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Dust in the Wind and the Summer of 77

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And  approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

— Eliot, The Dry Salvages

Following a memory of my own, I “found” this video shortly after it was posted to YouTube over ten years ago. It struck me then as powerful in that offhand, out-of-left-field way that found objects can be. The power of this short window into 1977 is that it captures, without intent, the elements of memory. It melds the plaintive almost psalmic acoustic hit by Kansas with an imagery whose sheer faded quality adds to an overall impression of other times once lived and now gone beyond recall. It is the essence of “time in a bottle.”

Ordinary when made the film has aged into something beyond itself. Our better memories do that. They seem, if we think of them at all at the time we have the experience we will later remember, to be just barely beyond the cusp of the work-a-day patterns of our lives; of the ordinary. Often we don’t even discover them as memories until years later when they emerge, not as they were, but as they have become  – – as our aging souls expand enough to value what we thought at the time was dross — become the real gold of our lives.

The fact that it was viewable by me at all was one of those strange conjunctions of love and fate that the Web has made possible. The video is under the YouTube account of “uselessdirector” who has in the years since he posted this posted only two other personal bits in his account. The response to those is what it should be. Negligible. But the response to this video is now above 3,640,000 6,277,000 9,595,301 views with fresh comments still coming in almost hourly.

What is the provenance of this video? Uselessdirector states only, “Filmed in 1977 by my dad, this music video nearly became “dust in the wind” until it was restored from its failing 8mm format.” His role was to see the film as it was made, 8MM or 16MM, and to save it as a video before time faded the film to invisibility. He caught it just in time and in doing so caught time itself. Then, because he knew it had a value beyond itself and because he could, he placed it on YouTube where, in time, it was discovered.

From the video itself, we learn the names of the “Cast” in the credits and also see a list of “The Tribe.” Aside from that there are other hints to the spring or summer in which this was made. We discover it was made in Findley Lake, New York, a small rural community up near the shore of Lake Erie. Was “The Tribe” a group of friends or a small commune of the kind that were still common in those years? Did the young man and young woman paired as “Adam” and “Eve” have a relationship outside the film or was it only for the purposes of the film? Somehow I doubt it was the latter.

Looking a little deeper into the Net I found a few things worth noting. For one thing it is possible, through the odd but wonderful Google Street View to compare “Then” with “Now” and confirm, as if we did not know it with every cell of our being, that “Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.”

Then

Now

An interesting exercise in contrasting the present to a memory. But “interesting” is pretty much the finish of the exercise. In mere aesthetic terms it is obvious that the “Then” as evoked by the film image is far superior to the glimpse of “Now” gleaned by a Google Street View car sweeping by and capturing a slice of that particular road during the particular minute it passed that otherwise nondescript place on the edge of Findley Lake. The former is gold, the latter dross.

What was the memory I was following when I first found this film? It was my own memory of that song heard first in the summer of 1977 somewhere in London, New York, or Burgundy in France. I loved the summer of 1977. It was one of my favorite years. ’77 was one of those luminous years when everything in my life seemed to fall right and come together into something you could assign to happiness. After ’77 I’d wait 26 years for the next one.

I heard the song once again in memory. It was in a suburban mall parking lot in Connecticut on a chill winter evening during one of those years in my life when it all went smash.

If I have to choose between memories I’ll take the one contained in this ineffable bit of short film saved from the fade and the fog of time. It’s one of those strange artifacts that evokes  — among those alive in the time it was made — the cliched thought, “Dear God, were we ever that young?”

Made on a whim during an afternoon, the film answers, “Yes, you were. Yes, we all were. And in time, with the grace of God, we will be again.”

 

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Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Carolyn September 16, 2017, 9:31 AM

    I cried as I sang along. Thank you for sharing this. Carolyn

  • Callmelennie September 16, 2017, 9:32 AM

    Carry on, my wayward scribe …

  • creeper September 16, 2017, 11:26 AM

    I swear to dog, Vandeleun, if anyone can drag me back to the internet, it’s you. This is one of the few places worth more than three seconds of my time.

  • creeper September 16, 2017, 11:27 AM

    {sigh} I coulda gotten the spelling of the name right. My apologies. Blame it on a typo, Mr. VandeRleun.

  • Larry Geiger September 16, 2017, 11:37 AM

    RE: Wild Bill and the NFL. Well, maybe attendance at local high school football games will increase. The best football in the USA happens each Friday evening during the fall months in the South. Come on down, support your local team. Get off the couch, climb the stadium, listen to a real band and eat some concession stand junk food and support your local high school. Talk to your neighbors. Watch your kids run around and enjoy some of that great fall evening air. Nothing like it in all the world.

  • fodderwing September 16, 2017, 11:55 AM

    Ah, what a year. Dust now, but what dust it is!

  • AbigailAdams September 16, 2017, 1:19 PM

    It was my favorite year, too.

