Week 97: Hurricane Music

Temporal, temporal, alla viene el temporal, que sera de mi pueblito, cuando llegue el temporal (Hurricane, hurricane, here comes the hurricane, what will be of my town, when the hurricane arrives.) –From the lyrics of a traditional and very upbeat and danceable Puerto Rican plena.

I’ve lived most of my life in the path of hurricanes. First in Puerto Rico, then in the U.S. (Houston and now North Carolina). I’ve prepared for a lot of hurricanes and have sat through a few. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had to evacuate my home, and never suffered any loss of a friend or relative’s life or even any major injury or great loss of property because of a hurricane. For that I am grateful, as I have seen close up what they can do. Hurricanes are terrible natural disasters and are not to be taken lightly.

That being said, I love music and have music going in my head most of the time. Which is maybe why I don’t’ feel I need to specifically mention music or a musical artist or recording in a post on this blog to feel that the post includes music in it. This post however, will be about actual recorded music, and how recorded music has often kept me company during hurricanes, even as we sat in awe at the power they can wield.

I spent the first half of my life in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, when a hurricane is coming, there is not a lot of places to run to, most hurricanes are bigger than the island. So what one does is build a solid house that a hurricane can’t easily take down.

My family’s house, as are many houses in PR, is made of solid concrete, all the walls, even between rooms inside the house, are about 6 inches of solid concrete, top to bottom, side to side, two stories. I had never seen drywall until I came to the U.S. On top of that concrete box you add a solid concrete roof and you have a house that has stood through 50 years and quite a number of hurricanes. Even the windows are built to stand against hurricanes. All the windows are what we in PR call miami windows, not sure why. They are made of aluminum and I don’t think they are made in Miami. With miami windows, you turn a handle one way and the blinds open to let in the cool ocean breeze, you turn it the other way and you are in an almost hermetically sealed concrete and aluminum box.

But even in a house as solid as that, a hurricane is no fairytale wolf, huffing and puffing at your door, and the prospect of sitting in a house while the wind is pulling street signs from the sidewalk and sending them flying through the air at insane wall piercing speeds is not exactly comforting. And then of course there is always the possibility of flooding.

So when a hurricane is coming, we prepare the best we can, batteries, water, candles, canned food, etc etc, and then we sit and wait for the storm. Usually this is not done alone. Family and friends that live within walking distance might come over. And basically you sit around, play dominoes, drink beer, rum and cokes, play music, listen to the radio and wait and wait and wait.

At some point the wind and rain become too strong to have any doors open or sit on the porch, so everyone goes inside and we close doors and windows. You crack open the windows on the side of the house away from the wind, otherwise the pressure inside can turn the house into a bomb. Then everyone goes back to playing dominoes or talking or whatever they were doing. When the lights go out, candles are lit, and we switch to the battery radio. When the eye of the hurricane arrives people come out of the houses, and a kind of musical chairs game takes place where some people return to their homes for the second half of the hurricane, and new ones show up at ours. Everyone checks the damage outside, but it’s as if the extras in a Hollywood ghost town were walking out from behind the fake facade of the buildings. It’s very surreal. Then there is that weird feeling in your muscles and bones, the pressure of the hurricane spinning around you makes it feel as if the wind was sucking itself in. And yet you know it will only last a few minutes. Then you see the other side of the storm approaching and everyone hurries back inside, and before the wind starts blowing from the other side, you close the windows that were open on the one side and crack open the ones on the other side. And you sit down for more dominoes, more rum, more music and more waiting.

There is a lot of waiting during a hurricane, waiting for the lights to go, for the water to go, for the telephone to go, for the roof to go. So as I grew older and technology became available in the shape of boom boxes and cassettes, I started to make tapes for hurricanes while I waited.

The cassettes were a combination of hurricane staples and songs specific to that particular hurricane. The staples are songs like the Scorpions’ Rock Me Like a Hurricane, REO Speedwagon’s Riding the Storm Out, and The Doors’ Riders in the Storm and a number of Spanish songs like the above quoted Temporal.

Here are a couple of playlists I found on line that are mostly built on staple hurricane songs:

Waiting for the Hurricane

Songs for Hurricanes

Of course there are better staple songs than those. The Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground is a great hurricane record with all its heavy rain imagery, for example. Black Sabbath’s first record is also a great hurricane record, though in a different way than the Violent Femmes, much more brooding and dangerous. But the classic staples have their place too and its always good to see people that wouldn’t be caught dead listening to the Scorpions finding humor and joy when Rock Me Like a Hurricane comes on.

The staple songs have to be there, but it is the songs specific to each hurricane that make the playlist and that hurricane musically memorable.

When Frederic hit in 1979 we listened to a lot of Chopin. If I was going to get blown away by a hurricane, I would wish that it was while I sat on a piano playing Chopin, any Chopin. Of course I can’t play any Chopin, and the odds of me learning to play any Chopin on the piano at this point are about as good me flying through the air while playing.

I love Chopin, and I also love Mahler, which is why I was actually guiltily excited when I heard there was a hurricane coming named Gustav. I bet that would make an awesome hurricane playlist. If the powers that be wanted to complete what I would consider my all time top three classical music hurricane playlists they would send a hurricane named Dmitri at some point.

But my all time favorite hurricane playlist so far has to be the one for Floyd in 1981. Not so surprisingly, the recorded tape sounds of Pink Floyd’s music cross-faded perfectly with the various sounds the storm was making outside, almost like there was another member of the band right out side the house. I was also fifteen, which might have been the perfect age to really enjoy this play between storm and band.

Most recently, in 2003, we sat through hurricane Isabel and like the old days we played music for the occasion. The playlist included all of the Unrest’s Isabel Bishop record, as well as songs by Isabel Parra and by association songs by her sister Violeta Parra (I don’t discriminate against the thinness of a given connection as long as it’s there).

So now we prepare for Hanna, and I’m wondering if this might be the time to give Hannah Montana music a shot, I hope not. What I am hoping to do is find a bunch of Hanna-Barbera cartoon themes: Tom & Jerry, Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo…. I do wonder what the Jetsons theme would sound like in a hurricane.

And then, we might also get Ike…

Of course after the hurricane it is de rigueur to play Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now.

Well, here’s hoping Huracan is in a good mood and that Yukiyu watches over us.