"Play it fuckin' loud!" ~ Bob Dylan
We listen to a lot of music. My husband was a radio music manager when we met and we have always had a lot of music around us. He played with a symphony orchestra - the viola - when he was a youth, the only one amongst an ensemble of adults. I sang with the Folk Club in high school and was with a rock band briefly (at far too young an age). We inherited the house we lived in on the prairies from a rock and roll musician. Three rock bands attended our wedding. We were heavily involved in a very successful folk club. My husband did sound design for theatre plays. Our entire lives have been back dropped by music of all genres.
In our travels from parts of Canada to other parts, and to and from the United States while doing grad work there, we have hauled our treasures of eclectic music with us. Our music library consisted of CDs, and vinyl albums, and audio tapes - though we no longer had the tapes that my husband had made while sound man for the folk club. They were precious. But they were stolen at a bonfire party at which we thought were only friends.
We have found since moving to Fat Hummingbird Farm that live music has returned to our lives. We have seen a wickedly good Australian blues singer/guitarist. We have seen an Irish band whose female singer has been awarded the most beautiful voice in all of Ireland. We saw the front man from a band that formed back in the '70s - which I never particularly liked and that front man, even today, has not lost that frenetic and chaotic quality that has always grated on my nerves. We have seen house bands and kitchen parties with very talented local musicians. We have seen a group that were part of the memories of my younger days, and a folk/country singer from the prairies who elicited a night full of our youthful history - coming from the same small towns in which we grew up, fell in love, had our sons, and made new memories.
Music and memory go hand in hand. There have been many scientific studies as to why that is the case and I am sure they are all valid and true in their deductive way. But I would rather not think of the reasons why when a particular song or music brings on a rush of memories and feelings. I would rather just submit to the will of my heart and my memories and where they want to take me. Some of the music we have heard of late has created recollections that have taken me by the the hand and led me away . . .
I remember when my boys were still small. My husband was away and the boys and I spent a lot of time during his absence at the farm of friends. We would leave after midnight in the early still dark hours of the morning to drive back into town, the boys wrapped in blankets in the back seat, smelling of horse and dirt and sauna-drenched birch. The highway was flat and dark and deserted and was inevitably lit by a full prairie moon. Sometimes, as we drove along, antelope would bound along in the fields beside the car, their shadows leaping at the moon. We played the radio full volume and sang along to Roxy Music or the Eagles or Roy Orbison or Kansas. To this day that era of music is my eldest son's favourite and he often talks about our 'midnight rides'.
"on a dark desert highway'
cool wind in my hair . . . ." *
"now, don't hang on,
nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky,
dust in the wind,
all we are is dust in the wind . . . " *
Another . . . .When we moved away from the prairies to the west coast we missed those same friends very keenly. I remember coming home one day when we were tired from work, the boys still cranky from school and hunger. The light on the answering machine was blinking on and off, indicating a message. We flipped the message on and from the speaker came the skeleton of a melodic line. A penny whistle piped and trilled a lovely Irish ballad. We all four stood stock still and just listened, the melody filling our hearts and putting us in mind of beloved friends. The tune came to a melancholy end and the phone went silent. Just the tune, nothing else. We knew who it was. Our old friend gifting us with a memory across country-broad telephone lines. A melody brimming with his missing and his loving.
Another . . . I remember in high school and early university years hanging out with musicians and poets. Leonard Cohen was played at every house party. His music was the backdrop and theme for virtually all gatherings (that and Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - but that's another story). We would sit, nursing cheap wine and flapping away cigarette or marijuana smoke, and listen to Cohen sing his hurting, torn thoughts written in the blood of ink. My life then was a bit of hippie lifestyle fuelled by more than ample Leonard Cohen poetry and music. My memories of that time and music are admittedly wine-soaked but I do recall that all of us bare-footed, Rapunzel-haired, gypsy-dancing girls each believed that we were the Suzanne that Lennie sang of in his song . . .
"Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our land of the harbour
And she show you where to look among the garbage and the flowers . . . " *
I would be that Suzanne and my skin would be paper thin. I'd be tender and completely at the mercy of poignant lines of poetry. Even now that reminiscence and that music takes me to memories of lovers who were poets and by being so, were doomed, like Cohen.
But not all were doomed. One of those poets lives with me here at Fat Hummingbird Farm. I remember long ago he wrote about brown coulees and the kiss of green in spring. He wrote of a young son he felt was too emotionally fragile for this hurting world (he was right). He wrote about how the sun dappled the arm of his lover sleeping in the early morning light. And I always hoped that the lover he wrote about was me.
We have come full circle and live with live music again at Fat Hummingbird Farm. Music that soars or hurts or makes you dance. And I hope that the memories and emotions that that music generates brings back the lines and words; the words about love and loss, about the vault and whorl of a coulee hill, about the curve of a lover's thigh, to the poet that lives with me here - at Fat Hummingbird Farm.
* Hotel California - the Eagles
* Dust in the Wind - Kansas
*Suzanne - Leonard Cohen
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