  • waltj September 16, 2017, 6:52 PM

    It was a good year for me, too, and the Kansas song brought that back. In fact, this was probably the last carefree time of my life. I’ve enjoyed the 40 years since then, but Summer 1977 was sweet.

  • bob sykes September 17, 2017, 4:46 AM

    Is this not a reposting from several years ago? I am convinced it is.

    When I first heard this song back in the 70’s, I liked it. But over time I have to dislike it nearly all the music from that period.

    I was born in 1943, and I remember the first eruption of Rock and Roll, with guys like Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis (not dead yet). Compared to the late 50’s and early 60’s, much of the music of the late 70’s is effete, affected, artsy, pretentious. The restored film is heavily cliched. It is the music of middle and upper class college students, whereas the early music, strong, clean, erotic, manly even was the product of the working class.

    • gwbnyc September 17, 2021, 9:24 AM

      **Jerry Lee Lewis (not dead yet)**

      -now some of his exes…

  • Chuck September 17, 2017, 6:29 AM

    My luminous year was 1968 and the song was Wichita Lineman. My life too just fell into place; I had my first car (a “48 Cadillac) and the girl on my arm was indeed luminous. But neither lasted beyond the coming Vermont winter and by the next summer I moved far away. I hadn’t thought of any of this until last summer when Glen Campbell died and Wichita Lineman was everywhere. Then that year, unlike the video, rushed back in full technicolor.

  • BillH September 17, 2017, 7:34 AM

    In ’77 we bought our third house and made our 15th, and last, we said, move. It was. We’re still here. Also that year we started our third of six kids in college, and were wondering how soon we would be bankrupt. We never quite went bankrupt, thanks partially to Carter’s stagflation, sky high interest rates, and some lucky borrowing and arbitraging. By now you’ve probably guessed I wasn’t paying much attention to Dust in the Wind in ’77. Nor any other music for that matter.

  • gwbnyc September 17, 2021, 9:21 AM

    crash&burn relationship, a jukebox, and this.

    ‘77.

  • PA Cat September 17, 2021, 11:37 AM

    ’77 was one of those luminous years when everything in my life seemed to fall right and come together into something you could assign to happiness.

    I’m glad it was good for you and for others who have posted here. For me, sadly, 1977 was the worst single year of my life to date; details left in God’s hands.

  • EX-Californian Pete September 17, 2021, 12:01 PM

    July ’77 was the year I loaded up a ’64 VW bus with all my belongings and headed for California. 41 years later I moved back to Ohio- after California turned into “dust in the wind.”

  • John Fisher September 17, 2021, 12:44 PM

    1977 was the year my first marriage came apart. ‘Dust in the Wind’ still hurts today.

  • ghostsniper September 17, 2021, 12:57 PM

    77 was my 3rd year in the army and I wasn’t especially taken with it. I got out the following year.

  • Mike Seyle September 17, 2021, 1:45 PM

    I deliberately implanted a memory in 1968, or maybe it was ’69. Several of us were at a small table just outside the Kaiser Fritsch Kaserne (Darmstadt, Germany) gate at Karl’s. Karl served that flip-top German beer and three-inch tall Swiss cheese sandwiches with a wild-tasting mustard and bread with hard crusts. One guy at the table was a gay man in my unit; the other was a guy from Vermont I still see almost annually. The gay guy, Steve, was the best worker in the postal unit we were assigned to. We got along well; he’d invite me to the gay bars, though I’d always decline. I mean, I was a Texan, fer God’s sake, and I don’t do that. But that late afternoon, sitting there with two friends, eating cheese sandwiches and drinking strong beer, deep into some weird conversation, I looked around and vowed to remember it all. The people. The food. Grumpy old Karl. The absolute contentment, camaraderie, and love of life, in that moment. “Remember this moment,” I told myself. And I do remember it. Might have to reenlist to recapture it, as if that were possible. Memories. I have awful ones, too. And that’s why we have sweat glands.

    • ghostsniper September 17, 2021, 5:36 PM

      Q: What’s the diff between sitting at a bar with a fag and sitting at a table with a fag?

      A: The table has legs and the bar doesn’t. shrug

  • Francis W. Porretto September 7, 2022, 12:32 PM

    This classic Kansas tune and the accompanying video strike me as perfect “end titles” to James Tiptree Jr’s story “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.” Haunting and beautiful.

    • Vanderleun September 7, 2022, 1:39 PM

      “James Tiptree Jr’s story “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.”” Hummm…. don’t know it but I soon will. Thanks Porretto.

  • Foo September 7, 2022, 7:22 PM

    Thanks G, I recall your posting that before- a wise and elegaic reflection by a true poet.

    You time traveled me, Captain.

    I graduated college in june 77 and remember the song had a big impact on me then…as well, in a different way…two places on the same River.

    Salute.