For many years, I thought “We Can Work it Out” was a song by Tesla — the band, Tesla. To this day, I can sing along with every note on the Tesla album Five Man Acoustical Jam, and I often still do so. And it’s all because of technological determinism.
Those of you who know me at all in my research life know that I believe in technological determinism about as much as I believe in eating oatmeal with cinnamon and fruit (that is, NOT AT ALL NEVER EVER NO WAY NO HOW). But then I find myself in the car, listening to Five Man Acoustical Jam, and I have to question this life choice. (Not the life choice to listen to Tesla, which is obviously always the right choice — but interrogating the genesis of this choice, because really, my life has come to that.)
Almost 30 years and several iterations of myself ago, I was an undergraduate student in New York City dating a cadet at Virginia Military Institute. VMI is located in Lexington, Virginia (also the home of, among other things, Washington & Lee University and the stuffed cadaver of Stonewall Jackson’s horse, Little Sorrell). At the time, and I don’t know if any of this has changed (there is NO NEED at all to let me know), one couldn’t really get from NYC to Lexington, Virginia. One could fly to Roanoke [and then what, really?], or one could take the train to Staunton (home of Mary Baldwin University), or one could take a Greyhound bus from Port Authority in NYC to Washington, DC, and then change for a Greyhound “local” bus that made, many, many, many stops across Virginia and had a stop right outside Lexington. This bus also went on to Memphis, so it was always about three-quarters-full of people from all over the northeast making their weekly/monthly/yearly/once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages to Graceland via Greyhound bus. An aside: this was by far the best aspect of the trip, that the bus was always full of Elvis impersonators, and women dressed head-to-toe in Elvis memorabilia, and university students from the northeast, all making their way to Graceland by the cheapest and most accessible means.
Anyway, the Greyhound station “in” Lexington moved several times during the couple of years I made this journey regularly, so it was often a mystery where I’d get dropped off and how I’d get to my motel in Lexington. Because a “weekend” for the VMI cadets went from noon on Saturday to late afternoon on Sunday, I usually left NYC late on Friday afternoon. The bus would arrive in Washington DC in the late evening, just before the only restaurant in the bus station (Hardee’s) closed, and arrive in Lexington anytime between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. (the bus journey could be a trifle unpredictable). Luckily, one could *usually* catch the taxi driver in Lexington before he and his wife went to bed. Or after they got up. Either way. They were lovely and accommodating people, and I remember them fondly.
Most of the bus trip was at night, so one couldn’t really read (no iPhone! no Kindle!). And I learned quickly it wasn’t such a good idea to sleep on this bus. Doing the homework problem sets that were due on Monday for whatever engineering classes I was taking that semester was right out. All this left me with many hours to fill listening to music. Radio reception, much like the sleeping situation, was sketchy. And no iPods! no MP3s! No iTunes, no Spotify, no Tidal! Just me, and as many cassette tapes as I could carry, and my trusty GE portable personal cassette player with auto-reverse capability (infinite loops, or one side only, or PLAY BOTH SIDES THEN STOP).
PLAY BOTH SIDES THEN STOP was perfect! I carted a number of cassette tapes around (AC/DC’s Back in Black, the original Broadway cast recording of A Chorus Line, Cat Stevens’s Footsteps in the Dark) but the best tool in my kit for this long bus ride was Tesla’s Five Man Acoustical Jam.
And this is where the technological determinism comes in: That cassette had pride of place in my bus trip playlist because it was LONG. A little over 67 minutes (A Chorus Line comes in at 51 minutes, Footsteps in the Dark a bit under 48). An hour and seven minutes to sit without jostling the people around me. An hour and seven minutes not to have to risk dropping a cassette on the floor of the bus. An hour and seven blissful minutes made available to me because my GE portable cassette player would “play both sides then stop” and because the longer-than-60-minutes cassette tape existed in the world.
Because of my GE portable personal cassette player with auto-reverse capability, and the limitations of the passenger rail and interstate highway system, and the long-play cassette tape: An hour and seven minutes and almost 30 years later, if I am on a road trip, I call up Siri on Apple CarPlay and ask him, in my best Strine (MY Siri is an Australian male), to “please play Five Man Acoustical Jam.” And I sing along, every syllable, including that great tune that someone once tried to tell me is NOT a Tesla song, although you can’t prove it by me. TRY TO SEE IT MY WAY! DO I HAVE TO KEEP ON TALKING TILL I CAN’T GO ON?