Palo Alto, 1998
I got the shivers as the crescendo of guitaring hit another peak. I’d been told about Freebird. I think I’d heard bits and pieces of it. I remember being told that you’d not heard guitaring until you’d heard Freebird. What had been the benchmark up until then? Floyd’s Comfortably Numb? The Eagles Hotel California? I’d related. At university I could check out any time, but I could never leave. Actually, I did check out, but came back. Seems like the Eagles were right.
Freebird was more like an orgy of guitars and you could never just start at the guitar section. You’d have to build to it. Starting at the guitar section was like having an orgasm with no foreplay. It’s said that if you were dropped on top of Mount Everest without acclimatising the change in air pressure would kill you in seconds. I’ve had some moments when listening to my headphones where I felt breathless and had to rip my phones from my head. The hot sun in Palo Alto didn’t help. California air seems both wet and dry, depending on the time of day.
I was free and lost in Palo Alto. No car. I took the buses and walked, even when it was clear that no one walks where I was walking. Taking London to California with me. Nobody drives in London. No one sane anyway.
Howard Stern had been playing on the radio. There was a discussion about blow jobs with Marilyn Manson. 90s America felt like another planet to me. Freebird felt like another planet. One guitar layered over another, layered over another. I had to turn the volume up, in the hope of matching intensity with sheer volume. I kept thinking it had to climax somewhere, but even when it did climax it then thumped along and built again and felt like an old runaway train. It’s where I wanted to be. It’s still where I want to be. I was almost sweating and panting as I whipped the headphones off my head, the sound trailing away in my hands.
Where next?
→ If you want to see how music and expression can hit us before we even have words for why, The Noise Coming From Philippe
→ If you want to explore how songs, memories and moments slowly become part of who we are, You saw Chuck Weatherspoon
→ If you want to understand how certain places and experiences can leave us feeling both connected and strangely distant, Hyde Park 2018
If the writing resonates, stay with it.