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Forty Years On
I have a good memory for dates. This isn’t something I often boast about, because it comes with a responsibility I’d rather not bear (namely, to act as the instigator and implicit master of all my social circle’s ceremonies). But there are times when being “temporally astute” adds a little charge to an otherwise idle moment.
Such as my walk home from coffee this morning. Without obvious prompting, the date “May 21, 1971” flashed into view. There are only a handful of things I associate with the year 1971: it was the height of the busing controversy in the States; my dad, still a decade away from meeting my mom, was in Florida, helping launch Disney World; there was The Pentagon Papers, which I wrote about in college; Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women was published; and on May 21, 1971, Motown Records released perhaps the most important American album of the vinyl era — Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
It’s a date I know from my love affair with the album, which began when I was 17, during a very rainy spring in Indiana (my last Midwestern spring, as it turned out). It’s also a date that was reinforced in my memory last month, when I spent one insomnia-tastic night remixing the single “What’s Going On”, trying to crack the code to the song’s gorgeous arrangement.
You can listen to my remix here.
—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter
