Soundtrack in My Head

When I write, I try to imagine the environment, the time, and the place where my characters hang out. Music is important in creativity. At times I use it to psyche myself into the mood of my story, using the energy for the beats or action. Other times I need silence to focus, especially with editing.

My Summer of 1973 series has a definitive playlist. Based on the true crimes of the Houston Mass Murders, I really wanted to focus on the neighborhood of the Heights and the music of the scene. Set in a time of car culture, the radio was a large part of the characters’ lives. One pivotal radio station in the 1970s was Rock 101 KLOL, whose influence reached into my teenage years in the 1980s when I had one of their Silver Surfer stickers on my bedroom wall next to the heavy metal pull-out posters from Hit Parader and Circus magazines. One of their popular DJs’ radio taglines was “This is Crash in your dash.” It made sense for him to announce some songs when my characters were cruising and riding in a super-blue ’70 Dodge Challenger muscle car. The symmetry gave me a connection to the material.

I used the popular early 70s rock music releases, including The Who, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd, and even mentioned Houston, TX, concerts of the time throughout the narrative. A county twang informed the jukebox of the Bohemian Pool Hall, a place where my characters drank and smoked weed with the likes of Cal Smith, Elvis Presley, and Jeanne Pruitt. (The legal age back then was 18, and some teenagers behaved like the ABC Afterschool Specials that played on TV a few years later.) The last part that set the mood was Lane’s records he kept at #19 of the Ben Hur Apartments. His vinyl collection included the likes of Deep Purple’s Machine Head, Townes Van Zandt’s High, Low and In Between, and The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed. This is not the entire playlist, just examples of music of the era that made it into my manuscript.

The funny thing about using music in writing is copyright. Legal trouble comes when writing lyrics from published songs. Copyright protects them just like poems, books, and other literature. I love the mood music invokes, so I mention bands, albums, and songs and characteristics like genre and pace. Context is also important in the difference between setting a mood and having a song be a killer’s M.O. (Modus Operandi).

On an earlier draft of my punk memoir, No Future, I attempted to obtain the rights to use some lyrics from “Johnny’s Got a Problem” by the punk band D.I. as an epigraph. I followed a research maze until I found the rights holder in BMI, but the cost was too prohibitive. The price depended on the book’s potential sales. I guess they charge Joe Doe one price and Stephen King another to get a bigger cut. Anyway, that is just an aside.

I love music in writing as part of the sensory experience of bringing works to life, as it helps my Frankenstein (my story) come alive with energy. Music is the spark of lightning that gives life to the page.

Dean Cade