There is a moment within certain songs that moves them from great to sublime. I first came across the idea of “The Six” sitting in the rear of a 1982 Jeep Cherokee, my parents pulling into Fox Natural Springs on our way to get water for the week.
One of Dad’s favorite bands was The Doors, and a copy of their greatest hits album was playing on the car’s stereo. Being one of his favorite records, both Patrick and I knew it well – or at least as well as any 10 and 11 year olds could, so as “Love Her Madly” finished we both tucked our ears to the speaker waiting for “Riders on the Storm” to begin.
The song opens with the sounds of a driving rain – is that a car driving down the road? In the distance lightning strikes and thunder rumbles, drawing you into the scene. Ray Manzarek opens the song, the sound of his Fender Rhodes electric piano, its brightness establishing a tension that stays with the song throughout – a counterpoint to Morrison’s lyrics and Robby Krieger’s guitar. And that space, those six or so seconds of Manzarek’s piano between the storm sounds and Morrison’s first words, is everything in that song. This is where the whole song lives. If you played nothing else, a person who’d never heard it would understand exactly why it matters. This is The Six.
I couldn’t have told you then of any developed idea on this but deep in my body I felt it – and this is critical – the reaction is visceral. If you’d asked me to hum that song, this is where I would have started.
I must have heard Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” a hundred times before I finally heard The Six. When the album was released in 1988 it was impossible not to hear this song nearly everywhere – it really was that big when it dropped. But this was the late spring of 1990 – I finally had my driver’s license, my ticket to freedom and a stereo ready to play whatever I wanted to hear. I don’t remember why Patrick wasn’t with me, but I was alone on that trip to North Pole High School. I’d cleared the wooded landscape of Badger Road, coming to Badger Flats, a wide, five or six mile stretch of anomaly against the otherwise darkest of roadside thickets. The song must have been a minute or two into its playing and suddenly I heard Izzy Stradlin’s rhythm guitar underneath it all. Reverby, a slight echo in the phrasing that added a whole new dimension to this song I thought I knew well. Suddenly “Sweet Child O’ Mine” transformed from a straight-ahead rock song to something deeper. Stradlin’s line gave a melancholic weight to Slash’s punchy, aggressive guitar and clearly I saw man’s rage as a product of his sadness. The song was never the same for me again.
Some you feel without ever knowing what they are; others find you when the time is right. I have a deeply held belief that music finds you when you’re ready and not a moment sooner. I could go on and on about how long it took me to come to several artists I now consider desert island staples. And then there are those artists and songs that hit you the moment you hear them.
The summer of 2013 was a transformative year in my life. K and I were getting serious, having navigated a divorce on my side of things and the death of her father on hers. K’s father was a beloved man by many, a college professor who’d touched the lives of countless people, and the memorial service and subsequent after party brought people from around the world to our little neck of the woods in east county San Diego. I fell in love with nearly all of these wonderful people during the extended period they were with us and knew I had to find some way to stay in touch with them once they departed. From this, I created a radio program I dubbed Sonic Sundowner – a tribute to a by then defunct radio program, Big Sonic Chill, that played on 94.9 KBZT. I would create an episode based on the program’s format of chill, downtempo, and alternative music, lay in some happenings around the home like a love letter, post it and let the online conversation continue.
I don’t remember exactly which episode I was working on but suffice to say I was knee-deep in finding tracks that fit the format I had given myself. Headphones securely atop my head, sitting out by what had been a pool and was now a koi pond, slumped deep into a larger-than-life chair, I was searching. In that search I stumbled upon Frou Frou’s “Breathe In.” The clean, shimmering guitar that opens the song caught my attention, giving the track a few more seconds of listening as I made my judgment. Breathy, languid, the song floats along like a fluffy cloud until Imogen Heap comes in matching the tone with her vocal phrasing, continuing that light, breezy feel. She moves to the chorus and like a sledgehammer The Six walloped me — a light, bouncy bass line punctuating her words in a manner that just felt joyful, like I was in love with the world at that exact moment.
And I was.
I do think it’s important to acknowledge for a moment that the absence of The Six doesn’t mean a song isn’t great. There is plenty of music out there that I adore that doesn’t carry those moments for me. Nor is the Six exact — maybe it’s two seconds, maybe it’s ten. That’s the beauty: it’s deeply personal, as music should be. But the Six does make demands of you.
The Six isn’t a technique or a theory. It’s what happens when you’re present enough to be ambushed by a slice of music. It doesn’t belong to a genre or an era. It belongs to attention. And once you’ve heard it — really heard it — you can never unhear it. The song is never the same again.
I can’t be alone in this. Fact is, I know I’m not — I’ve spent so much time with fellow music lovers dissecting songs and then going back to listen with fresh ears, finding a new Six. So tell me: what’s the song for you that has that section, that slice, that Six that forever changed how you heard it and became a core piece of who you are?
