Last night I was washing the dishes, streaming an online feed that I like to listen to and a Cat Stevens (as he was known then) song popped up. I was immediately transformed, transported, magically transmogrified to a different place and time…it was really jarring. Boom and there I was the Palazzo dello Sport, Rome Italy, Spring 1974 sitting in the crowd while Cat Stevens was doing his sound check. Isn’t it scary and wonderful how the opening bars of a song can just immediately take you somewhere else thousands of miles and decades removed! This was not just spring of 1974, it was Easter weekend in Rome Italy 1974. I had dropped out of my undergraduate year at Georgia Tech, fondly known among survivors…..errr alumni as the North Avenue Trade School or more ascerbically as Ma Tech, as in Ma Tech is a mean mother…fill in the rest, where I had majored in beer which led to some rather embarrassing un-achievements in calculus and chemistry, the latter being my major at the time. Have I mentioned that my mother is a Brit? Well if not that is an important part of the story because I took off for the UK in the fall of 1973, arrived hungover but with the address of an attractive psychologist doing research in London on sexually transmitted diseases. She and her roommate/research assistant had a basement flat in Belgravia, a pony neighborhood in London, just around the corner from several mid-Eastern embassies. That is where I first learned to play bridge, drinking copious amounts of wine, while occasionally listening to explosive devices go off set by the Irish Republican Army. It was in Deb’s flat where I first heard a Taj Mahal album called the Real Thing which was basically a blues album with a tuba backup section.
Since my mum’s parents lived just outside London I had a place to crash but I still needed income to pay for my room at my nan and grandads place. You should understand that back then it was still common to have to put coins into the gas and electrical meters and pay in advance for what you were going to use so it was not uncommon several times during an evening to break out a flashlight and drop some coins into the meter. Anyway, my poor grandparents had to deal with a 20-year old college dropout more interested in spending time in London drinking beer and chasing women. Since I needed income I got a job working in the collection department of a television rental company. In England most families did not purchase their televisions but rented them, some on a rent to purchase kind of agreement. My employment of course was not exactly legal, my not being a British citizen, and meant that I was working as an illegal alien. Back then though if you showed up at the appropriate agency they would basically issue the equivalent of a social security number which entitled you to access to the national health care and a pension. My employer wanted me to eventually help them with their new computer system because I was American and I think they believed even then that Americans were born with the knowledge of how to work and program computers. They did not know that I had failed my first quarter of calculus.
Back to Rome. Over the next 6 months I scraped together enough money to take off and explore Europe using my thumb as my travel guide. To abbreviate and get to the point, I eventually found myself somewhat stranded on the north coast of Italy where I hitched a long distance ride with a very pleasant Canadian couple from British Columbia. It was with them that I found myself in Rome that Easter Weekend. Back then, the first place travelers would go would be the American Express office to exchange some money and pick up mail. Of course on driving into Rome we hit the AmEx office and on walking in we met a scruffy heavily bearded guy who immediately launched himself into massive hugs with the Canadian couple. It turns out they had wintered over together in Morocco on the beach. He had a room in a pensione that we crashed in and oh…by the way Cat Stevens is playing tonight, let’s go get tickets. That’s how I ended up listening to Cat Stevens with a few thousand other people in Rome. This is obviously only part of the story, the rest includes another American traveler, a French Canadian gentleman with an impressive handlebar moustache, Easter weekend at the Coliseum listening to the Pope, and walking into a bar full of rather convincing transsexuals.
So my challenge to you is to relate what song transports you back to another place and time.
Be well, be safe, get vaccinated.
Geoff
