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Resonant Frequency

Resonant Frequency #63

Resonant Frequency #63

YouTube and Memory

by Mark Richardson, posted May 29, 2009
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Put quotes around "YouTube and memory" and Google it and you only get three results. Four, once this column gets in the system. How is that possible?

About two months ago, my wife Julie was out of town for a week. Nights home alone usually go one of two directions: I either dust off a book I've been meaning to read for a while, or else I end up surfing the web. Which usually means going back and forth between Wikipedia and YouTube. One minute I'm checking to see how many World War I veterans are still alive (six, checked on Memorial Day) and the next I'm looking to see if someone has compiled a new Barry Sanders highlight reel. Hours pass by like nothing; there is something a little sad about the whole thing (I feel like I should be accomplishing something) but there are worse ways to kill an evening. I reach over once in a while to mute whatever I'm listening to on the stereo (recently it was back and forth between two Neil Young records-- On the Beach and Tonight's the Night-- better music for loneliness has not been written) in order to hear a video if the sound is important.

This night, for no real reason, I found my way to Brucebase, a website that exhaustively documents every musical activity of Bruce Springsteen's life, no matter how trivial. This is the last word in laser-focused musical obsession. I'm talking about a paragraph discussing a gig at the YMCA pool with his buddies when he was a teenager. That level of detail. I love sites like this. It's part of what got me into the Grateful Dead. Depth over breadth: devote your entire experience in music to the study of a single band. Why not? On your deathbed, no one's going to care if you only ever listened to Springsteen. You fill (x) number of hours in your life with music, and there are no rules as to what you do with that time.

On Brucebase, I started reading about Springsteen's time in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1960s and early 70s. I knew he'd played a number of shows there when he was still fronting the bands Child and Steel Mill and was playing acid rock-tinged R&B, stuff that sounded a bit like the Amboy Dukes. I'd actually heard about the Richmond shows first-hand. My wife's Aunt Mary lived in Richmond then, and Mary's ex-husband, my wife's uncle, booked shows for Steel Mill. She had told me about the gigs, but for whatever reason it wasn't quite real to me. It was so long ago, and you know how it goes: facts get distorted over time. Maybe it didn't go down the way she told me it did. Maybe something she read or heard about got mixed up in what actually happened.

One of the shows Aunt Mary told me about was a rooftop gig at a parking deck near Virginia Commonwealth University. I used to walk and drive by that building when I lived in Richmond and once in a while, I would think about what it might have been like to see a show up there, with whatever kind of hippies gravitated to such a small town at the turn of the 70s. I'm thinking about all of this stuff, Aunt Mary and the rooftop shows, and then I see this on Brucebase:

"ONE show, triple bill, with blues band MARLO MAYS & THE STINGERS opening, MERCY FLIGHT performing second and STEEL MILL headlining and closing. Held under the stars on the upper deck of the parking complex. The general concept for this show was modeled after The Beatles memorable rooftop performance in the film Let It Be (which was in theatres at the time). This is one the most famous of all Steel Mill's gigs and it's now firmly a part of Richmond folklore. Promoter Russell Clem provides the immortal MC introduction. This was Steel Mill's first gig in about a month and their performance actually starts off somewhat ragged as a result-- something both Bruce and Vini Lopez apologize for this during the show."

"Promoter Russell Clem"-- that's my wife's uncle. So, wow, OK, here is some verification. And on a whim, I head over to YouTube, and man, there it is: a bootleg of the rooftop gig has been uploaded, and that "immortal MC introduction" is intact (sounds like he was having a good night). Someone, who knows why, had brought to this gig whatever kind of portable tape deck one brought to tape shows in 1970, and they kept it, and it got passed down through the years, and then someone stuck it on YouTube. So it's midnight, I'm listening to audio of my wife's uncle, recorded on some random summer evening almost 40 years ago, through speakers in my computer, as I sit in a room 1,000 miles away from where it went down. Uncle Russ, whom I've never met, is alive and well, but it was like hearing the voice of the dead. It made my hair stand on end.

I looked around on YouTube to see what other Springsteen boots had been uploaded. There are freaking Castiles gigs up there. That was the garage band Springsteen was in when he was 15. They played a few dances, and somehow tapes of the shows still survive. And we can listen to them. I knew this, of course-- that everything in the world is on YouTube now-- and yet somehow the extent of it never quite hit me. If you spend a lot of time seeing what was recorded and uploaded from a cell phone last week or last night, you forget to look for what was recorded last century. That's someone's memory up there.

In most cases, anyway. In another 40 years, everyone who was at that Castiles show will be dead, and all we'll have is an audio stream and some text on a website. But for now, there are people still breathing who were there, and for most of their lives, once they found out that the guitarist in the Castiles became famous, all they could do was try and play the set back in their heads. And they probably heard a few notes-- the way the drummer held his sticks, maybe, or that "Louie, Louie" was covered. But now it's all up there, a representation of what really happened rendered in reasonable fidelity. Things are changing, and it's fascinating. Maybe our memories will get a little flabbier because they are less important. Or maybe it's just a matter of emphasis. Instead of facts and details-- which you can easily get wrong, especially as your brain ages-- remembering feelings will be what's essential. Because those are yours alone, and there hasn't been a technology invented yet to digitize them.

So sometimes you go to YouTube to wander through someone else's memory, like with that night in Richmond in 1970. You might find flashes of things, snippets that someone saw once and figured they'd never see again, but now they can dissect them in all their detail. Maybe it was a TV show late one night with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol talking to Steven Spielberg about listening to the radio through one's teeth. Did I dream that? Was I drunk, or did that really happen? Or maybe it was John Cale appearing on some game show in 1963, back when Lou Reed was trying to write a song for the next dance craze. Or Royal Trux trying to keep from nodding off while doing a station ID for your local channel's weekly video show. Or Brian Wilson doing interviews when he was physically unhealthy but just a little more there mentally. Somewhere there's someone who had forgotten these things; they kinda sorta thought it happened, but they're not quite sure. But YouTube, barring a takedown order, never forgets.

My first memory of the city I now live in is the opening credits to "The Bob Newhart Show". Hearing the theme song still does an emotional number on me, to an embarrassing degree. I think of the credits and the tune every time I cross the Chicago River when I'm on Lakeshore Drive-- the grey skies, the El in the distance, Bob on his way home to see Emily. All the romance and excitement-- tall buildings, jazzy music, trains, the daily paper, the rush of people-- was there in that minute. Hey, I was eight. But then for many years after, it was like it never happened. I doubt I heard the song once between my early 20s and my late 30s. But now I can call up that song and that credit sequence any time I want.

Documenting the world in order to keep it alive is not a new reflex. It goes back to photos, to wax cylinders, even further. Our family had a very early Betamax, one of those things the approximate dimensions and weight of a large window air-conditioning unit. There were no movies to rent, and a tape held only an hour, so we would record TV shows and watch them over and over. There are a handful of episodes of "M*A*S*H" that I've seen dozens of times each, because we had tapes of them lying around. It wasn't as if there were any shortage of "M*A*S*H" re-runs on broadcast television. But we taped them because we could. They were ours. When you explore YouTube, you realize that this impulse was common.

I've just started reading a book by Greg Milner called Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, and it opens with a description of a concert in 1915. Thomas Edison used to barnstorm, doing demonstrations to prove that his Diamond Disc Phonograph machine was just as good as the real thing. He would play records, and standing next to him was a live singer, who would sing along with the records and then stop, letting the record finish a line or a phrase. People were amazed. All of a sudden, the act of hearing music was pried apart from the passage of time. Music was something you could put on a shelf or stick in your closet; you no longer had to remember how it went, or ask someone to play it again.

Which brings me back to something else. Highland Appliance was a Midwest chain of stores that went out of business in the 1990s. It's where I and just about everyone I knew in Mid-Michigan bought their first stereo. There was nothing especially notable about it-- it was basically Best Buy or Circuit City, appliance chains haven't changed much-- but their advertising was impressive for a regional concern. Reading the description of the Edison concerts, I flashed back to a Highland Appliance spot, one in which a boy uses a reel-to-reel deck to record and play back his piano lessons so he could sneak outside and play. I related to that ad. I was about same age as the kid when it ran, and I never liked practicing the piano. And guess what? There it is on YouTube. It was videotaped in a studio and broadcast through cables and recorded to magnetic tape and stuck in a cabinet, and now it's up there for the world to see. And it's exactly like I remember it: there's the tape machine whirring in the background, getting down every note of "Für Elise", capturing and reproducing life so faithfully even someone standing in the next room is fooled.

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