Did They Get You to Trade?

Album: Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here, 1975

Best Track: "Wish You Were Here"

Lasting Memory: The summer between my freshman and first sophomore years of college, I worked as a lot attendant for a family friend's budget rental car company.

The work was dirty, hot, and long, as jobs for youngsters with an unearned sense of entitlement should be.

The job was also damp. Very damp.

My principal responsibility as lot attendant was to wash and vacuum out returned rentals. So, of course, I was outside for most of two month, catching backspray from a high-power hose, sweating in the 90-degree/90-percent humidity weather, and getting caught in the regular thunderstorms that crop up during a Tidewater summer.

I also once got my leg stuck in water main access tube, or whatever you call those tiny sewer-like ports on lawns and driveways that house meters. I stepped on the cover of the one for the rental car lot while mowing the grass, the cover slipped, and I found myself thigh deep in a standpipe.

As I recall -- probably incorrectly -- the same day the Norfolk Public Works Department nearly became the permanent proprietor of my right leg, I heard "Wish You Were Here" on the AM-only radio of my parents' second-hand, baby blue 1979 Ford Fairmont while driving home. The radio-static-to-plaintive-piano-chords-played-on-a-guitar fade-in kicked in at the same moment as the sky filled with ominous storm clouds. Nice confluence of mood, music, and setting, that was.

If it, you know, actually did happen like that.

While mulling this post instead of writing it this past week, I got to thinking about how thinking about how you can think ideas into a song. Specifically, I got to thinking about how the lyrics to "Wish You Were Here" could be mapped onto President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address.
I'll spare you the college senior thesis-level of show-offy hermeneutics, but check this out:

Did you exchange
A walk-on part in a war
For a lead role in cage

versus

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety
and our ideals.

And then there's this:

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?

versus

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our
factories. ... To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the
silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that
we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

I'm making two points here. The first is that "everything original's been said much better better years ago by someone else, anyway ... anyway." This, obviously, was said by someone else.

The second point, and I'm a little chagrined to only be fully realizing this now in my fortieth year of hearing stuff, is that the message one takes from what one hears depends nearly 100 percent on the milieu in which it is heard. For example, I can read Obama's messages into a Pink Floyd song because I heard both close together and because I felt some compulsion to opine on both.

Does that mean that my observations carry any weight? Not in itself, but you have to admit that I'm pretty authoritative. Hence, vir bonus dicendi peritus, you should go with me on this.

Or you can go with what Roger Waters had to say about Wish You Were Here and its title track around the time that both were released. But he was probably high at the time.

Up Next: The Plimsouls, Everywhere at Once, 1983