Same Old Song, but With a Different Meaning

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 22, 2007; A08

"Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody/ I've got some money 'cause I
just got paid/ Now, how I wish I had someone to talk to/ I'm in an awful way
. . ."

It came to him unbidden, that song from his college days. Only now it meant
something completely different. There was a man on a stretcher before him,
draped in a poncho. Blood dripped off the end of the stretcher, the only
sign of life from a lifeless body. It was 1967, but Howard Sherpe had
already decided that the war in Vietnam was pointless, that the dead man
before him had died for nothing.

Sherpe felt lonely, but not the same way he felt back in college when he
didn't have a date on a Saturday night. He felt alone, existentially alone.
In his mind, he heard Sam Cooke's voice, but the lyrics were different.

"Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody/ I got all bloody and feel
some pain/ I just want to get the hell out of here/ I'm in an awful way. . .
."

Nearly 40 years later, Sherpe needs to hear only a few bars of the song to
be transported back to Vietnam, where he served as a medic attached to the
4th Infantry Division. The music brings the sights and sounds and smells
roaring back. He can even see a cigarette in his hand that is splotched with
blood -- the dead man's blood.

"What I feel is the sense of all of this was in vain, it was for nothing,"
said Sherpe, 62, of Madison, Wis. "That sense of loss. . . ."

Sherpe's experience is both unique and universal. That moment in Vietnam was
highly personal, but the experience of having a tune bring to mind a
powerful memory is something everyone can relate to. For neuroscientists,
this raises a question: How is it that music connects people to faraway
places and events from long, long ago?

Music hooks deep into emotions and memories in ways that words do not; in
fact, Sherpe is contributing to a project that aims to get at a history of
the Vietnam War through the music of the era. At the University of
Wisconsin, scholar Craig Werner and Vietnam vet Doug Bradley have found that
music is a highway into veterans' memories of the war.

"Words are tied up in politics," said Werner, who is chair of the
Afro-American studies department. "When we talk about wars, it becomes an
issue of liberal ideology versus conservative ideology, hawks versus doves,
you are for it or against it. . . . For the guys who were there, the words
don't fit the complexity of the experience."

"What music does is reach down into parts of our brain, it opens networks
and pathways that you can't get to via language," he added.

For neuroscientists, the power of music poses a puzzle.

McGill scientist Robert Zatorre once hypothesized that because music is
abstract, it must activate parts of the brain that process abstract ideas --
areas that developed relatively recently as humans evolved from apes. But
when Zatorre asked people to listen to their favorite pieces of music as he
ran brain scans on them -- people selected whatever kinds of music sent
chills down their spine -- he found that music activated very ancient parts
of the brain.

"Because music was abstract, we thought it would activate higher levels of
cortex," he said. "Instead we got this very ancient system which is usually
involved in biological reward. . . . What we found in a nutshell is when
people experience chills, there was a huge range of activity all over the
brain. It lit up like a Christmas tree."

Music seems to activate pleasure networks that are typically activated by
food, water and sex. Why would music have the same effects on the brain as
biological experiences integral to survival?

Zatorre hypothesized that the capacity to appreciate music might be an
accidental outgrowth of other abstract human skills. But Mark Jude Tramo, a
neuroscientist at Harvard University and a songwriter, said that notion
sells music short -- and overestimates the importance of words to survival.

"Some of the most emotionally laden sounds we hear and make are non-speech
vocalizations, like moans and groans and oohs and aahs and laughing and
crying," Tramo said. "If you believe music does not have evolutionary
significance you are in a very small minority."

Tramo argued that the sounds and grunts widespread in the animal kingdom set
the stage for the human brain to appreciate music. If music grew out of
nonverbal communication, and nonverbal communication is essential to
survival in much of the animal world, it would make sense that music should
hook deep into the brain. For social species such as humans, Tramo said
music can bind groups together.

"In a tribal courtship dance, the other members of your group who share that
same experience can also relate to it through music," he said. "So music is
iconic. There are wedding songs and funeral songs. You would never play a
wedding song at a funeral. . . . A culture depends on such associations."

Werner, who was part of a band that used to play at Colorado's Fort Carson
base during the Vietnam War, said the issue of music always comes up around
veterans. But as he started researching his book, which is to be called "We
Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Vets," he
found that songs popular among troops in the field were not always the ones
popular on the home front.

Music by the Doors, for example, was huge on campuses back home and even in
Saigon, but not out in the field where the battles raged: "Some of the
psychedelic music was more popular in Saigon than in Khe Sanh," Werner said.

Credence Clearwater Revival was always popular with vets, as was that old
sailor's anthem, the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B." Martha and the Vandellas'
hit, "Nowhere to Run," and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" were others.
As with Sherpe and Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night," Werner said the
vets often took away their own meanings from songs. The lyrics of "Sloop
John B" -- "why don't they let me go home / this is the worst trip/ I've
ever been on" -- came to be about wanting to leave Vietnam.

Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" was about a relationship gone bad --
"five long years I thought you were my man/ but I found out I'm just a link
in your chain." But for many vets, especially blacks, Werner said it became
a song of disillusionment after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Why, these soldiers asked themselves, were they being asked to fight for
freedom in a distant land, when their own country had allowed a leader who
fought for their freedom to be murdered?

"The lyric is, ' one of these mornings, the chain is going to break,' "
Werner said. "One guy said he thought the song was about the chain of
command and how it was going to break."