You See? I Was Right!

The preface from my new book, "Bridge & Tunnel Boys"

The following is the preface to my forthcoming book, to be published next week. It will be the first of three short excerpts to appear here. I hope you like them. —Jim

The writing of history is a bid for vindication.

Of course, the writing of history is many things: an expression of a deeply human desire for storytelling; an effort to understand; an act (sometimes implicit or even unconscious) of love. But whatever else they may be, histories are efforts to say, in effect: This—this topic, this question, this explanation, whatever—matters.  It matters to me, but more importantly, it should matter to you. The document you’re encountering, produced with some degree of exertion, seeks to capture a particular time and place, a time and place that may be described in personal terms but which is always to some degree collective, and that’s precisely why it matters. To the extent that a writer of history will succeed in engaging a reader, that reader will agree: yes, it does matter, because I, perhaps instinctively, share it, too. In choosing to pay the historian in the currency of attention, the reader (viewer, listener, whatever—modalities may vary) has a moment of recognition that while the historian is describing phenomena in the past, such phenomena are in some sense ongoing, even if only as a matter of the reader understanding the urges that led the historian to write in the first place. That bond, however finite or fragile, is one of imagined communion: you see, I was right to care, because you care, too. We have, for a moment, transcended time. Together.

This book is about the most evanescent of human experiences: popular music. Created in a moment to express a moment, hit records—a peculiar expression of 20^th-century American capitalism—are meant to capture an eternal now, not only in the moment of their composition, but also in the lives of their listeners: my senior year of high school; the summer I started dating Susie; that job I had in town. The pleasure these songs—these records of experience—confer is a function of their simultaneous specificity and collectivity (yes, I was in high school then too, or no, I wasn’t, but I understand because I had a Susie of my own). We all have a special affection for the music we think of as being a part of our time, broadly construed, but its value comes from a recognition that its uniqueness has boundaries. We both widen and deepen our experience by considering those befores and afters and what makes them so, which is what history is all about.

In the larger sweep of human experience, the particular time and place considered in these pages are not especially important ones. The setting of this story is the United States in the closing decades of the twentieth century, what might be termed the Indian Summer of the American Empire—a time in which a nation, having experienced intimations of decline, flowered in a moment of mortal splendor expressed in the music of a pair of musicians of similar backgrounds and comparable temperaments who managed to express shared feelings with unusual acuity and durability. If the perceptions recorded here are imperfect—what perceptions are not?—they may nevertheless be useful in the construction of subsequent understanding and meaning. With that in mind, let’s drop the needle and listen.

Like what you’re reading? Pre-order Bridge & Tunnel Boys now!