You know you are getting old when most of the people at the music events you go to, probably have a senior’s card or when the friends you are with, talk about how much they are enjoying the music because it reminds them of their parents!
But as the veil of COVID restrictions start to lift, I am finding myself in the world of live music again. Cancelled events are starting to have life again and through this giving life again to music, I am also feeling alive again.
I hear band the Angels belt out rock and roll classics like: "Shadow Boxer" and "Am I ever going to see your face again" and I am back at the Victoria Hotel in Ingham on a Saturday as a seventeen year old at the local disco with Bacardi and coke in hand checking out the local talent with my school friends.
I go to a Neil Diamond Hot August Night revival concert, and I am again a teenager, trying to look and stay cool, at the local pool sitting on the grass on a hot summer’s day with my trusted cassette player. Or I am a 9 year old walking with my cousin in Ayr listening to the local radio station blaring out "Cracklin' Rosie" on our little transistor radio.
As I now hearing the songs again, the nostalgia immediately taps into a time when there was no Foxtel or Netflix. TV only started broadcasting at 3 pm in the afternoon. And there was no social media with its proliferation of opinions and the cacophony of voices all struggling to be heard.
All we had was the radio and the music of a generation that could only speak through their music.
The hooks and choruses in the songs would take us in. Car rides would have us all singing songs at the top of our voices. We knew all the words even if we didn't really know enough about life to appreciate their meaning.
As I now sit in the Neil Diamond revival concert, close my eyes and am transported back to those childhood and teenage years, I am starting to actually listen to the lyrics and to understand the poetry in the words that were written. I am being present to the music and the emotions of the songwriter as they crafted the lyrics.
I listen to “I am I cried” and hear Neil Diamond’s voice speaking of his struggles with being seen as a person in the midst of fame. I hear “hello again” and can hear the words that speak of a deep and abiding friendship tempered by years of shared life experiences.
Recently someone of Facebook wrote about the passing of Gary Brooker, the front man of the band Procol Harum and how the words of “Whiter shade of pale” were probably some of the greatest lyrics ever written. The beautiful imagery of words like: “We skipped the light fandandgo”.
The music of the 60’s and 70’s was a re-imagining of life after the monochrome existence of the 1950’s. It was a re-imagining of the role of women in the words of: "I am woman", it was the re-imagining of what a world without wars like the Vietnam war would be, it was the re-imagining of love.
I am sure every generation is in the process of re-imagining through music. At the same concert, that I hear the Angels blare out their music, I hear a band do a cover of Greenday’s, 2005 hit “American Idiot”, a song which is a protest song about the hysteria generated by the American mass media.
It is my hope as I get older I can also be present in the what the music of every generation is trying to say about what their world should be.
My hope is that I can really hear the voices of the new generation of song writers and the new poetry that is being created by their words.
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