The Tracks of His Years
Craig Werner on a great new book from Doug Bradley
We’re thrilled to welcome back our friend Craig Werner, who has previous contributed great essays for us on Ann Powers and Rickie Lee Jones, to talk about the new book by Wisconsin-based writer Doug Bradley. Craig and Doug collaborated on an essential book about the music of the Vietnam War, and it’s a thrill to see them in call-and-response with this review. Thanks, as always, to Craig for sharing his thoughts with us. - DC and CH
In his mesmerizing Dream-Time: Chapters from the Sixties, Geoffrey O’Brien pondered the question of why music mattered, and matters. Meditating on his younger self, O'Brien wrote: “He never quite knew whether his emotions gave character to the song, or the song to his emotions. If he had not heard the Zombies sing ‘Tell Her No,’ would he have imagined some such miniature music drama anyway—or had the Zombies simply invented a new mode of feeling? After a while it seemed that every song—every good song—defined an emotion which did not exist outside that song. No song could ever substitute for another. There was only one ‘Another Girl,’ or ‘Pretty Flamingo’ or “Ooo, Baby Baby.’ Ultimately there could be thousands of isolated emotions, like a seed catalog.”
The miniature musical dramas at the center of Doug Bradley's The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir come together to form a not-so-mini epic on the theme of becoming a man. That may not be a particularly fashionable way to phrase the issue, but at a moment when any sane notion of masculinity threatens to be washed away in the tsunami of macho bluster, it matters. Deeply. As O'Brien wrote, each song defines a fundamentally new emotional condition, and each of the 46 title songs of Bradley's beautifully crafted short chapters pinpoints a stage in a long and winding road toward becoming a brother, son, husband or father who can look himself in the mirror.
As the early stages of Tracks make clear, that's not something Bradley always knew. Growing up in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he stumbled his way through a jungle of dating rituals that would have been familiar to anyone educated by prime-time situation comedies. On the surface, he more or less made it work, but, as his brilliant chapter on the Beatles' "I'm a Loser" makes crystal clear, there were times when he felt like he wasn't going to be able to pull it off.
As I reflected on The Tracks of My Tears, I found myself thinking of historian Heather Stur's essential Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era. Stur argues convincingly that Vietnam veterans assumed the lead role in a (always and obviously incomplete) evolution of role models from John Wayne to "househusband" John Lennon. Bradley put in a tour in Vietnam as a journalist based in the air-conditioned jungle of Long Binh Base. He's dug deep into those stories in his short story collection DEROS: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle; Who'll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America; and Rolling Stone's 2015 Music Book of the Year, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of Vietnam (full disclosure requires me to identify myself as his co-author on that project.) Vietnam plays a part in Tracks of My Years, but the musical foundation was established in Bradley's early years growing up in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He recounts the way his musical world developed in dialog with his big-band loving father, his doo-wop singing brother, and, crucially, with a high school English teacher who convinced him that the Beatles deserved to be taken as seriously as the great English romantic poets. Bradley does a disquietingly convincing job excavating the sexually ambiguous cross-currents of a relationship that walked the line between friendship and something more disturbing. The story never resolves, but it echoes through everything that follows as Bradley moves on to a small Christian college in West Virginia and Vietnam, before coming back to what the veterans called, simply, "the World."
The soundtrack of The Tracks of My Years–and you should definitely pull up Bradley's Spotify mix as you read–include iconic cuts by Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Four Tops and the Beatles alongside standards like "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin'," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Somebody to Love," "River," and the Vietnam veterans anthem "We Gotta Get Out of This Place." Anyone about the same age as Bradley will savor being reminded of not-quite-forgotten gems like Len Barry’s “1-2-3," Major Lance's "Monkey Time" and the Four Seasons' "Dawn." You can render your own judgement on Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Knock Three Times," the Brooklyn Bridge's "The Worst that Could Happen," and the Swinging Medallion's ode to getting drunk and puking, "Double Shot of My Baby's Love." The Tracks of My Years testifies to the sorrows and joys of what it means to live and love and grow with music.
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