A song on the radio brought back memories of a junior high school field trip. Sounds pleasant enough, but there’s also a bit of trauma. Imagine, three songs, three boomboxes, and enough D-cell batteries to pollute a small lake. Nope, it wasn’t just a casual memory, this one carried weight.
Before I get too far, I should mention that this is based on my memory of something that happened a long time ago. As such, it is only as good as my memory, which is often questionable, and can only be based on things I could know at the time. One assumes that other people remember the events differently, and that’s okay.
Our small school in our small Iowa town chose to send us to a John Deere factory for educational purposes. As students, we looked forward to a time without classes and it was an adventure. We had our permission slips signed and were ready to go.
The class size was large enough for two school buses. The teachers herded us on. This is where things started to go wrong, mostly by trying to be clever.
My buddies and I (I’ll leave their names off of this for their benefit) noticed that the girls were getting on one bus and the boys were getting on another. This wasn’t a requirement; nobody shouted out some rule about it. It was just the way everyone naturally separated themselves.
As a boy in my young teens, I was much more interested in teen girls than teen boys. This was where the clever part comes in. If there was no rule preventing it, I would rather be on the bus with the girls. I was young enough that I had no idea what to do with a girl, but they still seemed much more appealing. Even today, there are still some gaps in my understanding.
My buddies and I got on the bus with the girls.
So far, so good.
As I recollect, there were also three boomboxes onboard. For those not in the know, a boombox was a device that converted battery power into noise, typically with AM/FM radio and one or two cassette recorder-players. They also had at least two large speakers, one at each end, capable of producing ear-destroying levels of sound all driven by D-cells.
A common practice at the time involved recording one’s favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette. The person doing this had to know the exact start and stop positions on the tape or risk missing part of the song or overwriting a previously recorded song. Some people developed that skill into a ninja-like art form, which comes into play in this tale.
You see, there weren’t just the three boomboxes, there were also at least three cassettes all containing the same three songs. Present were We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos, I Love Rock and Roll by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and the novelty song Pac-Man Fever by Buckner & Garcia. All very popular songs at the time.
Anyone who knows me these days knows that I enjoy quiet. Sometimes I will sit still in the woods and listen to the wind in the trees and, occasionally, I will hear an insect crawling on a fallen leaf. Yep, nothing like the quiet.
All three boomboxes played the same song at the exact same time. Somehow, through teenage girl magic, they lined up all three tapes in different machines and then hit the play buttons in a synchronized manner. Three versions of catchy tunes blared into a cacophony.
This continued through the entire bus ride, each direction. By the time I got back, I was curled up a bit, humming Rhapsody in Blue to myself.
Back at school, excited chatter discussed the trip. The thing that sticks in my mind most, though, is the boys saying that they saw the other bus rocking back and forth in some sort of rhythm as it went down the road. There may have been some exaggeration in the telling, but it seemed very plausible.
Being a novelty song, Pac-Man Fever eventually lost air time over the years. Weird Al Yankovic’s I Love Rocky Road helped recover from Joan Jett. Eventually, I could even listen to The Go-Gos without cringing. Just another example of time healing wounds.
Now, the radio occasionally plays one of those songs, and it just brings up an old memory. The trauma is gone. Today, it is just music.