Similarly, when I ventured out of the classical music listening realm in 1978, thanks to the Beatles, I eventually landed on Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. All three of these bands used organs in some of their songs. First to hit me was Us and Them from Pink Floyd's landmark album Dark Side of the Moon. Richard Wright was the keyboard player for Pink Floyd and he wrote the music for the song Us and Them. This is such a great song and I never seem to tire of it. You may know I am a runner. I don't listen to music anymore when I run, but I used too. I will never forget an early Fall evening in 1995...going out for a run with this song on my Sony Walkman...that's a cassette tape player. Remember those? I was running along 119th Street in Overland Park, KS, at dusk, working through many feelings when this song came on. The quiet organ intro caused me to stop in my tracks.
Though not a pipe organ...I think this is a Hammond....it still has a tone and timbre that connected with me just as the big pipe organ in church. I was thirty years old. Cheryl and I were beginning to try to have a baby. I had so much on my mind at that moment when this song started and when I heard this beautiful organ, I just had to STOP and listen. Funny how I still remember that moment. David Gilmore's guitar joins in along with bass and drums. This album is recorded so well...perfectly. Tight and sensuous.
A few years earlier, Led Zeppelin recorded their first album called..Led Zeppelin. It was 1968. Lurking behind the sonic vocals of Robert Plant, the power chords of Jimmy Page, and the manic drumming of John Bonham was John Paul Jones on bass, keyboards and many other instruments. Jones had formal music education as a child, singing in the choir and playing the organ at church, He used his organ talent to wonderful effect on the song Your Time is Going to Come.
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On the other side of music, for me at least, is nothing...Quiet. Quietness. I do listen to a a lot of music every day, but I also like to have quiet in my life as well. But it's not always such an easy thing to find these days. I feel like we are inundated with noise. TV is noisy. Movies are loud. And the outdoors in my neighborhood is a freaking zoo. Stepping outside for some peace and quiet is impossible. Leaf blowers, mowers, cars, airplanes, locusts, kids riding crotch rocket motor bikes, cars, dogs barking, sirens in the distance, kids yelling as they jump on trampolines, air conditioners, power washers, power tools....to name a few...make it impossible to have true quiet. It really sucks how noisy my world is. And also, when you go to a ballgame, you are constantly being asked to "make nose" or "get loud.". Bullshit! Stop it already. I will cheer, clap, and yell when I want to. You don't need to tell me to get loud every 2 minutes. And of course, every stadium/arena has 50 gazillion watts of sound system power blasting music between every play. I wear earplugs every time I go to ballgame. And church for that matter. Yes, I have become a grumpy 54 year-old man.
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I failed a good friend last week. My acoustic guitar, a 1962 Gibson J-50, has been a trusty companion of mine for 24 years now. She was born three years before me. I was playing her on a recent Saturday evening outside on the patio while I was keeping an eye on our son's cat, Puma. Puma is an indoor cat who likes to go outside, but she can only go out if one of us is outside with her. So I take my guitar out to play while she enjoys her outside time. On this particular occasion, as a storm approached, I set my guitar down so I could go pick Puma up and bring her inside. But I forgot to go back and get my guitar. I closed the doors, turned off the lights and went to bed. The next morning, as I backed the car out of the garage on my way to church, I saw my guitar resting against the side of the house. My heart sank. It had been outside all night and we had a full night of torrential rain and thunderstorms. I approached her slowly, trying to pretend she was OK. But she was completely soaked and weighed a hundred pounds. I took her inside and dried her off with a towel and set her in the living room to dry. A week later, she was warped, buckled and cracked. But the strings didn't break, and to my profound surprise, a week after that, she was still playable. Playable in the sense that she still made a sound like a guitar. I have accepted the fact that it will never be the same. There is too much damage to repair. And I need to buy a new guitar. I am not heartbroken. It is a piece of wood. I am a blessed man. I have my health, as does my wife and my children. Life will go on. But I am sad that I didn't take better care of this piece of wood.
