In "The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir," author, educator and Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley tells the story of a life lived with, and in, music, as well as the songs that shaped him. (Legacy Books Press)
Even casual music fans know that songs evoke powerful memories.
Wilco’s “The Late Greats” takes me back to my daughter’s birth. That track, from “A Ghost is Born,” might not make you think of staring into the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen, but surely there are songs that elicit specific times in your life.
Eric Church sings about this phenomenon on his 2012 No. 1 country hit “Springsteen,” a song about young love framed by the recollection of seeing The Boss in concert:
When I think about you
I think about 17
I think about my old Jeep
I think about the stars in the sky
Funny how a melody sounds like a memory
July Saturday night
… Springsteen
Doug Bradley’s book “The Tracks of My Years” is brimming with music and memories. Memories of playing basketball with the Miracles … of sharing a joint with Grace Slick ... of holding Dionne Warwick’s hand when he told her that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. And that was just Bradley’s college years.
Bradley, this year’s recipient of the Vietnam Veterans of America’s Excellence in Arts Award, has written extensively about music. He co-authored with University of Wisconsin professor Craig Werner 2015’s “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,” which was followed by his own “Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America” in 2019.
His latest, subtitled “A Music-Based Memoir,” is a crate-digger’s delight: a deep dive into the soundtrack of his life, the songs that brought him comfort, camaraderie and even bitter irony. (You should also listen to his companion Spotify playlist.) The engrossing narrative flies by like a favorite album on a road trip. It’s a virtuosic performance, on par with Cream drummer Ginger Baker’s “Toad” solo mentioned in the book.
Music was a life-defining force for Bradley, who was born into the first rock ‘n’ roll generation. He unflinchingly writes chapters of his life, their titles taken from songs that factored into them. He is the hero in some dramas, the heel in others. The stories and lyrical references flow seamlessly, like singles stacked on a record changer.
“Our music broadcast our independence, anointed our individuality,” he writes. “Music on the radio, from records spinning on the tiny RCA 45-RPM record player I shared with [my older brother], music constantly in my head, in the hallways, everywhere. Connecting me to my body, my feet, to every other kid walking down the halls of Thomas Jefferson High School.”
Songs shaped him well before he roamed the halls of his Pittsburgh-area high school. They played in his childhood home, the source of many happy times but also a salve applied to the psychological wounds wrought by financial woes and the resultant steely silences between his parents. Generational conflict between his father and older brother, and fights over the volume knob, played out in time with the music. But the variety of songs at home set Bradley on the path to becoming an aficionado. His WWII veteran father loved big-band music. His older brother sang doo-wop. Bradley first took a shine to gritty soul before growing alongside all the offshoots of rock and roll.
It is when he writes about high school, though, that Bradley begins to really show his skill as a memoirist. He does this most effectively in the retelling of his teenage dramas, along with their internal and external soundtracks. He enters high school a confident young man and budding basketball star, but angst and ostracization erode his self-esteem. He experiences first love and its heartbreaking flipside (what would rock ‘n’ roll be without either?), with a tune to match every ensuing emotion. He would have made a great music supervisor for movies and TV.
On cue, high school also provides Bradley with a much-needed mentor, who becomes a main character in his story. The teacher opens the creative writing student’s eyes to more music (such as the Beatles and Bob Dylan), and a greater appreciation of it. This tutelage, however, is tempered by an unsettling ambiguity about the teacher’s intent that recurs throughout the book, coloring the quest for harmony with dissonant tones. Bradley often wonders aloud to his anonymous audience if something more sinister was at play. He’s still searching for meaning as the final notes of the text fade into the coda.
His social status improved considerably at Bethany College, where he had the encounters – and more like them – with the Miracles (and their leader, Smokey Robinson), Slick and Warwick. Bradley, as the elected social chair, was responsible for booking bands at the tiny West Virginia school, and this accounts for some of the most entertaining anecdotes in the book. He recounts the shows in expressive detail, and who wouldn’t remember vividly a peck on the cheek from Slick in her “Surrealistic Pillow” prime?
The good times didn’t last. Bradley drew a low draft number in December 1969 and soon joined other members of the rock ‘n’ roll generation in the first rock ‘n’ roll war. Next stop was Vietnam. As he stepped off the plane in-country, Bradley’s senses were assaulted by the oppressive heat and a foul smell. Somehow there was comfort, too.
“It was the sound of music. Rock and roll. Our music,” he writes. “A cassette deck was cranked up somewhere on the tarmac, blasting Smokey’s ‘The Tears of a Clown.’ Took me back to Bethany and pick-up basketball and better times.”
Bradley’s writing confirms what the Vietnam movies tried to tell us: Music was everywhere. Only his soundtrack is more diverse than most of those films. As an Army journalist at Long Binh Post in 1971-72, Bradley’s tour of duty wasn’t always the stuff of “Platoon.” But those chapters contain plenty of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll amid the quagmire in Southeast Asia. And, as Bradley recounts, tragedy still touched the soldiers stationed in the rear, aka “the air-conditioned jungle.” A final musical moment, including a song overlooked by too many of the movies, provides a bittersweet recollection of heading back to the world:
“Suddenly, the plane was lifting off the shimmering Tan Son Nhut tarmac, and we departing GIs burst into a chorus of ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’!” Bradley writes. “Everyone smiled as if the weight of the world had been lifted from their shoulders. Little did we know we’d be carrying the weight of that godforsaken war the rest of our lives.”
Bradley shouldered the weight, and his anger, while finding his way stateside. A master’s degree in English and an opportunity to help other vets readjust ultimately gave him purpose, as did true love. He worked for more than three decades in communications at the University of Wisconsin, where he had a most fortuitous introduction to Werner, with whom he taught the popular course “The U.S. in Vietnam: Music, Media, and Mayhem” for nearly a decade. His evolution continued as an advocate, an educator, a father and a grandfather. Life cycled so far forward that Bradley eventually found himself as the elder combatant in generational skirmishes with his own son. Music made peace.
Another full-circle moment comes in the book’s closing, when Bradley puts his remaining high school demons in the past while serving as the DJ at his 50th reunion.
“So many moments. So many songs. So many times. From ‘World on a String’ to ‘Chain Gang,’ ‘Kansas City’ to ‘Wild Horses’,” he writes. “Philly, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Vietnam, Pullman (Wash.), and Madison (Wis.). Music. Yesterday. Today. I smiled, fulfilled, at least for the moment at peace. I was where I was always meant to be, past and present, playing the music that mattered.”
Readers need not be Boomers or Vietnam veterans to enjoy “The Tracks of My Years,” although they both surely will find much to like about it. Bradley offers an invitation across the nation. Music lovers would be wise to accept.
