Music is thought to be nearly as old as civilization itself, and perhaps is older than that. Some people teach that music was invented by the ancient Mesopotamians, who sent drummers out to the fields to frighten away evil spirits (who comes up with this nonsense?). Supposedly, the drummers got bored and started developing some real rhythm. The Chinese have a tradition which holds that the Yellow Emperor, Huang Ti, sent the scholar Ling Lun to the western mountains to find a way to reproduce the song of the phoenix. Ling Lun returned with a reed instrument called the Sheng.
It is hard to believe that people did not invent melodies and discover rythms before they raised up emperors and built temples to ward off evil gods and spirits. Music is a doorway to the soul, for it moves us to sadness and happiness. A couple of years ago, a lady I worked with lost a step-son. She and many members of their family attended the funeral, and Helen was out of the office for a couple of days. At the time, I was in the habit of playing CDs on my computer to help me relax and think. The day Helen came back to work, I stepped away from my desk to get a soft drink. When I came back, one of our co-workers told me Helen had rushed away from her desk, crying. My CD was set on Random Play, and “In the arms of the angel” had come on. They played that at her setp-son’s funeral.
When I was in college, I had a close friend named Robin. She told me that whenever she was depressed, she would sit by her stereo, put on headphones, and listen to Huey Lewis and the News. Although I wasn’t that big a fan of Huey Lewis, as the years passed I found that, if I started feeling down, I could listen to some of their songs, think of Robin, and remember all the good times we had together. We associate both good memories and bad memories with music, and ever since I realized that I have tried to listen to music that makes me feel good.
I grew up listening to bands like Yes, Argent, the Allman Brothers, Uriah Heep, Emerson, Lake, & palmer and other “progressive” groups. My brother introduced me to most of them. But I also loved pop music, “Top 40” radio. He and his serious musician friends sneered at it and made fun of me for listening to songs like “Brandy, you’re a fine girl” and “It’s so nice to be with you”. Now they play these songs on their weekend jobs and millions of people sing them in karaoke bars around the world, and most people have no idea of who Uriah Heep and Steppenwolf were. There is a sort of poetic justice in the way music guides our lives, but I am glad I was never an Osmonds fan.
Some of the old groups are timeless, of course. The Jefferson Airplane evolved into Jefferson Starship and eventually just became Starship. You can still hear their songs on the radio and self-acclaimed Music Purists mumble in their beards about “insipid, boring music”. Personally, I think “We built this city” rocks, because it was obviously written just to get the feet to move and the legs to bounce. The lyrics are pretty meaningless, but then, no one could ever really figure out what Jon Anderson’s lyrics meant in “Tales from topographic oceans”.
The Eagles are another group who have managed to stay popular. Of course, they went through that awful Joe Walsh phase (the period where Music Periods whipped their beards over their shoulders and danced like drunken gold miners whenever “Hotel California” came on the radio). But there were higher points in the Eagles’ career. The best Eagles songs were “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” and “Best of my Love” because they let you drift off into your own thoughts. You didn’t have to worry about who thought they were cool or outdated. They still have that effect. In fact, one evening, while I was waiting for a woman to join me for some dancing, I sat and listened to a juke box in a Texas road house. “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” came on and I entertained the other people with my singing. They didn’t object and I didn’t mind putting myself in the mood.
The Doobie Brothers brought out “(Music is) the Doctor” in the 1990s, more than 20 years after they emerged from the Louisiana music scene with a bouncy, almost Cajun-rock style that was nearly totally destroyed by Michael McDonald. It seems like all the good bands hit a period in their careers where they stop producing good music and start experimenting with new styles. Yes did that in the 1980s when Steve Howe left the group and Trevor Rabin came in. About the only good song to emerge from that era was “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, and that was just so-so music by Classic Yes standards.
