Strike a chord...

On July 18th, I saw Billy Joel at Wrigley Field.  After seeing his show, I was on such a high.  It lasted for a few days and it got me thinking about my relationship with music.

I know people that are very invested in music. They know every song of their favorite artist.  Some of them are very talented musicians in their own right.  They can break down tons of songs and tell you more about them then you could imagine.  It is their passion.  That is not the case for me.

I don’t know anything about music.  I don’t know what a scale is or a chord.  I have highly questionable rhythm.  The only tunes I can carry are of the car variety.

I do not always have to have music on and many times I find it distracting if it is on.  Music was never a huge part of my life.  Sure I listened to it.  I’m familiar with many musical artists. There are some that I have been a fan of for a long time.  That I grew up with so to speak.  However, it never was a major part of my life growing up.  Music was never on very much in our house.  We didn’t have sing-a-longs or dance parties.  Additionally, there is some music that we weren’t allowed to listen to in the house growing up which probably lent itself to my lack of appreciation as a youngster.

I know a lot of people associate music with times of their childhood.  The only strong memory I have of music in my early days is we had a Beatles record.  This may be why I like The Beatles as much as I do.  Everything else that I listened to was on the radio or if my brother got a cd.  I was never one just to lay on the bed and listen to music like so many others I know did.  Very little of my time was spent just listening to music.

When I went to college, my perspective changed a great deal.  I have a much deeper connection to music in my college days and time immediately after than I do at any other point in my life. I think this is because there was a lot time where I just sat around drinking beer, chatting with friends, and music was on the in the background.

I think about this all because my sophomore year of college, I went to my first concert: Billy Joel in Champaign, IL.  Besides the fact that Billy Joel just rocks, it is probably when I really started to associate music with memories.  I can remember so many details about that trip.  I attended it with three other guys.  We sat in the nosebleed section almost behind the stage, but it was awesome.  I remember we went to the bars afterwards and had to leave early because one of the four of us drank too much too quickly.  We were pissed at that guy for a while.  I remembered I told a girl I liked her hair because I thought it was purple…it was not purple…stupid stain glass played a trick on me.  Needless to say, she did not chat with me.

I had always known who Billy Joel was.  His videos were always on MTV and my brother would constantly play “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on repeat.  I would have considered myself a fan, but being a fan is different than having a connection to specific songs or artists.  After this concert, I started to have connections.  This concert was the first time I ever got goose bumps from music.  When you have an arena full of people all singing the last verse of “Piano Man” it can have a profound effect.  I carried that feeling for a long time.  It opened a whole new emotional level.  I still hear Billy Joel songs and they take me back to that concert.
 
I now have songs associated with certain memories.  Every time I hear James Taylor, John Denver, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, David Allan Coe and others it takes me back to Tuesday nights with Whiskey Bill in The Downstairs of The Café.  Anytime I hear Jimmy Buffet it reminds me of summer in Macomb in 1996, The Ranch, softball, and the concert I went to trying to chase a girl.  Whenever I hear “American Pie”, I think of the nights at The Regulator, along with most of the popular songs of the eighties.  Anytime I hear “Radar Love”, I remember the road trip to Georgia Southern when I bought the cassette tape of that song from a gas station.  These and so many more have just made my life so much fuller.  All the memories aren’t positive, there are negative ones as well…but they are all part of the journey.

It is funny though.  Experiencing music in this new mindset has helped me reconcile some things in my past.  For the longest time, I disliked country music.  I could not figure out why.  Then I started to hang out with my friends and we would listen to Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and other classic country guys.  Some of these songs really spoke to me and I started to question why I didn’t enjoy country music and then it hit me.  My father loved country music.  My father and I had a falling out.  I have rarely spoken to him in the past 24 years.  My goal for a long time (and still is for a lot of things) was to be the complete opposite of him.  That included disliking anything he liked; country music was the top of the list.  By developing positive memories with all these old school country songs, I was able to grow past that point of my life.  Now, Johnny Cash is my second favorite artist of all time.  In fact, I had just gotten his American Recordings IV album right before the last time I spoke with my father.  It was very cathartic to listen to in the car for 10 hours of road trip.

This of course all comes back to the present.  When I saw Billy Joel this last time, it was with my wife.  I remembered all the memories and great feelings of those songs/concert from 20 years ago and also created great new memories and feelings that I share with my wife now.  That is something that is worth more than anything to me.  I have music to thank for that.

As I continue to move forward in life, I hope that my sons develop a level of appreciation for music at a much earlier age than I did.  I would be thrilled if they learned how to play musical instruments.  I may try to role model that for them by picking one up myself, but that is a post for another time.  Meanwhile, my oldest already seems to be on his way to knowing good singing from bad as he is constantly telling me “No sing daddy.”