Whenever I hear Neil Young sing about a "town in north Ontario" where there's "memory to spare," I'm

(Editor s note: Jeff Wasserstrom takes us around the world on a dark desert highway in this essay from our forthcoming Spring 2014 issue on California in the world and the world in California. travel last minute canada We re making it available now in honor of The Eagles and their fans during their six night residency at the newly reinvigorated and always fabulous Forum in LA. If you want to have the full Spring issue delivered travel last minute canada to your doorstep when it s out in early March, subscribe now . Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor s Professor of History at UC Irvine, co-editor of the Asia section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.)
Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country travel last minute canada Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody travel last minute canada seemed to think it strange that Filipinos travel last minute canada should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore, West Virginia…” I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station.
Whenever I hear Neil Young sing about a “town in north Ontario” where there’s “memory to spare,” I’m transported back to a hillside in northern California in the early 1970s. travel last minute canada I’m twelve and sitting with a friend the same age. We’re at summer camp and he’s teaching me the simple chord changes to “Helpless,” which is about to become the first song I can play on guitar.
Music does for me what biting into a madeleine did for that character in Proust’s novel: it sends me hurtling through travel last minute canada time and space to a specific moment in the past. I’m sure this is true for many other people as well. And they, too, surely often end up in places far removed from the settings mentioned in the songs that set them in memory-fueled motion.
This is why, ever since reading Video Night in Kathmandu , with its wonderful evocation of mid-1980s Manila, where “music buzzed through the streets” travel last minute canada from “dawn to midnight,” I’ve wanted to ask Pico Iyer a question: “When Don Henley begins crooning about a ‘dark desert highway’ in California, travel last minute canada are you suddenly back in Manila and in your late twenties again?”
That question first formed in my mind before I ever met Pico. So I had no inkling we would become friends. Since then I’ve had several opportunities to ask him where “Hotel California” takes him when he hears it played, but for some reason I’ve forgotten. This is strange, because one topic we’ve talked and emailed about regularly is the overlap between the music I listened to growing up during a childhood and adolescence spent mostly travel last minute canada in Santa Monica, aside from one year in England, and he listened to growing up during a youth divided between school years in a British boarding school and summers in Santa Barbara.
We’ve discovered in the process that our roughly travel last minute canada contemporaneous cavity-prone years—he was born in 1957, I was born in 1961—had very similar soundtracks. The Eagles come up a lot. How could they not when the most important musical common ground we’ve found is our shared fondness for the songs of many of the people named in the title of the book Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends ?
The best known names in that list are beloved by so many people of our generation, whether or not they spent any time in Southern California as kids, that had we just discovered that we each listened to a lot of, say, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell growing up, that wouldn’t have meant all that much. It had more significance when we found out that we even shared affection for the music and lyrics of some of the relatively obscure, though influential, unnamed “friends” alluded to in the book’s omnibus subtitle, such as Warren Zevon and J.D. Souther.
Still, for some reason, I haven’t gotten around to asking Pico whether Manila or some other locale travel last minute canada he’s visited since in his peripatetic life springs to mind when those globally recognizable “All-American” songs he mentions in Video Night in Katmandu , and doubtless first heard in England or Southern California, start playing. When I finally do pose the question travel last minute canada to him, there are some things I want to tell him. The first is that whenever travel last minute canada I hear “Country Roads,” I’m transported to the mid-1980s too, around the time he was in the Philippines. But I’m in Shanghai. And “Hotel California” takes me back to a different Asian metropolis.
When “Country Roads” comes on a car radio or over the Muzak system in a store, I’m in my mid-twenties again, spending a year at Shanghai’s Fudan University doing dissertation research. My wife, Anne, has a gig teaching English that gets her “Foreign Expert” status and secures us a place in a building reserved for Westerners and Japanese of that rank. Shanghai then was much less integrated into global musical circuits than was Manila, so virtually the only contemporary Western pop songs we hear are those on the batch of cassette tapes we have brought along or those that other expats in the building have in their collections. (When my sister sends a care package that includes a new tape—the latest Elvis Costello album—this is a big deal.) There were only a few Western travel last minute canada musicians whose songs had somehow made their way into China. Many Chinese students knew at least one or two numbers by the Carpenters, for example. And all of them seemed to know “Country travel last minute canada Roads,” thanks in part to the simple fact that the Carter administration had invited John Denver to perform for Deng Xiaoping travel last minute canada and his wife in D.C. when they visited the United States in 1979.
