Again, I was six. I can still imagine the line of hyped-up, thrill-junkie teens snaking around the block to buy tickets at the Showcase Cinemas in Dedham, Massachusetts. The movie had been out in the world less than twelve hours and already the word had somehow spread that this was the movie you had to see. I can picture the poster with a leviathan-scaled Great White with teeth like daggers rising up to the ocean’s surface, where an unsuspecting female swimmer is about to get turned into chum. I can picture the blood-red letters spelling out J-A-W-S on the theater’s marquee. And I can picture the teenage usher shooting my parents an insinuating, I-don’t-know-if-this-is-the-best-idea look as he ripped our tickets. I didn’t know it at the time, but my life was about to change forever.
I remember the thrill of anticipation mixed with mild nausea as the lights started to dim in the theater. From that moment on, things get a little spotty. I know my heart was racing like a fucking greyhound as a young skinny-dipper stripped off her clothes and sprinted into the ocean for a moonlit swim. I know my stomach sank like cement block as John Williams’s iconic two-note da-duh…da-duh score kicked in. And I know that I splayed my fingers over my eyes as that skinny-dipper got bucked and thrashed around like a chewy rag doll. Not that that did anything to block out the screams, mind you. My God, those screams. I’m proud to say that I stuck it out until the end of the movie, but I’d be lying if I also said I didn’t spend most of it with my eyes squeezed shut. But it doesn’t matter because watching that movie was a rite of passage. A rite of passage that would mark the beginning of a fifty-year love affair that’s never lost an ounce of its primal, white-knuckle power.
‘It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.”
I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.
Jones’s book brilliantly highlights the amount of extraordinary music created that year, from the groundbreaking plastic soul of David Bowie’s Young Americans to the carefully judged pop of Steely Dan. And, arguably, there was the last great album of Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks.