{"id":2248,"date":"2011-04-12T22:56:39","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T02:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2248"},"modified":"2015-09-26T13:44:02","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T17:44:02","slug":"blue-jay-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2248","title":{"rendered":"Earworms, Musical and Otherwise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

Earworms, Musical and Otherwise\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

Blue Jay Way, by George Harrison, sung by the Beatles (1967), encountered 1967<\/h2>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

I had expected that my freshman experience at college would full of good things, and it did not disappoint.\u00a0 But I started to find out quickly that it was also full of things that were difficult, frustrating, and sometimes downright horrifying.<\/p>\n

Settling Into a Harder Place<\/h3>\n

For instance, within a week of my arrival, a young man who had just matriculated with me, and whose face was on the same page as mine in the face book,[1] was tied up and beaten to death by a campus tobacconist whose shop stood just a block away from the dorm where I slept.\u00a0 Although I was not quite unfamiliar with violent death occurring in my immediate vicinity,[2] it had never before happened to someone of whom I could plausibly say \u201cthat could have been me.\u201d[3] More mundanely, my courses proved harder than I could have guessed (I pulled a first-semester GPA of only 2.8), and I wrote a friend, and meant it, that \u201ceverybody here\u2019s smarter than I.\u201d\u00a0 My study habits clearly needed upgrading, but I didn\u2019t have a clue how.\u00a0 There was also chronic homesickness, and not doing spectacularly well with the girls, although I wasn\u2019t really complaining too much about that: every near-miss at a relationship (and there were a lot of different ones) truly was a learning experience, and I felt it as such, whatever I may have said.[4]<\/p>\n

The city itself was challenging, too.\u00a0 I wanted to explore.\u00a0 Philadelphia yielded itself up, but not easily.\u00a0 There was lots of dirt, neighborhoods where it wasn\u2019t safe to go, unpredictable train schedules,[5] distances that were a little uncomfortable to walk (and this was before backpacks, wheeled briefcases, or any technology for miniaturizing the information you needed to have available for your studies).\u00a0 The air was full of soot that would collect on your record grooves (and you\u2019d best believe I noticed something like that.)\u00a0 Frequently there were sulfur dioxide and other smells from the nearby oil refineries.\u00a0 People were harder than in my hometown.\u00a0 The barber at the student union practically cursed me out when I didn\u2019t tip him (not knowing better).\u00a0 I got into a fight with the petty tyrant who checked to assure we were wearing ties for dinner at Freshman Commons, as required.[6] There was even a certain kind of pressure I had to come to terms with, being Catholic in a predominantly Jewish environment.[7]<\/p>\n

George Harrison’s Earworm<\/h3>\n

So as exciting as it all was, there was a queasy underside to it that kept me off balance.\u00a0 I came up against the\u00a0quintessential episode of that the day I bought the Beatles\u2019 next album, Magical Mystery Tour<\/em>.\u00a0 Per the experts at AllMusic, the release date was Monday, November 27th<\/a>.\u00a0 By then I had completely absorbed the complexities of Sgt. Pepper<\/em>, which I\u2019ve already discussed<\/a>, and I was more than ready for whatever the Beatles were about to dish up next.\u00a0 The first few people I\u2019d heard talking about the follow-up album were disappointed, but I just had to have it.\u00a0 I bought the album on Saturday, December 9.[8] I was finished with all my courses then, and studying for finals.\u00a0 (Complaining to my parents the previous day that \u201cI should be out wenching and getting topped, but I\u2019m going to be reading Kierkegaard.\u201d)\u00a0 Magical Mystery Tour<\/em> was probably a present to myself for getting through the semester and an encouragement to myself to\u00a0study hard.<\/p>\n

I think on my first couple of listens, I found a lot to like about the album, but there was one totally creepy song, George Harrison\u2019s Blue Jay Way<\/em>.\u00a0 My Beatles vade mecum<\/em>, Ian MacDonald\u2019s Revolution in the Head<\/em><\/a> objectively describes the song:<\/p>\n

