The Roches

I think I probably heard tracks from The Roches debut album soon after it was released in 1979. While I can’t pinpoint the source, it might have been the airplay on WFMU. But I really fell in love with the record (they were records then!) after repeated plays at my friend Maryclaire’s apartment in Montclair. I was 23 and Maryclaire was a “sophisticated” 25 year-old I worked with at a monolithic corporate goliath in Parsippany.

Anyway, MC, as she was legendarily known, had this crummy, walk down apartment somewhere in Montclair--the exact location has become fuzzy over the decades since, and mostly irrelevant to this tale. Whenever a group of us would gather at her place for afterwork socializing and wind down time, the album would invariably end up on the turntable, in heavy rotation with the likes of Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender” and something or other by Joni Mitchell.

The Roches’ album became a very specific soundtrack at a very particular time in my life--a very formative and impressionable time, I might add. Maryclaire and I never became wholly intimate--I was too awkward and inhibited and wholly unprepared, thus nothing really ever developed. Our paths drifted with the din and distraction of adult responsibilities, different life paths and even partners. I ended up with Jean and MC ended up with Marc, a nice enough lad who married her and took her away to Ohio where a great job awaited him. I always wondered about the destiny of different endings to the story…

We continued to correspond throughout the next few years, until one evening, around suppertime, the phone rang. It was Marc, regrettably informing me that MC had been killed in an automobile accident on her way to Ohio State early that morning, where she continued to work toward her degree. She left her husband and two year-old Emily. It was beyond tragic and I was deeply affected.

That was probably toward the late ‘80s.

I still listen to The Roches album, although it’s now it’s constructed of zeros and ones, on an Ipod or my computer, having given up the crusade to keep the vinyl experience alive many years ago.

The intimacy of the collection of songs still affects me deeply, the potent harmonies stronger today than ever, it seems. From the whimsical “We” to the ambient and beautiful “Hammond Song”, straight through to the stunning and haunting “Pretty and High”, which concludes the opus. We don’t live in the shadow of New York City anymore, opting for a quieter environment just outside Ithaca, New York. It is, by the way, an absolutely splendid place to grow older (I’m now approaching 52) and smell the flowers, as they say.

As time goes on, I often reflect on those days, MC’s apartment, my own awkward and unfulfilled youth. I even think often and with sadness of the glory of New York City. And while the Towers have come and gone and the world has turned a dark, angry tone, the soundtrack is always the same.

That first, timeless record by Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche.