The Sweet Spot

by whiteray

Ah, yes, the sweet spot. In baseball, it’s a maybe half-dollar-sized place on the barrel of the bat. When the ball meets the sweet spot, good things happen: the ball travels more true, the jolt of the impact through hands and shoulders feels more solid, not off-center, and the sound, well, there’s nothing that sounds quite as good on a baseball field as the crack of the bat when the ball has met the sweet spot.

My pal Schultz, a long-time music fan like me, borrowed the term. He says every music fan has a sweet spot, a cluster of four, five, maybe six years whose music laid the foundation for the rest of that person’s musical life. A listener can expand his or her horizons, can learn of new musicians and new forms, but at base, Schultz says, it all comes down to the music of the sweet spot: The music he or she heard during those formative years remains the most potent.

And that sweet spot is generally in a person’s youth. I’ve read essays and news accounts of studies that propose that the music we hear in our teens and young adult years – our formative years, if you will – becomes generally the most-cherished music of our lives. Why? Well, we’re young and unformed, we’re bonding with our peer groups, we’re learning what we like, and we have time to listen, being not yet encumbered with making a living, raising our own children or taking care of a home or other property.

I think Schultz is right (and so are the essays and reports of studies I’ve seen). For many folks, the years between, say, 14 and 20 are the years of the sweet spot. That’s true for Schultz, I think, and for my wife, the Texas Gal. But for me, the years of my sweet spot are set a little later: I got to pop music and its attendant styles a few years later than my peers. During the years 1964 through early 1969, when my peers were listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Supremes and Aretha Franklin, I was listening to trumpeter Al Hirt, the Tijuana Brass, and the soundtrack work of John Barry for the James Bond movies.

So, I was almost sixteen by the time I went down to our basement and rescued my grandpa’s old AM radio from storage, put it on my nightstand and tuned it to WJON, the local radio station that played Top 40 during the evenings. It was August 1969. I was a newly appointed manager for the football team at St. Cloud Tech High School (in Minnesota), and I’d been liking what I’d been hearing on the radio in the locker room’s training room. And I thought that if I were going to fit into a new peer group, it would be a good idea to know what they listened to.

And so began the years of my sweet spot in the late summer of 1969. The ending time is a little harder to pin down because there was no action as decisive as tuning the radio to WJON. I guess I’d put the end of my sweet spot at about the time I graduated from college in early 1976. The music was shifting. Disco and arena rock were beginning to crowd out my music, the rock, the singer-songwriter stuff and the basic R&B that had nurtured me. And I was shifting, with adult concerns like finding a job, paying rent and buying groceries on the horizon if not actually present.

The other day, I asked the Texas Gal if she could name my five favorite musicians/groups. She got four right away: Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Band. It took her a bit of time to get to Richie Havens. Now, I came to Springsteen’s work, and I came to truly appreciate Havens’ oeuvre, later than the others, when I was in my thirties, but that’s me; their music was a part of those years from 1969 into 1976.

There are many other artists and groups that I like, of course, and many of them have emerged during the forty-four years that have passed since I graduated from St. Cloud State University, some fairly recently. About a decade ago, I compiled what I called my Ultimate Jukebox, a listing of the records that would be playing at my place if my place were part malt shop, part beer joint, part crash pad and part heaven. The years of release for the 250 tracks I chose for that hypothetical jukebox began in 1948 and ended in 1999.

But they were centered, without any doubt, in the years of the late 1960s and early 1970s: My musical foundation. My sweet spot.

Here’s the record I most clearly remember hearing on the radio in the football locker room’s training room after a practice during the last few weeks of August 1969. It’s Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” and the sound of those first guitar chords takes me back to being not quite sixteen and vaguely knowing I was beginning a new musical journey.