You know how some songs, and not just Dead songs, transport you back to a certain time and place whenever you hear them? Maybe you didn't even like them at the time, but three notes and there you are driving back from the beach when you're 16, or whatever.
And some songs just come to embody a particular time and place forever after.
What are yours?
Im in my 79 bus, me and a friend just ran away from home. I loved her, she loved James Dean and Van Morrison. That song always puts me right back on the snow banked highway in New Mexico, far far from home.
Holiday Inn
First hotel I ever stayed at in my life, the Holiday Inn in downtown Portland, ME (across from the Civic Center, I'm sure a few of you know this one). Senior year in high school I was at a state CYO convention. We were the first occupants of this brand-spankin' new as-yet-not-open-to-the-public hotel. We were packed 6 to a room with an adjoining door to a room full of girls next door. One of my roomies scored some beer (legally -- he was 18) and reefer (not so legally), and we all spent the afternoon enjoying some definitely-not-CYO-sanctioned pleasures (including, sad to say, throwing the empties out the window -- a few stories down to a roof below-- to get rid of the evidence).
Where oh where were our chaperones? Policing the dance that night, making sure we weren't, you know, getting too friendly on the dance floor. They sort of missed that adjoining-door loophole.
Oh and you ain't seen nothing till you been
In a motel baby, like a Holiday Inn...
keep on dancin
"Row,row,row yer boat gently down the stream........................."
Locations