just can't take it anymore, when her mother is precisely thisclose to losing it, her mother leans into the hallway and shouts at the bedroom door, hoping against hope that her daughter will hear, will heed.

"Get your own music!"

As opposed, say, to their music.

The Allman Brothers. Jefferson Airplane. Bob Marley. Jimi Hendrix. That's what she's playing.

Also Creedence. Van Morrison. The Doors. The Dead.

They're lined up on her shelves, one CD after another, a regular Golden Aged, digitized Hall of Fame. Then there are the tapes, mixed by friends and passed around the circuit, with favorite cuts by Otis and Aretha, by Janis and Floyd. (Pink.) Not to mention Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and --

What's going on?!

It's a Million Dollar Weekend, that's what's going on -- weekends and weekdays, too. Here at the rump end of the Nineties, the Sixties are alive! The Seventies thrive! She's not completely immune to the charms of her own decade. Erykah Badu and Ani DiFranco make occasional appearances. Ditto Dave Matthews. Fugees. Phish. But mostly they've got a throwback living among them. She's doing the Time Warp, and she's loving it.

The man of the house is secretly pleased.

There are, after all, at least two ways of looking at this. Luckily, both ways allow major wallows in self-indulgent boomerism. (What could be better?)

One way: We were the special ones. Our years were the best years -- the clothes, the language, especially the music. Nobody can possibly appreciate our music the way we do.

That's one way of looking at it.

He leans toward the second way: We were the special ones. Our years were the best years -- the clothes, the language, especially the music. Nobody can possibly appreciate our music the way we do -- but if they try, that's even more of a compliment to our exquisite taste.

He leans toward the second way.

Actually, he's been relatively -- relatively -- restrained about the whole thing. She comes back from a friend's house enthusing about some newly (re)discovered star, he manages not to leap to his feet, race to the living room and drop the original vinyl onto the turntable. (Yes, they still have some vinyl. Yes, they still have a turntable.) He figures she'll like the music even more if she finds it on her own.

And now here she comes a few nights later, bounding up the stairs with excitement, with announcement.

"You've got the best records! I've never looked at them before. You've got Dylan, everything!" He just smiles.

And now she's back downstairs making her own tapes, and some of the songs she wants are on these large, flat...things. She has the turntable spinning and the tonearm in her hand. She thinks she's cracked the code.

"The spaces are where the song ends?" she asks. "So you know?" He nods. She grins. Slowly she lowers the needle into a groove, and it's the Great Back Then all over again.

"I've never done this before," she says. "This is fun!"

Her mother will adjust.

5/1/98