Within a Listen

OOD PLAYLISTS

Within a Listen

Thirty-six years folds down to the length of a listen.

1990 | TWO ALBUMS | ONE NIGHT

OOD Playlists is where the songs get gathered by year, artist, mood, place, memory, or whatever else makes them belong together. The list matters, but the reason for the list is the post.

This one is two whole albums rather than a shuffled list: Let Love Rule and Shake Your Money Maker, played back to back in a college apartment until the night became one of those memories music can still reach.

All four album links—YouTube Music and regular YouTube for each record—are waiting at the bottom.

It was spring 1990. I’d been out of Purdue almost two years, working at Andersen by then — dress clothes, office buildings, the start of what was supposed to be the adult version of the story. But I kept going back. Most weekends. Friend’s couch, somebody’s party, the long fade-out you get after graduation where the place hasn’t quite admitted you’ve left.

That night was a friend-of-a-friend thing. I knew one person when I walked in. By two a.m. I knew six.

We were also very high. Marijuana and shrooms. That part isn’t decoration. It mattered. It stretched the room.

At some point the guy whose place it was said, “Let me play you something.” He put on Let Love Rule.

You could feel the room change. Conversations dropped. People sat down. Lenny Kravitz had made a whole little world and left the door open, and we all walked in.

Then he put on Shake Your Money Maker.

That first Black Crowes record sounded like it had always been there. Like somebody had found it under the floorboards of a house where every previous tenant had smoked, fought, danced, and believed in rock and roll harder than was probably good for them.

We were blown away. So he played them again. Back to back.

Then back to back again.

It was fucking glorious.

I can doubt the edges of that night now. I can’t tell you exactly who was in the room, can’t swear to the order of the records or the time on the clock. Memory’s a bad librarian. Files things under the wrong year, loses names, steals light from one night and lays it over another.

But the center holds. Two records, back to back, in that room, in that condition, did something.

I was supposed to be becoming the Andersen guy. I had the costume. I had the paychecks. I had the start of a path other people would have understood if I’d stayed on it.

And there was this other thing. Road trips. Couches. Late nights. Old friends, fast friends, new friends. Rooms where everything felt temporary and therefore holy. A kind of portable church for people who didn’t know what they believed in yet.

That night made the difference sharper. Something broke at that listening. Or admitted it had already broken. I couldn’t go all the way back to the costume after that.

Thirty-six years.

In normal life, that’s an ocean. You don’t swim it. You stand on the shore and describe the other side. You can say Purdue. You can say 1990. You can say Andersen. You can list the names you still have. You can draw the map.

You can’t go there.

Then a record starts and for a few minutes the ocean gets stupid. Not because the past comes back — that’s the lie nostalgia tells when it’s had too much to drink. The past doesn’t come back. But the distance folds down to the length of a listen.

Here’s the part age gives you. If I walked into that room tonight, at sixty-one, I’d see two things at once. The magic, and the warning label. I’d see why it mattered. And I’d see how easily a life like that could eat you. Both would be true.

That’s not wisdom exactly. It’s double vision. You can love what something gave you without wanting it back. You can know a night changed you and still be glad you eventually left the room.

So you don’t try to rebuild it. You don’t show up thirty-six years later with a bag of mushrooms and a story. That wouldn’t be beautiful. That would be alarming.

You nod on social media. You like a picture. You say happy birthday. You type “man, good times,” which is both true and useless.

And then a record starts.

The room lights up. The friends are young. For the length of a side, you’re not sixty-one thinking about a night thirty-six years gone.

You’re just there.

Not all the way. But close enough to hurt.

Then the album ends.

So you play the other one.

Use whatever works best for you. YouTube Music is first because it is the cleaner album listen. Regular YouTube is there because sometimes that is the path of least resistance.

Have a record—or two—that can still collapse thirty-six years in a few seconds?