Switched On

Switched On

Prologue

There I was, doing seventy--five miles an hour in the left lane on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Suddenly, without any warning, I found myself transported back to a Boston nightclub, circa 1984. It was eight p.m. on April 15, 2008, when everything changed as I switched on my car stereo.

I was fifty years old, half deaf from hanging out with rock and roll bands in my youth, and tired from a long day working on cars. On top of that, I’d just left Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, where a team of Harvard neuroscientists had run an experiment on me, using high--powered magnetic fields in an attempt to rewire my brain and change my emotional intelligence. I’ve always been weak in that area because I have autism. Some autistic people have trouble talking or understanding language. Others—like me—generally talk fine and listen some of the time, but we often miss the unspoken cues—-body language, tone of voice, and subtleties of expression—-that make up such a big part of human conversation. I’ve always had a hard time with that. Luckily, my social disability is offset somewhat by my technical skills. But many of the gifts that help me make a living and take care of myself today also left me feeling lonely and broken as a kid. Some vestige of that hurt has remained in me, and that was why I had agreed to join the scientists on what several of my friends had called a crazy quest.

The idea of fixing myself with a fancy new treatment had sounded great in theory, but from what I had seen so far, it hadn’t worked. The scientists had proposed using electromagnets to rearrange connections in my head. It had seemed like science fiction, and maybe that’s all it ever would be. As I got into my car that evening after four hours at the hospital, I was more exhausted and annoyed than when I’d arrived. But otherwise, as far as I could tell, nothing had changed.

The drive to Boston had taken two hours and now I was facing another two hours to get home. What was I doing there? I asked myself. But I knew the answer—-I had volunteered for this research study because the scientists had issued a call for autistic adults, and I wanted to “make myself better” in some ill--defined but powerfully felt way.

Those thoughts and a thousand others were all running through my head when I plugged in my iPod and music filled the car. I’d done that same thing a thousand times before and heard nothing more than songs on a car stereo. I hadn’t seen anything at all—-just the road ahead. This time the result was strikingly different. All of a sudden, I wasn’t in my car. I wasn’t even in my body. All my senses had gone back in time, and I stood backstage listening to the Tavares brothers singing soul music in a dark, smoky club.

Years ago I’d stood by those stages as the sound engineer, whose job was to make sure the machinery of the show kept running. These days I hung around the stage as a part--time photographer, following performers through my camera lens in the hope of catching that magic moment. This was something totally different. When I’d engineered rock and roll shows all I saw or heard were the little cues that told me everything was okay, or not. Now when I work as a photographer I concentrate so deeply on my subjects that I don’t even hear the sounds of the show. That night in the car, the recorded music captured me and drew me into a world of a long--ago performance in a way I’d never experienced before.

The transition was instantaneous. One moment I was navigating traffic in my Range Rover and the next I was watching five singers in a nightclub. Floodlights hung from the ceiling, illuminating the stage, and I stood just outside the lit area. To my left, on the stage, I saw the Tavares brothers in sport coats and bow ties, with a backup band on the side. A flute player stood in the background, whispering his contributions to the melody every few measures. Tavares is known to the world for singing “More Than a Woman” from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, but they had a long history in New England before that and a much larger repertoire of songs. Thirty years earlier I’d been a part of that world, working as a sound engineer and special effects designer. Many of the big Boston venues used my sound and lighting equipment, and I’d stood beside countless stages and watched more performances than I could remember. Was I reliving one of those now, or was this a figment of my imagination? I could not tell then, and I still don’t know today. All I can say is that the experience felt incredibly real. I could almost smell the cigarette smoke on my clothes. And through it all, some separate part of my mind kept driving the car, though I only know that because I didn’t crash.

Meanwhile, the sound of their voices was so clear that I let my mind run free. The musicians and their gear were right in front of me onstage. Looking into the wings I saw amplifiers and road cases stacked in the darkness. Scanning the club I saw the keyboard player, with his rack of instruments. One of the singers onstage walked toward me, and I heard the swish of the cable as he carried the microphone in his hand.
My vision was crystal clear, my head was full of sound, and I felt totally alive. The sterile digitized songs on my iPod had come to life and the feeling was so magnificently overwhelming that I began to cry. Not because I was happy or sad, but because it was all so intense.

I turned up the volume and sank deeper into the melody. The brothers kept singing, my car kept driving, and tears ran down my face. I felt the beauty of the sound wash over me, and every note was brilliant, new, and alive. This was similar to the way I heard music thirty years earlier, when I had spent every waking moment listening to performances, watching audio signals on my oscilloscope screen, or visualizing the sounds of instruments in my mind. Back then, “listening” was such a detailed experience that I’d recognize individual instruments and their positions on the stage. I’d hear the voices of each background singer, distinct, as he or she stepped up for a chorus. But now the experience was richer and deeper, with an added layer of feeling.

Suddenly I had an insight: Perhaps I was hearing music pure, and true, without the distorting lens of autism. Perhaps others heard that emotion all along, and now I could too. Maybe that was why I had cried—-because I could feel the music, something that autistic people do not often experience in response to things we see and hear. I’d always been able to tell when music was happy or sad, but that night the Tavares brothers’ music had hit me with a power that was new and unexpected.

A few hours earlier, back at the hospital, I had listened to two people shouting in anger as they passed in the hall. He’s mad, I said to myself, without a trace of emotion attached to the observation. I was an accurate, logical observer. Now, as I listened to Tavares sing, tears ran down my face as I felt the emotions rise up from the lyrics of “She’s Gone,” “Words and Music,” and “A Penny for Your Thoughts.”

As many times as I’d heard those melodies sung, I’d never felt them the way I did now. Earlier that day, I would have understood the logical meaning of the words but nothing more.

At that moment, I got it. A song like “She’s Gone” wasn’t just words and melody, delivered to the audience with artistic precision. It was an expression of love, written and sung for a real person. I wondered who she was and what had become of her.

Later that night I sent a message to the scientist who was heading the effort. “That’s some powerful mojo you have in there,” I told him. And we were just beginning.