Song Memory #3

Bat Country
by Avenged Sevenfold, from the album City of Evil

Admittedly, I don't really care for this album, even with the Fear And Loathing reference. The band themselves, though....

I was an early supported of Avenged Sevenfold. There, I said it. I like 'em. My first encounter with this band was at a Symphony X show several years ago. Matt and I drove down to New York for the show - bringing homemade masks with hopes of meeting the band - and after a long wait outside, were ushered in. I think this was at the Nokia theater in Times Square.

There were four bands on the bill - some anonymous opener, Avenged Sevenfold, Symphony X, and Blind Guardian. Serious metalheads are a tough audience to win over, especially those into progressive or symphonic metal who are very set in their ways. I know, I was one of them. We like the blazing guitar solo, the fourteen minute epic song showcasing everyone's musical talent, and singers with tremendous range. Having A7X on the bill (shorter songs, snarlier vocals) could have been a disaster, and by most accounts was not the most successful pairing, but I was intrigued. The musicianship was solid, and the singer swapped back and forth between screaming and a surprisingly clear singing voice without showing any effort. I particularly remember the rendition of Darkness Surrounding, which remains one of my standbys for just plain rocking the fuck out.

Song Memory #2

Roadhouse Blues
by The Doors (live bootleg performed by Pearl Jam)

I played Roadhouse Blues to a crowd of over 30,000 people in 2007. No, it wasn't on a stadium tour; no, I'm not that big in Japan (yet) - this was at the 2007 ING New York City Marathon. According to their website, this is the World's Largest Marathon (killer!), and in 2007 was won by Martin Lel, of Kenya. Most of the hardcore American marathon runners were away, since the trials for the US Olympic Marathon team were to be held the next day.

Anyway, I had been out late at a friend's house in Brooklyn that was fortunately right near our meeting place to set up and perform. I met up with Joe and some friends of his who play the Marathon every year - on keyboards and drums - and we set up, tuned ourselves in the cold (not easy with big ol' steel strings) and started playing as soon as the first "wheelers" came in sight. We led off with Roadhouse Blues, mostly because it's a great tune, easily recognized and fun to improvise on - and were greeted with grins and thumbs up from the passing athletes.

This was a very last-minute band, and as such we hadn't practiced anything - our repertoire was limited to less than a dozen songs - but since the audience was constantly changing, it didn't matter. We played for maybe two hours, even enticing some of the spectators to start dancing. One little boy was a particular fan, and jumped up and down arhythmically each time we came to the chorus.

Roll, baby, roll.

Soundtracking

Lately, I have been thinking about how I interpret music.


Now, I am pretty secure in stating that I am, without doubt, a Music Person. From my very first LP (Big Bird Sings!), through fascination with dad's new CD player (Ray Lynch's No Blue Thing), my very first boom box (with Dookie and Vitalogy, both of which were confiscated after the lyrics fell under maternal scrutiny), to the first time I hooked up an iPod to my new car stereo (the bass on Clint Eastwood felt like it was lifting the '98 Camry off the ground) and assembled a library of almost ten thousand mp3s; from the first recorder I was obligated to buy in 1992 to the Warwick bass guitar I couldn't help buying in 2007; from the first shaky rendition of Hot Cross Buns to writing and recording original music with bands, the creation and absorption of music has been the single greatest defining factor in my life.

I wrote this last year:

I once read a personal profile of an anonymous person on an anonymous website. I don't remember it verbatim, but the gist was:

Everyone is interested in music.
Those who say they aren't are lying.
Those who aren't don't exist.

Which is true, at least in my observation. Ask anyone if they like music. They'll say yes, and then begin listing genres, composers, singers, bass players, albums. Tastes vary, of course, but the idea behind it, rhythmically arranged notes expressing ideas, remains the same in all genres and cultures. Scarcely any aspect of human endeavour allows for the same amount of freedom within a set of boundaries with the result that the boundaries expand outwards exponentially, always have always will as music by its nature cannot remain static and no language can possibly be as universal; written records can tell us what the past looked, spoke, smelt, and died like

and as a devotee of military history these are the AllImportantQuestions; reading accounts of the by now famous Easy Company 506th PIR 101st Airborne being struck in particular by how one poor sap, younger then than I am now, can recall how he was one of the lucky few to see Glen Miller in concert, how he started with Moonlight Serenade and followed with In The Mood, how he remembers this better than the names or personalities of some of the men who died beside him

or as a devotee of family history, especially as it relates to the military, a letter written by the Eagle at my age, from the deck of his transport bound for Kwajalein, a leader of men and all of them nervously brave; Eagle and Ted and Harry and Fireball on the deck, night after night, listening to a Marine who couldn't bear to leave his accordion behind, and the Agony Quartette singing Dear Old Girl, I Wonder What’s Become Of Sally, “old college songs and lullabies” as the ship took them to fight, and days later the Quartette became a Duet as Harry was wounded and Ted was killed, then ending abruptly on Saipan as Fireball was wounded and Eagle killed

but not how they felt when they heard that certain arrangement of pitch and rhythm that got the blood flowing to dance, to love, to kill

another friend, fresh out of active service in the Marines mentions listening to Lamb of God on headphones while preparing for a patrol; sitting in the gunner's turret of your Humvee, solid weight of a fiftycal within arm's reach, your life behind you and before you at least for now, and in your ears the adrenaline encouragement - Now You've Got Something To Die For

With this in mind, I am going to try and add an entry per day (or so, we'll see how long that resolution lasts) by putting my music list on random and writing down what I associate most with that song. Could be interesting.

Today's Song, Chosen At Random, Is:
Going To Your Funeral, Part 1
by eels, from the album Electro-Shock Blues

I haven't got any memories associated with this song in particular, so let's talk about the album. I found out about eels during the summer of 2003, while working at the SPAC box office. If I'm not mistaken, my boss Mollie mentioned the song "Last Stop: This Town" during one of our lengthy bull sessions on a slow summer day while waiting for OAPs to buy tickets for the ballet. I was fresh from my first year of college, feeling very worldly (I had a beard! I had smoked weed! I went to a psychiatrist!), and was always looking for new bands to present to friends. Electro-Shock Blues became one of my favorite albums of the summer, despite not really being a summer album - it's a downer, but a really pretty downer, written by singer E in response to his mother's death by cancer, and his sister's suicide. If anyone had the right to feel sorry for themselves, I felt, it was this guy - now the only living member of his family - but despite the exterior of sadness, it's an album about coming to terms with life and how to cope with the inevitable problems and tragedies that we will all face. The last track, "P.S. You Rock My World" was my particular favorite, with the last lines providing some of the most valuable advice I could have received during one of the more emotionally unstable times of my life:

Laying in bed tonight I was thinking
And listening to all the dogs
And the sirens and the shots
And how a careful man tries
To dodge the bullets
While a happy man takes a walk

And maybe it is time to live

Time to live, indeed, and it was glorious listening to this song while driving home on a warm summer night, down Route 50 from Saratoga to Rexford. There was always a backing sound of humming tires and singing cicaidas, mixed with the sweet smell of flowering trees and cut grass, the comforting smell of the car's interior, and the forbidden smell of the Camel Reds that I hid from my mother. I took a lot of photographs that summer, dealt with the side effects of anti-depressants, and for the first time looked forward to the end of summer when I could return to college.