You Can't Go Back
On Nostalgia, Community & Time Travelling
I was half heartedly browsing in an op shop (thrift store for those of you in America) the other day when I spied an original vintage box of Nina Ricci’s L’Air Du Temps perfume for $12. I wore this perfume - that cast ‘a fragrant, mysterious spell’ according to its romantic advertising - as a teenager.
I remember I loved its lightness, it smelled clean, like sunshine and soap, in deep contrast to the popular intensely exotic ‘seductive’ perfumes of the 80s like Poison, Obsession and Opium that made me gag as they drifted by. I purchased the bottle and could hardly wait to get home and try it, to see if it could momentarily transport me back in time. Either my memory was lying or the perfume had turned bad, but I was in a shower scrubbing the cloying L’Air Du Temps from my skin within half an hour. The Dave Rawlings Machine song Pilgrim (You Can’t Go Home) started playing on repeat in my mind. If you’ve heard it you’ll know what I mean, its got lyrics about being blasted by the sands of time and new tattoos that won’t let you go home and climbing silver strings of mandolins and wondering where you’re gonna run and where you’re gonna roam. All I knew was I understood you can’t go back.
There’s a photograph of Jimi Hendrix playing a cheap student level Fender Duo Sonic guitar in the back up house band for the Ronettes, circa 1964, that a fan put online last October. Apparently someone asked Jimi to turn down during the set (“Jimi, not so loud!”) and he at one point played guitar through his legs. ‘The Lovers’ was stuck onto his amp in shiny paper. It appears the drummer has gone for a cigarette, or a leak. If I could time travel to a show, this is the one I’d go to.
Buried amongst the avalanche of comments it generated is a reply from Ronnie to a fellow called Phil T Listener, who wrote that he saw his first rock show at ten years old in 1963, a Murray the K review at the Brooklyn Fox. Ronnie just pops in there, fifty comments deep, to reply to him and mention she remembered it well, thought Marvin Gaye might have been performing there too and how great those shows were. Nobody seemed to notice the great Ronnie Spector was in their midst, including the guy who had written the comment.
Journalist Annie Zaleski dug up an old review she’d written from when Ronnie guested at a 1977 Springsteen show that noted ‘Ronnie Spector had more eye contact with the audience in ten minutes than Springsteen had in his two hour show’. Ronnie told Lisa Loeb how much she loved her voice in a Twitter comment. The actress Debi Mazar posted on her Instagram ‘You’ve been my favourite forever Ronnie’ and she replied ‘Aww thank you Baby! I love your attitude!’. Ronnie wanted everyone to feel like they mattered, to be welcome in her community. She knew what it was to be an outsider, to feel alone. Ronnie’s last Tweeted reply was ‘Always there for you’ to artist Emily Wilson from Wilson Phillips, who shared a picture of Ronnie playing on her car radio captioned ‘Ronnie Spector always pops up when I need her’.
I need Ronnie every Christmas. Ronnie loved Christmas, I’m a grinch. Maybe it’s because I hate being told what to do and how to feel, I don’t know, but my Christmas struggle is real. I do not like Christmas music, except on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But when those first schmaltzy notes of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus kick in, I’m transported by Ronnie’s voice to a joyous place and to every good Christmas memory I ever had. You can read about my Christmas Eve 2020 communications with Ronnie here. She’s my Christmas spirit portal, the Christmas spirit well I drink from.
When I woke up January 12th this year, the morning she died, I had made notes for a message I was planning to send to Ronnie to ask if I could interview her about her painting for a story I was working on about musicians and art, and also because I desperately wanted to know more about the songs she casually revealed she sings with old friend and neighbor Keith Richards at the piano when she visits his place in a great Guardian interview with Jenn Pelly. The article states: ‘When she is not on tour, she likes to paint – she has an easel near a window – and lately, with a nod to the #MeToo movement, she has been painting images of other women’. Though I’ve searched high and low, I can’t find any of her paintings online. But I understand the compulsion. I’ve been painting pictures of women and men who have inspired me lately, its a way to connect through time and space with that feeling I have for them somehow. Art in all of its forms is a way to find connection, to touch something untouchable, whether by creating or absorbing.
Ronnie’s cover version of the Johnny Thunders classic ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory’ encapsulates so much of this feeling. So does ‘Say Goodbye To Hollywood’, and of course, it’s ultimate inspiration, the great ‘Be My Baby’. It’s her specialty, she has this way of reconnecting us with an earlier version of ourselves in a way thats both deeply nostalgic and defiantly forward facing. We’re peering through a window to witness ourselves way back in time. Songs can truly be a portal to time travel. As she sings in another song ‘It isn’t easy to explain’.
Listening to the Valerie June episode of the lovely podcast Playing Along With Norah Jones, I was enraptured by their beautiful voices entwining, singing one of Valerie June’s tunes together. After they finish, Valerie June is very choked up, and says the song took her right back to when her dad was still alive, and it shook her up. She says “It’s a crazy thing to sing a song and then go back in time!”.
recently posted a really moving essay by Tessa T about trying to remove those associations and meanings and memories that a song can plunge you straight back into - revisiting old ghosts as she puts it. It’s no easy task. Ghosts like hanging around. It’s hard to take meaning away once it’s taken hold.This is my 40th Loose Connections essay. I’ve never worked so consistently on a creative project in my life before, turning up without fail every second Sunday (Saturdays in the US) regardless of what chaos I’ve encountered the night before, and I’m grateful for the community I’m slowly finding here. I just published a story in No Depression about all the portals to inspiration and meaning and insight I’ve found on here from other musicians writing in the past couple of years, from
, , , , , , , and more. I'm excited that the brilliant has recently started a newsletter and , and are always great reads. You can read the article here:Here’s A Christmas Gift To You from Lo Carmen, a mere 3 or 4 hours of pretty groovy Xmas music to help you through the season.
As Dave Rawlings would say, Keep rolling, rolling down that road that you’re on…. and see you on the other side x
Thank you so much for the signal boost, sister. Much obliged!
Here's to loose connections across the seas! X