MUSIC

It binds us in a rapturous chain, keeping us in its circle of fire, mesmerized, sometimes alone. The slow dragging, feet shuffling underneath a coffin, the calm lull and then the crash of cymbal, footsteps coming undone.
I first remember music as a boy with my father.
Up on the third floor of the house, way up there in his tower he’s got a room of music up there, stacked and folded and boxed up and taped, roped around and kept in a disorganized frenzy.
“Let’s listen to this one.”
The crying child of a guitar, weeping sadly amidst the cold train of a drum beat pounding along the track, the bass a fuzzy benevolent friend making my head bend, wondering in amazement, What is this thing? What is this I am experiencing?
Jimi Hendrix picks up all the pieces with his hand, he is a voodoo child.
My father fast forwarding the tape deck, until the sweet pummeling of ‘Celebration’ came to life with its soaring verses, images of women in long summer dresses skipping through flat fields under the looming moon lit covering, an awning of dancers reaching back in unison, black women carrying water with heads bobbing amidst their half step rhythms.
The voice of Richie Havens like an old chain gang cuddling me to sleep, his baritone whisper lending me life, handing me dreams worth living for, the power of soul submerged in a line of words sublime … can one man do this?
“They’d sell his body like they do used cars.”
My father stopping off at our apartment on his way to work, handing me discs bearing names and symbols that would come to define me.
“This one is great,” he says. “Just go up to your room and listen to it.”
There is the clanging of strange instruments and harmonious dribbling sound effects as I am swept away by Radiohead.
The charming lustful glance of a song by Nat King Cole, whisking me like an old lover into a world of barsmoke and polished wooden counters.
“This is Joni Mitchell,” he says. “This one is called ‘Last Goodbye’, it’s by a dead man named Jeff Buckley.”
The shaping of realities, the twisting tourniquet of colors.
There is the introduction drumbeat of the Doors ‘Who Do You Love’ like a howling Indian ceremony, the tremulous wavy slash of gently guitars and that deep crooning voice I’ve come to consider a friend
Made out of human skull. Tell me who do you love?
Up on the room in the third floor of the house, the music room, my father dusts off the old jacket of a record bearing a few dozen faces. The sound fades in, a soft accordion and a soft spoken crowd, and then I’m mesmerized by the marching kick and snare, the rugged creaking of the lead guitar, listening to history, having it form in my ears, hearing the strange sounds of the past that will etch out my future.
“It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper Taught the band to play …”
On the long rim by the edge of an English field I wandered alone, hearing long lost testaments, stories about women choking on the fumes of their widow-dom, making love amidst the funeral pyres, walking aimlessly while pondering the crash beat dance hall progressions blaring through the soft foam against my ears.
I remember listening to Ryan Adams ‘Political Scientists’, staring into the dying embers of a bonfire, the pale daylight a stranger around me as I was transported to another realm, hallucinating ghosts that came up from a murky ground where men once carried the bodies of their friends.
I was sober but I was drunk off of the music, lost to its wave, a victim to its shipwreck that went crashing against the rocky shoreline.
Sitting behind a drumkit as the frenetic chords of ‘Lapdance’ simulate sex in my headphones, the drumbeat sneaking in like a thief in the night as I realize that one day I too can contribute to this movement of lovemaking, this movement of sharp courage that rises and falls like a mountain range, this movement of bare knuckle brawls and stripclub anthems, sweet crescendos of acoustic grace and replicated drumbeats.
My dad takes me up to the third floor, he’s got a room full of music up there.