The apostasy of Yes is part of what drove me back to the pop radio market in the 1980s. That and the fact that I spent a lot of time listening to radio rather than records. I was tired of scratching my old vinyl and didn’t want to buy any new vinyl. I was also tired of buying stereos. Stereophonic record players were a pretty awful technology and no one was happier to start buying CDs than me. Of course, one can buy the old favorites on CD, but my CD listening experience includes many more recent artists.
I bought Avril Lavigne’s first CD soon after I heard the second single from it, “Complicated”. I liked “Complicated” (still do) and would often dance to it in the car. My “cool” nieces always freak out when I do that, I suppose because their boyfriends are more laidback (boring) and they just drive around and talk about themselves. I think I have always danced behind the wheel. If you pull up behind a car at a stoplight and you see it bouncing, it could mean the driver is getting lucky with his girlfriend, or it could be me, tapping away to the beat of Wham’s “I’m your man” (I know, it’s a gay song, but the girls don’t have to know that). Could be both, I suppose, but I’ll never tell.
The first time I listened to the Avril Lavigne CD, I pegged “I’m With You” as the major hit. I just knew, when I listened to that song, that it would become a monster. And I was right. Of course, we all make such good guesses on occasion. There was a time, though, when you could buy an album and know which cuts were designated singles before they were released. Bread (David Gates’ old band in the 1970s) used to release 12-song albums with 6 six songs on each side. Nearly always, the 2nd, 4th, and 6th cuts on the first side would be released as singles. Sometimes the 1st song was, too.
Bread had some good makeout albums. The girls just sort of drifted off into an amber state of glassy-eyed fantasy and a boy who was smooth and confident could have an enjoyable afternoon (in between getting up and flipping the records over if he didn’t stack them). Yes had some great daydream albums. I used to put on Close to the Edge, Tales from Topographic Oceans, and Relayer and just drift off when I didn’t want to do anything. I often went to played those albums late at night, to help me drift off to sleep.
It’s hard to do that sort of stuff with today’s music. Sure, you have Shakira and Savage Garden to fall back on, but the girls have short attention spans. They can sway gently to “Beautiful” or “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and then Shoop-Daddy and the Snakedogs will come on and the next thing you know, your hands are in the air and you’re chanting, “Go daddy! go Daddy! GO DADDY!” and the mood is broken (but you still get a workout).
I got into Salsa dancing while living in Texas. Salsa is a very sophisticated, sexy style of dancing. In fact, everyone told me it was the hardest of the Latin dances to learn. I don’t speak Spanish so I have no idea of what the lyrics in the Salsa songs mean. I had to spend a lot of time learning to pick out the beat anyway. Salsa ain’t your basic two-step, baby. I eventually reached a point in my Salsa appreciation where I began listening to the words. I still couldn’t understand them, but the singers in the bands (live Salsa is much better than CD Salsa) often enacted little scenarios with their body language. One of my favorite songs, and one which is popular with a lot of the bands, is “Una Aventura”. Near as I can figure out, it has something to do with a married man who falls in love with a married woman and they meet at a cafe (with their partners). They have to communicate under the table.
Of course, I could be way off the mark and it might have something to do with milking cows.
The best Salsa performer I have seen is Mary Frometa. She makes the music come alive. She plays at Elvia’s every Friday night and I got in the habit of just dropping by there. Sometimes I would invite my friends along, and we’d dance to the music. The biggest complaint I have about Elvia’s is that there are very few formal dancers there. They mostly sort of wiggle, and that is no fun for someone who knows how to dance real Salsa, ChaCha, Merengue, and Bachata. Now, Bachata is pretty popular with the Elvia’s crowd. I struggled with it for a couple of months because the beat is backwards to Salsa. I kept wanted to do Salsa steps and finally had to get some pointers. When done right, Bachata and Merengue can be fun, sexy dances, but most people don’t really do them right. I’ve seen some dancers just take on the floor and move it with these dances.
