Blowin' in the Wind

After all these years, the voices I listened to at 12 or 13 resonate deeply enough to move me. JoJo bought an album called Peter, Paul and Mary in Concert at our neighborhood Sour Records store when she was visiting at Thanksgiving and left it with us because she doesn't have a turntable. When I tried to play it, the stereo kept cutting out, so you'd hear half a line then nothing, very annoying. Gven thought it was a speaker problem but couldn't explain how that would make the tuner cut out (see On Verbocentrism), which made no logical sense to me, but what do I know about audio equipment? Only enough to improvise cables from an old set of computer speakers and the speakers from a 1986 Saab named Olaf, so we could listen to CDs with the volume low. When a new set of real speakers magically appeared under our dying fraser fir, I hooked them up and the stereo worked fine.

First I played the new Dave Brubeck CD that my thoughtful daughter gave me, and what a difference it made to hear it through decent speakers with the woofers to get a warm, solid bass. Then I played a raucous Squirrel Nut Zippers CD with lots of crazy swing tunes loosely strung around a holiday theme. Finally I got around to putting on JoJo's PP&M LP, and by the second track tears were streaming down my face as I was transported back to 1964.

The songs have taken on a life of their own over the years, as they've entered pop culture and been covered by hundreds of other performers. The writer has long since become a folk hero by writing and singing hundreds of other songs that have influenced thousands of other artists. The social changes encapsulated in some of them became part of mainstream culture, as well as my personal history growing up in Middle America in midcentury. Now people look back at the civil rights and antiwar movements as quaint artifacts of something called The Sixties. It's tough getting old.

Those three familiar voices etched in vinyl weren't the first or the last to record Dylan's protest songs, and most people would argue that they're not the definitive version (JoJo would disagree); but Yarrow, Stookey and Travers were the reed-like tenor, baritone drone, and passionate alto who introduced me to those songs, that kind of music, and those changes. Since the records could be played on the radio and bought by church-going, middle-class white kids, they opened up something for people like us at just the right time. In some kind of chronosynclastic infundibulum (to steal Kurt Vonnegut's great phrase) I was born just in time to be ripe for what Peter, Paul and Mary were singing when Bob Dylan was writing epochal songs like "The Times They Are a Changin'."

According to the growth-ring theory of human development, I will always be that 12-year-old boy from the suburbs, even after that growth ring had been outgrown by many other layers of experience, just as the 18-year-old in me still gets into the Carpenters, the Association, and Iron Butterfly. What surprised me is that it's not just the songs, which I knew I liked, but the voices that first brought me the songs. I guess you had to be there.