Written in the fog-bound Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles on 1st<\/sup> August 1967, the blurred harmonic oscillation between C major and C diminished which is almost the entire musical matter of BLUE JAY WAY all too successfully conveys its author\u2019s jet-lagged dislocation while waiting for publicist Derek Taylor to arrive.\u00a0 A four-minute pedal-drone laden with ADT,[9] phasing, and backwards tapes, it numbingly fails to transcend the weary boredom that inspired it.<\/address>\n

Subjectively, I found the song scary.\u00a0 It seemed like a descent into some kind of languorous madness. (To be fair, probably not what Harrison intended.)\u00a0 Not only was the song unattractive, but it wormed its way into my head and I couldn\u2019t get it out.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the songs you like that do that to you.\u00a0 By the third play-through I deliberately lifted up the tone arm and skipped that song.<\/p>\n

Here Be Dragons<\/h3>\n

Predictably, I was far from the only person celebrating that day.\u00a0 The fraternities and sororities were doing their end-of-semester thing.\u00a0 I was no frat boy, and would not have been invited or welcome to their festivities.\u00a0 But a block from me, at the Delta Tau Delta house, a dance was in progress.\u00a0 Around 1:30 on the Sunday morning, someone mishandled a cigarette near some combustible Christmas decorations.<\/a> The ground floor was promptly engulfed in flames, which then quickly spread up the one stairway to the second floor.\u00a0 People on the second floor were trapped.\u00a0 Many jumped from the window, some were pushed from the window by frantic partygoers behind them, and some injured themselves in the fall.\u00a0 Three died, two frat brothers and a high school girl.\u00a0 (Heavens only know what she was doing there at that hour.)<\/p>\n

The word was all around campus, of course, when I awoke that Sunday morning.\u00a0 I was dumbfounded.\u00a0 That frat was, if memory serves correctly, at or near the east end of the fraternity row, on the main campus block.\u00a0 I passed it every day.\u00a0 And now people had died there!\u00a0 I was scared.\u00a0 I was horrified.\u00a0 I tried but failed to get images of people on fire out of my head.<\/p>\n

When I first walked on campus after that, I stole a glance at the charred entrance with the tape around it.\u00a0 Then I looked away.\u00a0 And for the next several days, I wouldn\u2019t look that way.\u00a0 Even though I didn\u2019t attend frat bacchanals, I knew that what had happened was a sample of the random disasters that come along from time to time.\u00a0 The next time might not be frat party, but something else I hadn\u2019t even thought of.\u00a0 People die in disasters, and there was no telling when one of them might involve me.\u00a0 There but for the grace of God, I was feeling.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s obvious, then, why the song is the Theme Song for the experience.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want either to look at the one thing or to listen to the other.\u00a0 But I had to keep encountering them.\u00a0 And I couldn\u2019t get either one out of my head.<\/p>\n

Growing up was, thank goodness, a process of becoming exposed to all kinds of things, only a few of them traumatic, but traumatic surely was part of it.\u00a0 And I was growing up.<\/p>\n

Denial to a New Level<\/h3>\n

I had not been the only person celebrating, and then I was not the only person avoiding.\u00a0 The following summer I received the yearbook (actually the only one I ever sprang for while I was a collegian).\u00a0 On the Delta Tau Delta page<\/a>, it\u2019s as if the event had never occurred.\u00a0 \u201cThis was a good year for Delta,\u201d the page informs us, \u201cas brothers remained active in every major aspect of University life.\u201d\u00a0 Football heroes are mentioned, and service clubs.\u00a0 Toward the end, remarkably, this: \u201cSocial activities were climaxed in the fall with the annual Christmas formal and the spring semester was full of promise as we gained another outstanding pledge class.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s it<\/em>?\u00a0 That\u2019s all that\u2019s worth mentioning about the \u201cChristmas formal?\u201d\u00a0 Nothing about the three lives snuffed out and the desperate people being pushed out the window, and the charred entrance, and the trauma for the entire campus?<\/p>\n

