Back in Maine – my beloved Maine – is a bar where I used to drink. It’s called Amigos because it purports to be a Mexican restaurant. Word is, there’s a dining room upstairs, but everyone in Portland knows that downstairs, through the door marked “BAR ROOM” in cheap, somehow menacing adhesive letters, is a serious drinkhouse.
It’s perfect. Cheap drinks, a pinball machine, two dartboards (which I was prohibited from using – more because of the darts than the boards), and an adequate sound system playing great music: Alice in Chains, Johnny Cash, Social Distortion, Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Tool, and Soundgarden.
When I hear those bands, I’m back at Amigos.
Unlike anything else, except maybe scent, music has the power to transport people across decades and miles. Hear a song you used to listen to in high school, and, for a tiny moment, you’re there again.
Music is transcendent that way. Soundgarden recorded Fell on Black Days in 1993, when Chris Cornell was 29. He sang into a machine which captured the moment – a moment – and ultimately distributed it around the world.
Machines shouldn’t be able to preserve the power and beauty that Cornell produced but, magically, they did.
Even more magically, hearing a few seconds of sound transports me back in time and delivers me to a barstool in Maine. I can smell Amigos, which is not always a blessing, and I can see my friends there, which always is.
Some of them, like Cornell, are gone now, but in brief moments that wash over me with sound, they live.
