when you heard it

This evening I was sitting in a Peet's in San Francisco, having a quick cup of coffee before a meeting started. As I was sitting there, checking mail, I heard the barista singing, "Stop Breaking Down" as he was working in the back, cleaning stuff. From the style, I could tell that the version of the song he'd learned was the Rolling Stones from Exile on Main Street.

I could tell by the phrasing. It's the first album I'd heard the song on too. I must have listened to it hundreds of times the year it came out. It's still probably my favorite Stones album, even though it's messy, has this dense, druggy production.

A few years after Exile came out, I bought a couple of records of Robert Johnson's music, King of the Delta Blues I & II. It had come out before Exile, but I hadn't really started to listen to blues then. It has the original (as far as I know) version of "Stop Breaking Down" on the second volume. Johnson's take is faster and funnier than the Stones: His vocal is more eccentric.

It's weird to think that I was the same distance from Robert Johnson's recording as the Peet's barista is from the Stones.

Earlier this week I was thinking about music and its context during a staff meeting. My organization is going to have a reception in Houston at the end of the month. I'm bringing a wi-fi speaker, but I told everyone that my musical tastes are not reliable enough to be the DJ.

It's the truth. I would put stuff like Poinciana on it and 21st century Bluegrass and funk and maybe even some electronica. I would be the only one enjoying myself. So one of my colleagues volunteered to bring her surefire four hours of Motown.

People will really like that.

It's the truth. Motown is pretty universally liked across race, age, class, and any other line you can think of.  The odd thing (to me anyhow) is that most of the people who love Motown, know it only as oldies music. Most of them weren't born when "Where Did Our Love Go" hit #1. I probably heard it first on a transistor radio sitting on someone's window sill. Or maybe I heard it at the beauty parlor on one of those interminable Saturday mornings, as I was getting my hair straightened. It was just summer music.

I don't know why the big hits were always released in the summer. It seems as though that still sort of happens. When I heard the music that's now known as Motown, though it might be from Indiana (Vee-Jay), New York (Atlantic), or Memphis (Stax), it was just soul music or R&B.  Calling it all Motown makes it an artifact. It's fixed in time and space. No one makes music that sounds like this, unless it's a quote or ironic. Even if someone hearing it for the first time loves it, there's no way that there aren't all these associations and cultural echoes built right into that first experience. They will never hear it as just one thing out of many on a lazy afternoon.