Recently I was watching my loved one’s family home movies. I was unexpectedly delighted when I saw that black and white “static”, once so common to your average TV and/or VCR viewer, now about as rare as a family sitting around the radio of an evening. There was quite a lot of hick-ery to be seen; dirt bikes, dirty jeans atop dirty horses, dirty faces beneath dirty haircuts, country music, poor grammar. I tease her about her family from time to time but really her upbringing doesn’t seem to have been terribly different than mine, and at any rate she emerged unscathed. Moreover, if I’ve learned anything whilst eking out the last 10 years in a major metropolitan, it’s that being in the middle of nowhere is good for you. Perhaps, as the Confucians say, an uneventful life is best.
One portion of the movies was shot at a wedding. A forlorn spectacle right off the bat. The venue seemed an ungainly cross between a bowling alley and an elks lodge, and the vast majority of the affair seemed to have been dedicated to a group performance of a dance not all that dissimilar from the Hustle, a sight that, due to the assorted 1980s garb worn by the participants and the mixture of joy and gravity on every countenance, I won’t soon forget. Trying so hard to have fun, or dance correctly, but probably not both. I suppose that’s weddings for you. Presumably there was at least some some amount of booze to be had to account for any shortcomings. I found myself wondering, “what happened to these people?”. A wedding day means a great deal to more than a few, and what do they amount to, 20 years on? I suspect little, besides forgotten videotape and most likely a divorce. How many of them are dead now? Or so wildly different from the person they were? Do any remember the day well? I’d like to hope so; I’d like to hope that more than a few golden moments of that day have not faded. And what happened to all that stuff? The dirt bikes, the clothes, the cars, the wedding china, hell the video camera…..a junk heap? A closet void? Our lives can so easily be reduced to so many piles of things. And where does it go? Alas for the sorrow of modern man, a life measured in plastic accumulations, weighing him down and choking his planet.
It was around this time that I also found myself drawn to Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”. As if this song didn’t ooze 80’s nostalgia enough, Bruce Hornsby also plays on it, and as everyone knows his piano parts are more or less the equivalent of a Doc Brown Delorean, only they require less plutonium. This has been the way of it, I suspect from adolescence onward; songs bubble up to the forefront of my consciousness and demand a prompt listening (In regard to the potentially perceived cheesiness of this particular number, well, I’m cutting myself some slack on this one; Dylan covered it in the early 2000’s), although only in the last year or so have I begun to understand why. Songs themselves have formed my ethos, or a belief in their healing power has replaced the need for one. The right song at the right time can be the perfect prayer. A life can be, and almost certainly is, little more than a long succession of trials and aggravations, rarely if ever achieving perfection. But a song, through at least some degree of perseverance on the part of its writer, can be perfect. Melodically, lyrically, in simplicity or complexity, a song can be the answer. Exactly what you need to hear, leaving us only the job of knowing when to hear it; “In My Life” when someone dies, “Forever Young” when someone is born, “Let’s Go Get Stoned” on Fridays at about 5pm, etc. etc. I remember a long anecdote told to me by a cab driver on my way to a rehearsal once that more or less addressed this sentiment; several times he would say “there is a music for…” and then list some life event or another, and though his English was broken, I think natives drumming around a fire and a conductor pacing through the Pastoral would agree. There is a music for every occasion. I just can’t imagine how talking (or more likely venting) to someone about one problem or another could offer the same relief, or perspective, or reliability, as listening to a song you know will help. People will invariably let you down sooner or later, but “Don’t Let Me Down” never will. It will always be “there” (where?) right when you need it, and it will always be right where you left it last.
Very soon I’d like to take ol’ Don’s advice. Find a nice warm spot, in an open field miles from nowhere, lie down and look up and breathe deeply, make the decision to let all the noise and nonsense not matter. I’ll look up and pretend that I’m in that same spot only hundreds of years ago, in a raw land, living free. I’ll let the bittersweet, autumnal glow of reminiscence fill me, and longing, grief, joy and wonderment will be as one. Life will slow down….”the clouds roll by, tall grass waving in the wind”…
…I’ll go back soon thereafter and bring her along. Let her long hair fall all around me. You heard it here first; thanks Don Henley.
