Seduced Into Life

Recorded Music and Our Secret Histories

Some people think they were born too late.  I was actually born late.  I was to be born on December 15, 1972, but I squatted.  My labor, January 1, 1973, was induced.  The #1 song was “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon.  As a child, I told everyone that I was seduced.  When I figured out my mistake—when I learned the meanings of the words induced and seduced—I did not want to let it go.  My misapprehension felt right, somehow. 

I lie down, press play, and I am induced and seduced again.

The first promise of recorded music is privacy. Not everyone has it, of course, but we want it.  We think back to a time when we either had it or yearned for it.  And adulthood begins with the recognition that safety is an illusion.  We are all vulnerable, and all the trappings of comfort we cobble together are temporary.  They can be taken away anytime.  And yet we cling.   “In My Room” by the Beach Boys, based on this premise—really, it embodies the premise—is so simple, nearly savant in its genius, that nearly anyone could make it into nearly anything.  It induces, it seduces.  The 1963 B-side to “Be True to Your School,” written by Gary Usher and Brian Wilson—a bard of adolescence who had a hard time growing up—is, to use a young person’s word, relatable, even to the unrelatable.  One could be a loathsome person and still yearn. 

When it comes to “In My Room,” there are no red states or blue states.  For me, its two minutes and fourteen seconds defy cynicism.  Every time I hear it, my objectivity is gone.  The façade of safety keeps cracking, and when I listen, I feel something cracking, too.

I do not think of the room as a place of perfection.  Far from it.  My bed—my first post-crib at two and a half—was too small, my closet was a fire hazard, an allergen.  Even my cherished records were in a constant case of chaos.  Music, my refuge, was a mess, like everything else.  And yet I still searched for bliss. With whoever shared my bed, whatever came through my speakers. 

We want that feeling of safety again.  We do not want to be reminded that we will die, and that, if we live long enough, we will decay, disappoint ourselves and everyone else who cares.   There could be a time when no one cares.  There will be a moment when we struggle for our final breath.  And when we hear the Beach Boys, we imagine a group of teenage brothers coming in from a day of surfing and maybe dancing with girls (Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who surfed, and he drowned), and seeking asylum. 

"In My Room" was written when Carl, Dennis, and Brian were sharing a room.  It wasn't for them, it was for us.  For many children sitting at the piano, the first accomplishment, after “Chopsticks,” is Frank Loesser and Hoagy Carmichael's “Heart and Soul”—the near universal song for kids who learn nothing else on the piano—based on the same 1-6-2-5 progression as “In My Room.”  These are the chords you learn when you never learn.     

It is hard for me to hear the word “room” without thinking of “womb,” and Paul Simon, when he was writing the lyrics to “I Am a Rock,” must have felt the same way.  We keep finding our way back to the promise of comfort, new romance, a soundtrack to take you away from your worst subjects and your least favorite teachers.  How many hours of your young day were devoted to misery, and how many to salvation?  If you were lucky enough to have a stereo in your room, it advertised compensation for the worst parts of your day.  Keep moving on from “Chopsticks,” “Heart and Soul,” and “In My Room,” and you learn that Virginia Woolf wrote of needing a room of one’s own.  Shut out the world and create a new one. 

When I was in third grade, my isolation chamber was proliferating.  A used record store owned by an alleged pedophile sold me enough old issues of Rolling Stone to fill my developing lungs with dust and fill my still forming mind with rock critic swagger.  Then, for a parody of that attitude, I had the National Lampoon records and magazines, then everything I could read about Monty Python and the early years of SNL.   Silence, Exile, and Cunning. 

I was doubling down on shutting out the outside world with music and books.  Everything I was reading and hearing was an attempt to negate pretty much everything else.  By then, I was such an acquired taste, there were only three kids who would do recess with me.  One died of cancer at 40, another reached out to me well into my 40s to try to convert me to Christianity.

Then there was Uriel Carpenter.  He seemed to have a different tie-die for every day of the week.  If there had been a hippie kid in Peanuts, he would have been it.  His father’s name was John Carpenter, and he was an actual carpenter.  Every room in the house had a waterbed.  It felt like a commune.  He moved away and I never heard from him again until the end of 2020.   

You the David I went to grade school with at Hamilton Park? I'll assume yes. I'm obviously sitting around with too much time to think thanks to the pandemic. Regardless. I've been wanting to drop a note for years, to thank you for a cassette you gave me back in third grade. It was black, originally with something lousy on it, but you peeled off the labels, taped over the notch, and put Revolver on one side for me, Rubber Soul on the other. I can't tell you how many thousands of times I played that thing. Or how much sustenance it brought me. Or how much badly needed escape. It was the first music that found its way to my inner self, my soul, and it still is the surest means for finding myself when there is too much happening around me…. Of course I'd have been turned on to them eventually, but I wouldn't necessarily be able to listen now and be transported back to Uriel at 8, 9, 10 years old. It's being a kid again, at my age, that really I'm writing to thank you for. 

Imagine that cultural share: It’s 3rd Grade in 1981 and you’ve got to hear Rubber Soul and Revolver.  Imagine hearing them for the first time.  He didn’t need me to expose him to The Beatles, of course, and I thought it odd that his hippie parents hadn’t already done it.  Because I did not fit into childhood, I was taping Beatles albums for another misfit, recommending them as an obsessive.  Now, here we were, on the internet, surviving Covid, our 40s getting serious.  The Beatles were taking him back to the thing I was rejecting.  He was finding his way back to the childhood I rejected, with the cassette I made for him, which he kept. 

I did not have a specific vision for adulthood, but I did imagine it would get a lot better than 3rd Grade.  I never thought that I would yearn for it later.  And yet I had given a key to Uriel.  I remember envying him for having a hippie family, but it was he who still envied me.

I remember your room, and how it felt to me, from when I had occasion to visit your house. The Carpenter abode was full of family and chaos and comfort, without privacy or personal space. Yours had this cavernous quiet darkness that felt so foreign to me, and so appealing. 

This was the lonely place where I made my tapes, did my reading, and plotted my escape.  It didn’t occur to me that it would be anything worth envying. 

In this world I lock out
All my worries and my fears
In my room
In my room

In the summer of 2019, there were two—two!—documentaries about the Laurel Canyon music scene in the 1960s.  One of them featured a performance of “In My Room” with Jakob Dylan—son of Bob and inspiration for “Forever Young”—and Fiona Apple.  Apple had been sheltering in place long before it was mandatory.  She was recording Fetch the Bolt Cutters at home, bursting at the seams for all of us.  And for those who could really hear it, being in one’s home, in one’s room, created a greater freedom than the old studio settings.

I spread like strawberries
I climb like peas and beans
I've been sucking it in so long
That I'm bursting at the seams

“In My Room” had become fate.  Since Fetch the Bolt Cutters, we have struggled to survive.  When it was nominated for Grammy Awards, she appeared on our screens to tell us she wasn’t going.  She couldn’t go and stay sober, she told us.

The closer one is to the music, the more one feels it.  Almost everything out there is taking us out of the trance.   “In My Room” is based on a fantasy.  If we are still here, we turn it on again, and for two and a half minutes, we are not in this world. 

On the day I was born, Carly Simon sang that I thought that this song was about me.  It’s not, but in our rooms, we can believe what we want.  God only knows what I’d be without it.