The memory of music

                                                       

Yesterday I posted some lyrics by a new band, The Head and the Heart, that reminded me a little of some older Toad the Wet Sprocket songs from the '90's, so this morning I woke up with the intention of going out to find the TWS song and post it, possibly with video link, so my loyal readers could see for themselves whether or not there was some similarity b/n the two bands.
But listening to the music brought back some interesting emotions that I hadn't counted on;
it's funny how music does that to you.

There you are, just bopping along in your car and you're thinking about everything and nothing, and about going to the grocery store because,

"you're almost out of coffee filters and while you're there you should really pick up some bananas and check to see if those little chocolate thing-a-ma-jigs your special somebody likes are on sale and, jeez, did I call Verizon about switching to that lower cost plan I saw on TV last night?, and did I mail that check for my annual contribution?  I should probably get a fresh loaf of bread and dang it, I forgot to submit my bid on that new Michael Kors location in Arizona....."

And then you hear a song that you haven't heard in a long time.
One that pulls you right back into some distant, receding past of heavy emotions that you had completely forgotten.
Some difficult, or painful, or even beautiful event in your life.

You're standing on the beach with your arms around someone with "that song that was so popular that summer it seemed to be the soundtrack of everyone's life for a couple months" playing somewhere in the distance.

Or, that song that came on the radio as you drove home, sad and broken and alone, late at night, from that someone's apartment for the very last time.
http://youtu.be/u9lEd5bIbbQ

(Every time I hear this version of Wild Horses I see a girl standing on a balcony in a crummy apartment complex off of Jimmy Carter Blvd. and I can still see the sunlight shining on her face.)


I was looking for the lyrics to one TWS but found this one:

http://youtu.be/Yp1ZGW9MdbI

And suddenly I found myself in an '85 GMC cargo van full of everything I owned, driving north on I-95, as I moved from Middleburg, Florida to Marietta, Georgia in 1994.
It's 6 hours by car and a million miles by heart.

(There's a Black Crowes song in which Chris Robinson sings,
"ask me why another road song,
 funny, but I guess you never left home")

I had bought a handful of CD's just before the trip, including the TWS album, Dulcinea, and played them nonstop for the next couple months and, by some trick of memory and mind and music they have melded into all of those feelings of excitement and promise and fear and pain and doubt that can fill up in your heart when you really leave your home town for the first time.
That feeling of escaping the gravitational pull of your parents and family and even your friends to find some new, perfect "other" that doesn't really exist outside of your own head.

Funny.

Adam Duritz, the singer for Counting Crows, wrote:
"The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings."

In the same song he opines,
"If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts."

And maybe that's what I'm talking/writing about here.
That haunting feeling of love and memory that some special song can bring right back to you.
Maybe it's appropriate, that here, just before Halloween, I spend a few moments contemplating those ghosts, living and dead, that haunt our subconscious on a daily basis.

And whether it's the memory of some lost love or some loved one lost, I still find it odd how completely tactile those feelings can become with just the right popular refrain.
I mean, I'm sitting here in my home in Virginia Highlands in 2012 and for a minute I could hear the strains of Dulcinea over the rattle of metal and highway somewhere in south Georgia in 1994 and I swear I can smell the weeds and wildflowers and gasoline and I'm not sure how such things happen.

But there you are.
Or there I am, anyhow.

Jim Croce does that to me as well.
Which makes a lot of sense in an odd sort of way.
Croce was born in Philadelphia, PA same as my father and all of my brothers and I.
And Croce, like my father, died unexpectedly in 1973.

http://youtu.be/n8lmM1_ARk0

His last album was released posthumously and became his biggest seller and throughout the mid and late '70's you would continue to hear "Operator", "Time in a Bottle", "I Got a Name" and "Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown" and it would always stir a sort of melancholy inside of me.
Particularly those songs about love and loss would ring a certain chord with me, even though I was too young to understand all of the themes completely.

And maybe, in some subconscious way, the notion of moving on to better places became rooted in my mind when "the Source of the Trouble" loaded us all into her VW Bus and drove from Philadelphia to our new home in Winter Haven, Florida to be closer to family.
40 years later I can still remember the sound of that little pancake 4 cylinder motor as I slept with my head against the spare tire in the cargo area in the back.
Little did I know then that I would spend so much time in such close proximity to spare tires throughout my childhood.


Ms. X just returned from Pittsburgh where she was visiting with her late fiance's family for the weekend and of course that's always a heavy trip for her.
One of many things that Ms. X and I had in common, and/or connected over when we first met, was that fact that both her late fiance and I had gone to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in early 2006 to seek treatment for our various tumors.
It's not impossible to think that we would've passed each in the halls of the cancer center, or on our way to the MRI lab, or in the elevator.

That's an odd sort of deja vu sort of feeling of connection and happenstance.

Fate sure is one helluva weird bird and there seems no way to predict his flight on most days so you just make of it what you can at the time, and then later, sometimes much later, you hear a song on a random day that takes you right back to that place where you once stood, wondering what the hell it all meant.

Last year, before I met Ms. X, I had dated a girl I rather liked but the relationship ended poorly.
As a by-product of that poor ending, I ended up with a slightly used Harley and a 2 month road trip that I'll never forget (not to mention Ms. X.)

Again, fate flies in the face of reason.

Back in 1996, I finished my first big commercial film project and had just enough money to buy a  new Honda ACE motorcycle.  I really wanted that bike but I had decided to get married and felt that motorcycles and marriage didn't really go together too well and the bike would have to wait.
You join the team, you have to be a team player.

I have joked many times to close friends that when the choice between a girl and a motorcycle came around for the second time, I made the right choice and got one heckuva nice bike and some wonderful memories to boot, which just goes to show that we all mature and grow eventually.










Toad the Wet Sprocket took its name from a Monty Python comedy sketch called "Rock Notes"[2] in which a journalist delivers a nonsensical music news report:

Rex Stardust, lead electric triangle with Toad the Wet Sprocket, has had to have an elbow removed following their recent successful worldwide tour of Finland. Flamboyant ambidextrous Rex apparently fell off the back of a motorcycle.[3]