Listening to Music While Driving

By ROB PATTERSON

I’m sure that at least some of you readers are long-enough in the tooth to recall how listening to music in the 1970s was often about your home stereo system. And having sonically sophisticated speakers, top-shelf amplifier and tuner components as well as a quality turntable for playing vinyl records, or at least a more compact integrated stereo set for home musical consumption.

My how time and technology have changed. Listening to music has shifted in both how and where we do so here in the digital era. But the times they have been a-changin’ how we listen to music over the years even before the digital revolution shifted it all.

There was in my lifetime, first, the transistor radio I got for Christmas in 1959 at five years old. And the family home stereo system. But the primary way I listened in my youth well into the 1960s was the car radio.

In the 1980s I went mobile again with the advent of the Sony Walkman. At the time I lived in New York City and was an avid walker throughout Manhattan. I’d slip on my headphones as I’d leave the house to add a soundtrack to my travels aboveground and below on the subways. I found listening on the Walkman headphones a great way to hear albums for review (I would also buy recording Walkmans to use for interviews).

On moving to Texas in 1989 and reentering driving and car culture, my automobile became a primary listening spot even if I also still had a stereo system at home. Over the years since, as the digital revolution has grown, I’ve come to listen more via my phone and computer, and the car has become the place I listen most and I believe best.

I’m not alone in that. Neil Young’s producer/engineer John Hanlon reports that the artist who’s consistently been one of my favorites and most-admired musical creators since his first solo album in 1969 likes to review his own work in the car. He believes that the practical act of driving leaves the mind more open to the music, a tactic he credits his earlier producer/engineer David Briggs with instilling in him.

A friend once contended to me that the process of driving stimulates the creative left brain. An internet search didn’t find any genuine scientific proof of that, but it strikes me as anecdotally accurate. A number of noted songwriters have told me how they get ideas and inspirations while driving distances, and I’ve experienced a similar creative fertility behind the wheel.

These days, earbuds and over-the-ears headphones are quite common on the heads of those in younger generations, at least if my observations and the seeming sales popularity of such devices are any indication. My experience since my Walkman days attests to how well and deeply headphone listening can serve my music consumption in many ways. But there’s a certain bit of sonic claustrophobia that creeps into it for me.

To get anecdotal and unscientific again, when I play music in the car – and usually rather loud, though nothing compared to the window-rattling mega bass from the cars of some hip-hop fans – the space of the driver/passenger compartment gives the music room to breathe. If you’re driving solo and going a bit of distance, I find music in the car one of my primal pleasures. And if it’s music I’m going to review or write about, it seems to me to be the best way to hear it and come to know it. And later savor it again.

Populist Picks

When I drive long distances by car, I enjoy some two-disc (and more) albums that pass the time and make the miles roll by with pleasure, such as:

LP: Hammersmith Odeon London ’75 by Bruce Springsteen – None of his studio recordings have the vibrant grooves and infectious energy as this 156 song delight that captures Springsteen at the E Street Band at their legend-etching best.

LPs: “…It’s Too Late To Stop Now Vol II, III, IV & DCD” and “A Night In San Francisco” by Van Morrison – Four 1973 shows and 22 live tracks from 20 years later that are all superb and at times wondrous and even transcendent.

LP: “Strings Attached” by Ian Hunter – The veteran rocker with a band and orchestral backing that spotlights the power, smarts, sophistication and sensitivity of his work.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2019

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