Still, the world of Salsa music is very different from the one I grew up with. Salsa doesn’t put me into thoughtful moods, or remind me of my childhood, or stop me in my tracks with that “Oh, WOW!” effect. It has collected some happy (and not-so-happy) memories in my repertoire. There are songs I can do without, especially the ones which alternate between Merengue and Bachata rhythms (what is up with THAT anyway?). There are songs I love when I hear them but I cannot name them, much less describe them. It’s funny when my non-Latin friends and I try to describe good Salsa songs to each other. Talk about the blind and deaf trying to lead the blind and deaf….
Describing songs is an art. I have developed an appreciation for people who spend all day working with music. They live and breathe it, and they seem to know far more than the average “cool” person would ever want to know about it. These experts can name that tune in one note. For a couple of years I kept hearing this one song on the radio, in restaurants, and in stores. At first, I didn’t like it. But as I listened to it more and more often, I came to change my mind. So, one day, while eating at a bistro in a mall, I heard the song come on again. I decided I had to know what it was called and who it was by. I didn’t want to wait until I heard it on the radio again because I was sure I would forget to pay attention to the song credits.
So I headed to the music store across the way and found a helpful sales clerk who listened patiently as I tried to describe the song. Nope. I did not remember the lyrics, and I got the beat wrong. But I did get two words right: “moon” and “ocean”. Based on those two words, he suggested I listen to Santana’s “Smooth”. Yup. That was the song. I bought the CD (and the next CD, the one with Michelle Branch’s “Game of Love”). I decided I liked another song on the newer CD, “Why don’t you and I” (or something like that — I’m terrible with song titles). Gosh. That was released as a single, too….
But maybe my most memorable “I don’t know the words but can you describe the song” experience occurred a couple of years ago. I kept hearing this Bruce Springsteen song on the radio that had such a tender, sweet melody to it. He usually rocks away and I like a lot of Springsteen’s stuff (ever since “Born to Run” came out, in fact). I couldn’t find anyone who could interpret my warblings when I tried to describe the song to friends and sales clerks. So, finally, in desperation, I searched the Internet for lyrics to Springsteen songs. I found one site which had a huge collection of lyrics. I became lost in a sea of lyrics, doomed to forever wander in ignorance (because I never pay attention to the credits announced on the radio).
Before I gave up completely, I decided I might as well make a fool of myself and send the Webmaster a crazy email. I described the up-and-down melody of part of the refrain, and the way the song was so soft and melodious. She suggested it might be “Sad Eyes” (I guess Sa-aa-aa-ad eyes never lie-eee….”). That was it. Once again, I had managed to communicate intelligibly to someone whose language I didn’t speak. Or maybe I just got lucky.
Music and luck go hand in hand. Whether you are just walking into someone else’s home, or visiting a new restaurant, or driving down the road on a long trip, you have no idea of what song you’ll next hear. Most of them will sound like dreck. You know that SOMEONE likes them, somewhere. Perhaps such people have had rough lives. But eventually one comes into your range which you have never heard before, and you think, “Wow, that’s neat.” You might get a happy memory from it. That happy memory might turn into a sad one.
There was a girl I met a couple of years ago. I liked her, she liked me. We talked a lot. We found excuses to see each other. Things seemed to click. One day, I noticed a song playing on the radio, “I don’t know why” by Norah Jones. I asked the girl if she knew the name of the song, who did it. She didn’t like the song, but I did, and it seemed like every time we talked after that the song was playing on the radio. After I got the Santana CDs, I started playing “Why don’t you and I” for her. She didn’t like it. But after that, we heard it a lot together, and she eventually admitted to her best friend that she loved the song because of me.
And then we went our separate ways. Now, when I hear “I don’t know why”, I think of that day long ago when we first listened to the song together, and of that day long after when she admitted she liked Santana’s “Why don’t you and I”, and then I come back to the present, and she is not here with me. Things don’t always work out. That’s life. But the music keeps playing, and instead of wallowing in regret, I am looking forward to that next special song. What makes the music so great is the fact that it is not simply in the background. Music is a part of my life. The music is in me, and around me, and it lifts me up and carries me away with it.
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