We didn’t bring any John Denver tapes with us to China. To do so would have meant leaving behind something by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, travel last minute canada or one of the many people listed in the subtitle of that Hotel California book. To my knowledge none of the other expats we knew made room in their musical stashes for “Rocky Mountain High” or any other album by Denver. Still, “Country Roads” ended up being among the songs we heard most often that year.
And we didn’t just hear recordings of it. We often heard students sing snatches of song, and they sometimes asked us to sing it ourselves or sing along with group renditions of it at parties. travel last minute canada In that pre-karaoke period (both “Country travel last minute canada Roads” and “Hotel California” will later become karaoke mainstays in Shanghai and many other places in Asia), singing a cappella at social events was a popular thing to do. Many Chinese students had at least one number, often an operatic one, which they could perform passably to superbly at the drop of a hat. They assumed “Country Roads” was that kind of song for everyone who looked like us, treating it as a kind of national anthem. We generally tried to be good sports about this and were glad that, unlike the “Star Spangled Banner,” at least “Country Roads” was easy to sing.
What then of “Hotel California”? Whenever I hear Don Felder’s distinctive guitar opening now, I’m instantly in a New Delhi café in a supremely jet-lagged, disoriented state. I’d been in India less than 24 hours when that song from my teenage years in California became the first one I ever heard in India.
The mechanism of this musical memory must be somewhat different from the one that sends me to China whenever John Denver waxes nostalgic about the Shenandoah Valley. For while I had heard “Country Roads” plenty of times before going to Shanghai, I had never thought much about it, nor did I associate it with any special setting or moment. The Eagles, by contrast, were a group I listened to—and thought about—a lot while growing up in California, dreaming of a career as a singer-songwriter. And long before “Hotel California” began evoking an Indian café on my first visit to the country in 2010, it made me think of a very different time, place, and companion.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whenever I heard “Hotel California,” I would be transported back to an afternoon in the 1970s in the west LA home of close family friends, soon after the album Hotel California was released. The house was one I hung out at a lot in those days. I was close to two of the three brothers in the family, Danny and David.
In this moment, David keeps picking the needle up off the turntable and restarting the song after first twenty travel last minute canada and then thirty and then forty seconds of it have played. He is determined, in a way that fascinates me because travel last minute canada it seems to border on the obsessive, to figure out how to replicate exactly the song’s bass line. The intensity of his focus strikes me as special, because I can never get myself to work as hard as David on mastering a lick. (It isn’t until later that I realize he is equally bemused as a teenager by how long I can spend worrying over and reworking a lyric I’ve written, which already seems to work fine in terms of meter and rhyme.)
It took the strangeness of hearing the song right after arriving in India to break the memory hold of that west LA living room, but by the time that happened, I had already spent years thinking about the song’s peculiar global ubiquity. Seeing it mentioned in Video Nights travel last minute canada in Katmandu was one thing that got me thinking about this topic, but so did noticing how often, from the mid-1990s on, I would hear the strains travel last minute canada of the song at least once during my periodic return visits to China. I also began to notice how often I would see the song mentioned on Beijing-based blogs, often disparagingly.
Most memorable in the digital-dissing category was a 13 September 2005 post on the invaluable Danwei site that was titled “Seeking Graffiti Artists and Hotel California-Haters in Beijing.” It described an upcoming creative happening—a musical exorcism. The event would include “an artistic attempt travel last minute canada to destroy the song ‘Hotel California’ in a 24-hour sark [sic] fest performed by bands, DJs, spoken word artists, danc