Travel Music 4: In the open air with Genesis and U2, 1987.

The trip in 1987 covered quite a lot of ground over a period of four months. It also offered the first opportunity to witness major musical concert events while traveling abroad: Genesis live in Budapest, Hungary in early June, and two months later, U2 in Cork, Ireland.

Genesis was at the pinnacle of its 1980s pop phase, and perhaps "fashionable" only in a locale behind the Iron Curtain, where Queen played a groundbreaking show the year before. The group's Invisible Touch album was ubiquitous on the radio, and it became the soundtrack of my extended stay in Hungary. The track chosen here is Abacab, off an earlier album, and a far better song when performed live. The dual drumming conclusion is classic.

On the other hand, U2 as yet was traveling an upward arc, somewhere in the middle of a year-long tour to support the band's Joshua Tree album. Like the Genesis gig, the concert was outdoors in a soccer stadium. My memory is decidedly pre-Zoo TV; the crowd was massive and reverent, and there was a spiritual vibe that later dissipated when U2 became iconic. "Where the Streets Have No Name" competes neck-in-neck with "Still Haven;t Found What I'm Looking For" in my personal lexicon of travel metaphor music.

Travel Music 2: Drunk in a crowded house, 1987.

Perugia, Italy, 1987.

I'd spent ten days in the Italian hill towns, using a patchwork system of buses and trains to visit Florence, Siena, San Gimignano and Perugia. The chosen domicile in Perugia was a youth hostel affiliated somehow with a religious order, which didn't frighten me because it was quite cheap.

There I met a fun group of American college-aged travelers (I was a bit older at almost 27), and in the joyous way things worked, for a few days we split off in ever-changing small groups to explore the vicinity. One of them, a fellow whose name I've forgotten (Josh?), accompanied me on a bus ride to Assisi; he was an Ivy League history major, but I managed to hold my own in a discussion of the beginnings of World War I. See, the IU Southeast education was fine, after all.

Josh also had been in Italy for a few weeks, and was in the process of mastering the art of cafe-lounging and girl-watching with aperitifs. I couldn't afford many, but it was much fun.

One night all of us convened in the hostel's kitchen and cooked up a massive meal of pasta, vegetables and fruit. There was wine, which led to song, in turn bringing the night staff to quiet our exuberance. At some point very late, I crawled to my bunk bed, made it to the top -- I weighed 200 lbs then, not 260 -- and donned the miniature/a> radio earphones to make the rounds of the Perugia AM dial.

The first song I heard was Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," and although there was something familiar about it (Neil Finn's residency in Split Enz, to be exact), I couldn't place the connection. It wasn't until I got back home in the fall of 1987 that I made a positive identification.

By then, I was planning the next trip.

Travel Music 1: Pole-vaulting a borderline, 1985.

My musical tastes never were particularly avant-garde. They are what they are, influenced heavily by early exposure to swing and big band music, which is to say I'm a very melody-based type of guy. As an adult, I've learned to appreciate and enjoy atonality, bebop and the Bulgarian women's choir. But when I was a kid, it wasn't quite the same.

Straight up: Pop isn't a dirty word in my lexicon. Never has been, never will be.

Back during the 1980s, my entire life was organized on a 24-7-365 travel footing. If not actually wandering the European continent, I was reading voraciously and planning another trip, working multiple low-rent jobs to save enough money to make my dreams come true. There simply wasn't cerebral time remaining to actively seek out new music, and besides, how quickly we forget the relative paucity of options in the prehistoric, pre-Internet planet.

There was some MTV, and later VH1. There was local radio, and at the time, quite a lot of classical music, then as now on WUOL 90.5 FM. There were people close to me who'd make suggestions. So it went. I'm surprised I ever learned anything at all.

All of this is prelude to the startling revelation that of all the world's music that might have settled into the weird archive between my ears, where music plays all the time and has done so for as long as I can remember, the song I always associate with my first overseas journey in 1985 is Madonna's "Borderline."

I heard the song numerous times just prior to departure, and it never really went away. In fact, in a metaphorical sense, that initial foray out into the world did indeed involve stepping across a considerable borderline -- I'd done nothing, been nowhere and was in the process of embracing the notion of "late bloomer" and straining it into comic incredulity. As noted previously, in spite of all the laborious planning and research, I was well aware how remarkably terrified I was of the interactions necessary to make the trip work ... and how equally cognizant I was of absolutely having to do it, or else resign myself to complete a homeland trek to irrelevance.

A bouncy Madonna pop song may not deserve to be fiercely metaphorical, and yet one's sub-conscious sometimes does the choosing for you. Maybe it worked, because that very first trip in 1985 certifiably changed my life, and it's why I smile every time I hear the song.