Saturday, April 21, 2012

Favorite music memories, not specifically guitar


I am enjoying tripping down memory lane, so here are a few more.

In honor of Record Store Day, I must mention trips to Tower Records with Mike—not that we did it that much, but he had always heard some thing new that he was checking out, and he really knew a lot about music. I have seen him play drums, guitar, banjo, and piano, including an absolutely beautiful piece that he composed, and that I really hope he did something with. So really, it is memories of Mike. Other good memories are…

Mom banging her cane up and down to “Howling for You” by the Black Keys: It was after her second knee surgery, and the recovery was going a lot better than the it did for the first one. Maria had her iPod in the docking station, and that came on, and Mom started going down the hall, rocking out to the music. Because her cane had this metal ring that was kind of loose, basically she became the percussion. She doesn’t use her cane anymore (sometimes I think she should), so even though she may still rock out on occasion, it will never be like that again.

Riding out to Sherwood to Hunting High and Low by a-ha: As long as we are going with family memories, this happened all the time. We had friends there, and Mom and Julie and Maria and I would pile into the Colt to go see them. I had recorded my vinyl copy of the album onto a cassette, and it was always in the tape deck, and we would sing along the whole way. I bet we still all have the entire album memorized.

Group sing to “Bohemian Rhapsody” (in the style of Queen) at Voicebox: A group of us for work had gone for happy hour. Voicebox has private karaoke rooms. I suspected this would be fun, so I insisted that we do this number, and all sing along, and it was awesome. Everyone was singing and passing the mic around, and not only was there air guitar, there was air piano. The only person who did not get really into it was Scott. Poor kid was not only too young for Queen—he was even too young for Wayne’s World.

Choreographing dance numbers for ward talent shows: I choreographed numbers for ET twice: one with her husband for “The Music of the Night”, and one with Mollie to “’Cause I’m a Blonde” by Julie Brown. Then there was one with my sisters and some friends for “Ice Ice Baby”. We did use humorous elements in all of them, but there were some cool things too, and they were crowd-pleasers, and it was just kind of fun.

Now, attending jam sessions does not exactly make the list, just because while I find them interesting and always learn something new, as the one who is just observing and not jamming, I tend to feel a bit awkward and useless. Sometime I should try one where there are groupies or girlfriends and try to blend in. I am confident that someone handing me a tambourine would only make things worse.

Here’s the one I have never told anyone: One night I had just attended a dance performance, and I had some waiting time alone at the train station. There was wind, and a flagpole with some rope and hooks, that was being blown in such a manner that the clanging of the hook and the scraping of the rope was making a pretty steady rhythm. Bum-bum-bum, bumm-bumm-bumm. So I did the only logical thing and started dancing.

Springfest Battle of the Bands: Springfest was put on by the dorms, and I volunteered to help with the Battle of the Bands. I got to help a lot. There was a lot to do, and I think we were basically a committee of five. A lot of the pre-work was cool. I made some awesome posters, we screened demo tapes of different bands, and we went to Duke’s to procure equipment.

Duke had a bar in Springfield, but he also rented equipment for music events. If you were a musician in the area back then, you knew about him. I don’t know if he’s still around, but he was great—super helpful and cool.

The day of the event itself was busy—I don’t think I participated in any of the other Springfest events—but it was a good kind of busy, working with the bands, helping with setup, getting ballots to and from the judges, and eventually the take-down, which was not awful because suddenly there were quite a few people helping.

The great thing was that after it was over it was not really over, because there were a bunch of musicians in the area and they all had their instruments, so we were just sitting in the grass and there was random music and dancing going on.

It’s weird how some things are still so clear years later. Like one of the bands, Skunk, that did not even make it in, but I still remember their demo tape, and their logo of a skunk formed by the word.

Looking back there is a sort of wistfulness to it, knowing some of the things that would come later. One of the guys on the committee, who was so helpful and engaged, would later get into drugs and kind of burn out, and I don’t know if he ever came out of that. One of the bands, Something She Said (I still have their tape), broke up shortly after. I had been friends with John, and later on I ended up working with Kurt (at Intel of all places), and he blamed his ego and really wished I could have put him in touch with John (I would have liked that too), but everyone had lost touch, and as far as I can tell neither of them are on Facebook now, and neither is Andrew Diamond of Movement (super-cute—he reminded me of Simon Lebon, they incorporated Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusic into one of their songs, and also very appreciative of my help), If Facebook had already been around, things would have been different, but most people weren’t even using e-mail yet back then.

So looking back there are things that are kind of sad, but that day was golden. We had orchestrated a good time for people, and it certainly would not have been possible without the bands, but this bunch of non-musicians had still been a part of making it happen, and it felt really satisfying.

So many of these memories are about a response that you get. Sometimes it is a physical response that is almost involuntary—you could control it, but why? Sometimes there is an emotional response in you, or the response that you have gotten from others, and there is this unity as you connect to the music together. It can be deeply personal, but also incredibly communal. And I realize that I would totally participate in putting on a music festival now, as scary a thought as that may be. Well, I do have a dream lineup ready to go, so at least there’s that.

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