Written by: Dave Cantrell

‘It’s hard to explain magic.’ That phrase, truism that it is, has no doubt been uttered countless times by countless critics over cocktails after a difficult day spent trying to do exactly that. It’s the same dilemma inherent that brought about the famous quip (murky provenance and all) ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ and it’s that unnerving aspect that has kept me from pursuing an idea that has been lurking for some time, an occasional column devoted to those singular – if often lesser-known – songs that have stayed with me since day one. And yet, and yet, well, here we are, intimidation be damned as a recent revisit to the track at hand, that has hung with a haunted, persistent grace in the more sublime reaches of my consciousness for nearly 40 years, rather demanded I take the leap.

As it transpired, and a bit oddly for me, I was forced by circumstance to write this piece in bursts which, in its way, helped me understand how complex this relationship between us and particular songs truly is, that indeed any attempt to make sense of it, to describe it to someone else with any degree of emotional clarity requires a deep delve not unlike that required when trying to do the same regarding family or past lover relationships. These songs we cling to, that cling to us, they have that hold, they help shape us, and I think it’s safe to say that we are not who we are without them. In the end I understood that that’s what drove me to ‘go there,’ difficult as the getting there may be.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

*  *  *

If a song, by both its tone and content, can be intrisically evocative of your own memories, if, upon hearing it, be it for the first time or the four hundred fourth, certain images, if only for the length of the track, come vividly to mind like a personal newsreel spun inside that theater in your head, their images bespoke yet unaged, you know you’re in rare company. Quite – if not most – often, as it is for this writer with this song, the echo evoked is two-tiered in that both the overall nature of the track, its lyrics and the mood of its sound, and the moment it arrived in one’s life overlay each other in some sort of seamless, once-in-a-lifetime montage, a trick either ‘of’ or ‘by’ the heart if not somehow both that seems as much as anything an instance of emotional trompe-l’œil.

Though in 1988 I was already thirty-two the vibrancy and promise, the plain daily verve and thrum of youth gave its typically callous impression that it had no intention of waning. Lived above the Haight on Buena Vista West, slept little, still devoured the NME and other essential weeklies, went night bowling sometimes with the then-girlfriend when I wasn’t driving Yellow Cab into the wee hours. It was existence neverending as if we were late 80s Kerouacs thriving primarily on a diet of post-punk and its entrails with essential swerves into that old Beat’s contagion of Parker-wild jazz and whatever other (many) derivations prompted by a restless curiosity. Into that amphetamined halcyonic mirage of everlasting life came, well, a lot of records but this one 12″ EP called Bou Noura self-released by Cali-based brothers Steven and Michael Meloan, especially its standout track “Oppenheimer Hat” that’s the focus of this new feature’s inaugural appearance, had what can only be called an immediately lasting pull.

Now, being as hopeless a devotee to this medium as I’ve been for over a half-century now, a span that’s taken me from the earliest stirrings at Winterland (including The Last Waltz) through spending a couple months scrapping and nearly starving in London at the tailend of 1979 where’d I’d gone just for the music (and, as it naturally turned out, John Peel), the varied and sometimes rudderless scenes and trends that followed from there – shoegaze through grunge through countless strands of indie and all its variants that continue to spiral all around us – there have been at least a few dozen songs that have caught me in their clutches and never let go, cycling through the shadows of memory before reappearing at the forefront and surging their way through my head for days if not weeks but few as consistently, as commandingly, as “Oppenheimer Hat.”

Not to give too much away at the start but, seeing as the song does exactly that, announcing itself with a gently alluring immediacy from the drop, a kind of buoyantly haunting in media res effect that takes instant hold of you and never cedes its grip for the next four minutes, we suppose that’s okay. And anyway, as with just about any track that would qualify for this column, the fact it would present with an entrance that, upon first hearing, makes you stop within seconds and turn your head, your attention paused in a wonder that excludes all else as you ask “What’s this?” and then proceeds for whatever duration to maintain that moment of timelessness until it ends, is pretty much a given.

Aside from the inherent irony of a song bathed throughout in an incandescent nostalgia remaining to this day as fresh and ever-listenable as it was upon release, it naturally behooves to examine exactly how and why that’s the case and while I can and in fact must cite the bare structural reasons, how it’s built on an uncomplicated progression that, both because and in spite of its seeming simplicity (and believe us, such gems are rare), nonetheless swoons start to finish, swamping the heart in the process, the fact the track bears a vocal melody that conjures the phrase ‘seductive innocence’ and would prove irresistible to anyone but the dead, it is, I feel, “Oppenheimer Hat”‘s overlay aspect mooted up above that most moves.

While it’s the case that a track of this nature, seductive and sharp yet as soothing as some kind of warm saline bath flooding through one’s bloodstream, will elicit silent nods of approval from even the most jaded listener, it’s the intimately reminiscent quality of the lyrics that helps secure the song’s place with the eternals, a factor that’s especially potent when it triggers a personal memory as it does – every time – for this writer. Here’s why.

Somewhere, in some drawer, there’s a black and white photograph taken with a Brownie 127 aimed through the departure window at San Francisco International as my grandparents, crossing the tarmac in pre-jetway days, wave back to my mom – their daughter – her husband and their three kids (of which I am the youngest) before boarding a flight to Hawaii and, yes, grandpa is wearing a (decidedly non-Oppenheimer but nonethess felt) hat. Somehow poignant in its mundanity, that image, when set next to the ‘where’ of where I was when this record released, elevates the song some measure beyond the already lofty status guaranteed by its basic components and there I am, drawn over and over again to the center of this thing by its storied lyrical content as, in fact, just about anyone with a memory and a family photo album of a certain vintage would be.

And that, my reader friends, is as close to explaining the ‘love’ of why I love music as I’m ever likely to come.