I kept hearing George Harrison\u2019s refrain in my head, Please don\u2019t be long\/Please don\u2019t you be very long<\/em>, like a plea to the missing, as if George were invoking them to delay no further their return from the dead.\u00a0 But George was too spaced-out for his voice to reach them, and so they wandered off further into the land of shades.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1] I am now speaking of an actual face book, distributed by the University, with pretty much everyone\u2019s photo and some identifying information in it.\u00a0 I still have mine.\u00a0 So successful has Facebook become in preempting the sense of these morphemes that this bit of etymology will probably soon be known only to philologists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2] In a fit of road rage, a next-door neighbor of mine had slain the father of someone I went to school with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3] In reality, it probably couldn\u2019t have been me.\u00a0 There were strong overtones of homosexuality about the whole incident, which would have ruled me out as a victim, but I hadn\u2019t quite got a fix yet on what all that was about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4] For instance, one concrete lesson I learned was that after a bad date, even if the girl said she\u2019d go out with you again, she wouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 I think I grasped that one quicker than some guys did.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5] Although I talked with bravado about the transit system.\u00a0 And it was a fact that I could enter the maw of the 37th<\/sup> Street underground trolley stop, and emerge near my father\u2019s apartment at the 116th<\/sup> Street and Broadway IRT station in New York without going outside once, which was pretty cool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6] I wanted to wear a turtleneck sweater one night, and thought a tie under it would be silly.\u00a0 He insisted on checking, found that I had no tie on, and refused me admittance until I went back to the dorm and secured a tie.\u00a0 The following night I presented myself with a turtleneck again.\u00a0 He again insisted on an inspection.\u00a0 This time there was a tie, but taped to my collar above the tie was a sign that read \u201cFuck You.\u201d\u00a0 This needless confrontation with authority got me into some kind of trouble, although the details are hazy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7] Which Penn was at the time.\u00a0 The resulting rules could get damned confusing.\u00a0 For instance I\u2019d been a stage manager of the Penn Players\u2019 big musical which had played the weekend preceding the weekend I\u2019m about to discuss.\u00a0 There had been a pretty member of the crew who had kissed me several times amidst the scrum of sexual friction that always happens backstage.\u00a0 After the production, I had asked her out, and was told she only dated Orthodox Jewish boys.\u00a0 I found it strange \u2013 then \u2013 to be treated as a person in one context and as just a member of a category in another.\u00a0 Acceptable to kiss but not to date was a new one on me.\u00a0 Then.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8] The incident I\u2019m about to discuss occurred in the early hours of Sunday, December 10.\u00a0 (See this newspaper account<\/a>, dated the Monday, which supplies the date by implication.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9] Artificial double-tracking.\u00a0 Says MacDonald: \u201cIt consists of taking the signal from the sync head of the multitrack, recording it to a variably-oscillated loop, and sending it back to the multitrack about a fifth of a second out of phase.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around 1:30 on the Sunday morning, someone mishandled a cigarette near some combustible Christmas decorations. The ground floor was promptly engulfed in flames, which then quickly spread up the one stairway to the second floor. People on the second floor were trapped. Many jumped from the window, some were pushed from the window by frantic partygoers behind them …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2628,2411,2657,2642,2656,2635,2639,2631,2629,1926,2648,2647,2644,2653,2650,1726,2640,2026,2645,2634,2053,2652,2641,2646,2113,2638,2655,2654,2465,2651,2643,2633,2637,1972,2632,2636,2649],"class_list":["post-2248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-116th-street","tag-2411","tag-adt","tag-allmusic","tag-artificial-double-tracking","tag-backpacks","tag-barbers","tag-blue-jay-way","tag-broadway","tag-catholic","tag-delta-fire","tag-delta-tau-delta","tag-derek-taylor","tag-dress-codes","tag-face-books","tag-facebook","tag-freshman-commons","tag-george-harrison","tag-hollywood-hills","tag-homesickness","tag-ian-macdonald","tag-irt","tag-jewish","tag-los-angeles","tag-new-york","tag-oil-refineries","tag-penn-players","tag-pennsylvania-players","tag-philadelphia","tag-road-rage","tag-soren-kierkegaard","tag-study-habits","tag-sulfur-dioxide","tag-the-beatles","tag-violence-beatings","tag-wheeled-briefcases","tag-yearbooks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2248"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5500,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions\/5500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}