There are times when you hear a song, and it feels like you originally listened to it with certain people and certain places only to realize that is not the case. As a musical trigger my memory of the melodic and classic Boston tune “More Than a Feeling” seems to take me to clubs and parties aligned with my senior year of high school which ran from the fall of 1975 until its bitter end on June 28th of 1976. I can still see a bunch of stoned or blasted kids thrilled to finally reach the pinnacle of their educational prison and oblivious to what awaited ahead. 1976 was a transitional year with what would be considered classic rock today taking center stage while disco was roaring up behind it in the clubs.
The twist with this trigger is that Boston’s debut album, and the release of “More Than a Feeling” did not happen until September of 1976. By that time, I was living in a dorm room on the campus of Arizona State University doing my best impression of a student with a future and making friends with people from around the country. This is a period where our best thinking would have us piling into one of these meager rooms to smoke bongs and watch back-to-back episodes of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” on a local Phoenix channel. So, it would seem, that the people I was gathered with while listening to the timeless Boston sound were not my high school lower companions at all. Wait… I was the lower companion, wasn’t I?
The stark differences between June of 1976 and September of the same year were mostly cultural. As much as I would complain about my Long Island upbringing there were definitely advantages to these cultural differences I would only learn about by moving to (almost) the other end of the continent. It isn’t as though I had not seen differences in my younger years. We did travel on a camping trip throughout the United States one summer when I was a kid (my first taste of California at the age of 9 or 10?) I also used to go to Fort Lauderdale, Florida every February during a winter break from school for much of my childhood. There was also my mother’s fondness for pretty much all of the New England states which meant we would take trips to Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut to see caves, gardens, trees, woods, bays, maple syrup, and the home of the Von Trapp family in Stowe.
But in August of 1976, I would step into my first real experience in a desert (where I wasn’t driving through or leaving relatively quickly). The dense but dry heat and intensity of the sun would welcome me and I, in my own inimitable New York style would not return the love in the same way. It is possible there was a part of me who enjoyed being away from ‘home’ and all it represented, but the plain, stark reality was that I don’t know that I ever really had any sort of good feeling about Arizona in general or Phoenix as a home. It just always felt like a giant miscalculation on my overall path.
Coming into Tempe, the college town section of Phoenix, felt decent. It was very new and very much a day-to-day adventure for the discovery of bits and pieces of the southwest that I had not experienced in my home of origin. I can remember finding a little dive Mexican restaurant right by the campus and turning it into a regular place to eat. The Dash Inn was where I first had Margaritas (they weren’t something we drank in NY) and guacamole. The first time I saw guacamole I wouldn’t touch it because it was green. There was the idyllic sense of freedom along with all the hopes and fantasies of what to do with that freedom. I quickly found a few like minds on my floor at my initial home of Palo Verde West on campus (some by sniffing at doors for cannabis), and I remember locating a couple of other long-haired stoner types to begin the formation of what would become my original posse.
My first friends came from Indiana, Illinois, California, Upstate New York, South Carolina, and from a reservation in Arizona. It was my first real example of a melting pot. All these different backgrounds starting new lives and setting forth to begin their own distinct versions of a foundation for adulthood while feeling a bit of the shell shock of the heat and somewhat conservative atmosphere that presented itself around us. ASU was a party school, I expect you would hear that from most schools during any generation and I don’t know if this school still holds that mantle today. In 1976 it was our priority to make sure we all could find the right places to go and things to do. We were all able to instantly scope out where we could manage to get the drugs and the alcohol. Several of us came from states where the drinking age was 18 (at the time) and weren’t happy about having to digress to being underage once again (in 1976 the drinking age in Arizona was 19). But as any teenager or newly anointed college student would do, we found those who wanted to play and gathered to listen to the music that was important to the masses or the alternative audiences. Out of dorm room doorways, one would hear the strains of the country music of the day (prevalent in a southwestern state at the time), the swiftly gaining disco of the era (my roommates incessant playing of “Disco Duck” as an example), and the guitar-heavy new releases of Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same,” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “One More From the Road” that were coming from the rooms I would be in.
But then there was Boston and their first album entitled “Boston”. Here I thought this was a high school band when, in fact, it was my new college friends I was sharing it with. Boston was rock and roll like I had never heard it before. It moved us up from the southern rock that dominated a lot of the earlier 1970s in Long Island bars and created an instantly memorable pop-rock sound that fits the definition of a musical trigger like a glove. The song “More Than a Feeling” lives in its own fantasy of music as an escapism that brings the artist back to an event in his past. Although Boston’s event includes someone named Marianne and mine does not, the simple theme and sentiment are the very basis for the idea behind my musical triggers. This trigger is a soft reminder that not everything about Arizona was horrible.
I looked out this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away
It’s more than a feeling (more than a feeling)
When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)