The Playlist Was the Notebook: How I Used Songs to Recover 34 Years I Never Wrote Down

American Graffiti, released in August 1973, was the last movie I remember watching as a walking man. Director George Lucas is credited with introducing the wall-to-wall jukebox soundtrack, a film scored not by an orchestra but by the records his audience already had in their heads. Nothing in that picture needs explaining. The first bars of a song you danced to come up, and you’re in the car, on the strip, summoned back to that precise time, before the plot has done a lick of work.

(Why the Soundtrack to Your Book Could Make All the Difference.)

Lucas understood that his audience carried those songs around with them. What I didn’t understand until I sat down to write a memoir, half a century later, was that the arrangement runs both ways. The songs carry the audience, too. They don’t just score a memory. They retrieve it.

When I became a paraplegic at 19, the concerts moved to the back row—elevated, railed, away from the energy. I learned to enjoy music the way older people do, sitting still, moving my shoulders to the beat. The memories of my first life, the walking and skating and rock-and-roll one, eventually faded the way memories do.

But the music never faded. The playlist kept marking the moments, the way it does for everyone, and for me became the one thread that ran unbroken from the first life into the second. I didn’t know it yet, but it was also becoming an archive.

My memoir, For the Love of Money, covers 34 years on a Merrill Lynch sales and advisory desk, 1983-2017, the most transformative stretch in Wall Street history. I did not diligently keep a journal through any of it. What I had was the ordinary paper trail of a working life and a memory that had already proven it could twist and lose things.

The standard advice for reconstructing a period like that is sound. Build a timeline. Pull the documents. Call the people who were there. All of it gives you the facts. None of it gives you the depth, what the desk smelled like, what you were afraid of on a particular day, or the tone of a colleague on the phone. Facts can be looked up, but the room needs to be re-entered. For me, the door was the song.

When I began writing about my first job, I couldn’t have told you much of what happened at that penny-stock chop shop. But I could tell you what was playing: The Pretenders' “Back on the Chain Gang.” I played the song. What came back first wasn’t a scene, but a feeling.

It was a specific bitterness about pitching penny stocks to low-income 80-year-olds for a living. And behind the bitterness, the details started surfacing: the six proprietary stocks listed on the white board, the only ones we could pitch to our prospects, and their prices being adjusted up or down every half hour to a clanging school bell—all part of the firmwide scam.

The biggest producer in our office was snorting cocaine off his desktop on IPO day to celebrate his big winnings and the office manager showed up to work in his new pink convertible Cadillac, saying we could have one, too, if we double or triple our daily call volume. I wrote those down before the track ended. The feeling is the index, and the details are filed beneath. 

A memory can float. A record cannot. It belongs to the year you wore it out. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was recorded in 1964, but for me, it belongs to the mid-90s desk, when the personal computer and the web arrived and remade the advisory business under my feet. Playing put me right back in the office, facing the only two choices the song offers: learn to swim or go under.

When I couldn’t place which year something happened, I asked what had been playing. The song usually knew.

Some seasons have no soundtrack at all. Grief usually doesn’t. During my spinal cord rehab, the people who saved my life are the memory. When the dot-com collapse was taking the Nasdaq down 80% from its peak and I was ready to wave the white towel, the material didn’t arrive by song, but by letters my father wrote me, the “Bronx Bard,” what my book calls the Bear Market Letters.

I never cut a scene because the music failed to show up. If a chapter had a void, I filled it with whatever was true: a document, a literary reference, a joke. Only after the chapter stood on its own did Kenny Loggins’ “Watching the River Run” find its way in, the way a score is added in post. That order matters. The song is for getting at the material, not for dressing it up once you’ve got it.

The book ends with Jim Croce’s “Hey Tomorrow,” a young man’s appeal to whatever is listening for one more day. He was asking for a tomorrow he wouldn’t get. Croce died just 17 months after recording it at age 30 when his small plane went down between concert appearances. I chose his prescient song for the close because it perfectly describes my nightly prayer wherein I express my sense of vulnerability and profound gratitude for the day just ending, while humbly requesting just one more day to do it all over again.

By the time I reached the end of the manuscript, I’d left a career I wasn’t finished with yet carved out a new pathway once again, just as I’d done all those years earlier when the walking man was forced to assume his sitting position. Through the entire adventure, the song has been the primary thing that put me back in the seat without having to argue with myself. None of us knows when their soundtrack will spin for the final time. The song remembered that for me, so the chapter didn’t have to say it.

Lucas scored a story with songs his audience already carried, and it turns out the trick runs in reverse. If you’re reconstructing a decade you never wrote down, don’t start with the notebook. Start with the record. Put it on, close your eyes, and write down whatever walks into the room. Then keep the song if it earns its place, and cut it if the prose already does the job. Either way, it’ll get you there.

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