Odyssey Land
In a episode of The Best Show from a month or so ago, a caller mentioned the band Bad Company and it prompted the host,Tom Scharpling, to have a reverie of youth:
I used to, when I'd go to the arcade — okay, there was a sub shop, actually — again, walked to the sub shop, play pinball. I'd put "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy" on the jukebox and play pinball and it was like — if I've been trying to get back to any moment in my entire life, it is the moment when I'd be playing pinball in that sub shop and "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy" would be playing on the jukebox, and I would just — having the time of my life ... I'm chasing that moment.
That reminded me of one of my favorite paragraphs about anything, from a tumblr that has since been deactivated. I don't even know who wrote this, but it comes from a list of "pinball music," and this is the entry for Head East's "Never Been Any Reason":
Oh my gosh, it’s just perfection. Absolute perfection. It figures that the epitome of classic rock would be a song by a band that no one remembers and never really had any staying power. An exuberant hymn to the powers of a good woman’s love. This is the song you want to play during your first kiss, during your Donkey Kong high score, during that moment when you realize hope is not lost and redemption is just in sight in the guise of that person at the bar, that person whose path you inexplicably crossed again, or that one special person you wronged terribly who has, inexplicably and incredibly, forgiven you. And yet, this doesn’t truly get at what Head East accomplished with this song, let alone does it let it stand apart from countless other rock tunes that are a sonic buoy in a sea of dissonance. I must asservate that “Never Been Any Reason” nails it in an almost spiritual way in which very few have from that amazingly composed synth symphonic opening, the staccato guitar riff, slow and steady, doggedly persistent and yet a wee bit anxious, the plaintive vocals thirsty with longing, pensive and yet strong, giving way to that choral cry of salvation that gives me goosepimples each and every time: “Save my life, I’m goin’ down for the last time/ Woman with the sweet lovin’, better than a white line/ Bring a good feelin’ ain’t had in such a long time/Save my life, I’m goin’ down for the last time.” This is proto-pinball music. The originator. Each time I hear it, I light up in all different places just like the electric mappings of a pinball game board. And you should, too
I'm in the right age bracket for this kind of nostalgia: I spent a fair amount of time in sub shops, pizzerias and stand-alone arcades, playing video games and pinball machines. My memories of standing in front of these machines — a MatMania game in a Pizza Hut, Ghosts 'N' Goblins at V&J Pizza — remain vivid, even though I've forgotten so much else. I wouldn't have guessed then that I would still be thinking about those moments decades later; I didn't have a concept of "decades later." And as much as I may enjoy playing Frenzy on MAME now, I wouldn't say I am chasing those childhood moments or would want to go back to them. But I can remember the relief when it was my turn, and I had something to do. I had a sense that something was happening, for a few minutes anyway.
The Head East paragraph gets at this, in its conflation of hope and high scores and peak moments. But that wasn't a particularly magic combination for me. Video games are programmed to provide challenges and plateaus; the feeling of achievement is built in and inevitable, ultimately mundane and unsatisfying. Yet that programmed feeling still seems to structure my emotional responses to life's more unpredictable moments of accomplishment — as if I were clearing levels, alone at the controls, overcoming arbitrary obstacles to gain access to regions I hadn't seen before, with a dismal sense that I would grow bored of them if I didn't master them immediately. The escapism quickly lapsed into performance anxiety.
It was a slightly different feeling when I got more into pinball instead of video games. That felt more like an unsustainable feat of balance. I gravitated toward pinball because it seemed like an experience still worth paying 25 cents for, something you couldn't do on a computer or a Nintendo. There was a physicality to pinball that is easy to romanticize, especially now, though in reality it mainly meant broken flippers and miscalibrated Tilt mechanisms.
This was in the latter days of the old stand-alone arcades. After I had my driver's license and a car, I would sometimes drive myself to the arcade off Route 309, a dilapidated place called Odyssey Land — I thought it would be easy to find a picture of it, but it turns out there is little trace of Odyssey Land online: a few mentions on forum boards of guys discussing their favorite arcades from youth and that's about it. The game I remember playing there the most is the Williams pinball machine Earthshaker!
The premise of Earthshaker! was that you were playing pinball through a variety of seismic events that you triggered by hitting a variety of targets. "Head for the shelter!" a voice would call out when you hit certain spinners or captive balls. Another of the cues was a squeaky voice cooing, "Ooh, give me shelter!"
Earthshaker! made explicit the analogy between playing pinball and driving, all the lanes and ramps. Each game began with the recored voice saying, "It's sunny drive time!" and then you racked up "miles" for bonus points as you kept the ball alive. But you never got anywhere; there were no destinations. At best, you triggered the big one, multiball started, and the machine rumbled like you were crashing into a guard rail. With multiball, your focus fractures, and suddenly it feels like there is no strategy, no taking aim, no making a plan. You don't follow one ball on its path; instead there is an overwhelming, exhilarating sense of triage. It no longer matters where the balls go as long as you keep them moving.
"Pinball music" also has a lot of overlap with driving music, or at least what I think of as "highway rock": songs like "Slow Ride" by Foghat or "Radar Love" by Golden Earring or "Green-Eyed Lady" by Sugarloaf. If I am on a road trip, I can almost always find a song like this on some radio station, usually one with a name like The River or The Eagle. What these songs have in common are hypnotic stretches that conjure the sense of an endless road, the suspended-animation feeling that sets in when you have been driving so long it no longer feels like you are on the way somewhere. You are just going.
In Die Tryin': Videogames, Masculinity, Culture, Derek A. Burrill argues that video games structure a "particular masculine subjectivity, the 'digital boy,' a subject who is equally at home behind the keyboard and the game controller" and that spaces like arcades are evocations of "digital boyhood," which he describes as a kind of tool, a subject position one can assume to "navigate and play games." At the same time, digital boyhood is a condition in which "adult males return to their adolescence to play without the responsibilities of adulthood."
Carly Kocurek, in Coin-Operated Americans, quotes Walter Benjamin's 1928 essay about toys: "The adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with the image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children's games and children's books."
Naturally, I want to disavow such an impulse in myself. When I play pinball or video games, when I find myself thinking about old arcades of my youth, it's not because I am looking for somewhere to run to. It's not because I am trapped in "digital boyhood." My pleasures are not regressive or ideologically suspect. According to Burrill, "digital boyhood" glorifies mastery through individualistic play. But it doesn't take the edge off the perceived threats from the "real world." It is not a return to a safe and comfortable home, but to a place where slights and resentments and anxieties accumulated about how to be in control, how to gain respect, how to appear invulnerable. Playing video games as a kid was already an awkward escape; going back to that as an adult is like escaping to another escape scenario, like working your way out of the suit of armor only to find that you are still trapped underwater inside the glass box.
In "Roadrunner" Jonathan Richman sings about "the neon when it's cold outside, and the highway when it's late at night, got the radio on." The Genius page for the song quotes an interview with Richman, in which he says, "When I would sing 'Roadrunner,' the thoughts that would be going through my own head would be of a cold, freezing night out there. It was not cruising for burgers like American Graffiti… No. It was a lonely kid, which was me, in my father’s station wagon ... I just thought it was so lonely. How’s anyone going to like this? I never thought anyone would." That seems closer to the feeling I have when I hear "Never Been Any Reason" or when I'm playing pinball. I'm just trying to keep the ball alive, just trying to stay awake.