This track serenaded me during wheels-down in a gray, rainy France in June all those years ago--not to visit, to live. As we coasted on the tarmac at CDG, that guitar riff barked out of foam-covered headphones and a worn TDK in my player, and the cascade of drums urged me from apprehension to exhilaration. I was gonna do it.
What, I didn't know. But I was. I had to. I was already there.
And, funny, I thought I didn't have this--and I had wanted it--but it is already here.
Basking in Macca afterglow today, this track from his modest 1980 McCartney II struck me whilst pecking away at very the usual negligible affair of bossing people around through emails.
Was it the inspiration for another honeyed meditation on a summer day? I mean, it's the first thing I thought of upon seeing the song title.
And, of course, it's timely. I look out the window and see white pleasure boats dotting the blue lake, a soft breeze, rain-fed leaves.
Since I'm still in that afterglow, I'll pose a hopeless wish for a obscurities- and deep cuts-only live show from Sir Paul, such as this or this, or even this (it isn't silly at all).
I'm determined to take measures to make Shuffle shuffle. But I'm also not going to complain about two tracks from The Big Express.
Whether out of ambition or narcissism or inability to focus on one thing, today I'm embedding a thought about each track.
Neko Case, The Pharoahs Middle Cyclone
That voice.
XTC, This World Over The Big Express
"Can you tell us about that far off, and mystical land?"
Crowded House, Anyone Can Tell Afterglow
I love this album of CH rarities. I loaned the CD to someone at work ca. 2002 and never got it back.
Beck, Dark Star The Information
California: in two weeks I will be in you.
Nick Lowe, Cruel to Be Kind Labour of Lust
Three years ago during the month of December, I listened to this song almost every day.
Michael Jackson, It's The Falling In Love Off the Wall
I adore OTW, but, despite its too-baroque, on-the-R.-Kelly-tip production, I prefer this MJ ballad over all others.
Sweetback, Jesus Girl Stage 2
I had to look up this delivery from my sister.. I didn't realize I was listening to Sade's backing band.
Tonight I received surreal news that a classmate from undergrad, a fellow theatre major at MU, has passed after a rather sudden illness. He has to be 43, maybe 44 years old. Wife. Three daughters with Irish names, little girls whose big grins and fun vacations I'd see from time to time in photos on Facebook. That's where Bob and I reconnected, on Facebook. As he was back in the green room of the theatre, Bob was always up for a quick exchange, the "YES! that's cool" acknowledgement or clever exchange--the authentic connection with all of the cool people that you've known in different stages in life, that, despite its Orwellian underbelly and meme-driven mediocrity and inherent inauthenticity, makes Facebook a positive experience. The funny thing is, I wouldn't feel the hit of this so hard if I'd gotten a call about Bob, or an email, from a mutual friend or fellow classmate. I'd have strained to think of the last time we saw each other, or talked.
So the surreal news comes via an already-surreal, still surreal, when you think about it, resource. Or platform. We read the news; our collective shock and grief was timestamped almost immediately thereafter.
I have an excellent XTC tribute album in Dropbox thanks to Bob. After one of my many postings--and a few trivia-contest style status updates that he posted and I participated in--he chatted me up on Facebook and shared the digital album. "You're an XTC fan? We really should have talked about this at Marquette," he told me. No matter, we could now. We had time, we had Facebook. We had a brief "what you up to now?" exchange as well. Actually, not so brief, but substantial and honest enough for me to get a real sense of his life. Raising two girls, both under the age of 10, I think. Living in New York. Working in publishing.
He was, you know, a guy. A nice guy, with sweet children and a smart woman he married. Someone with a quick wit and great comic timing on stage. I vaguely suspect that his were among the costumes I had to launder for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum when I was wardrobe head for that show. (Did he play Senex, the henpecked-husband stock character who is always duped?) I had to haul everyone's sweaty togas to and fro, and untangle sandal straps and shit like that. Then, the show would close, another would open, and it would be my turn to be on stage and have someone--Bob, or someone--build the sets I stood on and haul my sweaty costumes from the dressing room to laundry.
I bring up this detail because this whole operation, this toiling onstage, hoping you are good, and toiling backstage in the dust and darkness, dealing with people's bodies and personality quirks both, this collision and collusion of disparate personalities and energies and talents and goals that is a theatre production--especially a college theatre production, since one is literally in the building from early morning til late at night--is, actually, a family. See, these little families form, coalesce into a musical that everyone hates doing, or the serious play that is pockmarked with attempts to break each other onstage, or the high-adrenaline comedy that you'll never, ever, forget the lines from. And then, when the show closes, these families dissolve.
In the theatre, if only for a little while, whether the breadth of a show, or the duration of the completion of the requirements for your bachelor's degree, you are family. I'm connected to those people from my four years in college in a way I'm not to anyone else, nor have been since. We share a deeply formative, collective experience. I mean, I still hear my teachers' voices in my head when I am working in a theatre, when I am performing, when I am shopping for props ("NEVER do a show with real food!"), and especially when I was running a theatre company and its space. I'm fairly certain there is a group of 40 to 50 people who circulated in that building on the southeast end of campus during a six- or so year period who hear the same voices.
So losing a family member, even some twenty years after we last pulled staples from the stage and costumes out of the washer and exchanged Simpsons quotes in the green room, or mere months after a genuinely good-willed exchange of "I'm glad your life is good, old friend," it's...surreal.
This song immediately came to mind tonight, thinking about that nice moment of XTC geekery, of reconnection, we shared.
All roads lead to Beatown*, where Andy breaks down how one actually achieves (or, in the late 70s, achieved) what I call that psychedelic, in-the-tunnel sound effect at the end. It's literally playing two tapes of tracks synced slightly apart from each other and recording on a third tape. I think.
*This is very, very dangerous for me. I haven't let myself even scan everything. Yet. When that day comes that I've gotten everything work/project/necessity-shopping finished, then I will dive into this fat pile of creative analysis and music/gear nerdery.
...only because I've had this song in my head for a week solid because there are gulls crying everywhere around this eerily hot city, and they're sailing everywhere, not just over the lake that's the right temperature for this time of year. I've heard them outside my bedroom window since last Wednesday morning.
They're all going, WHA-AT? WHA-AT? WE'RE OUT HERE AND THERE AREN'T ANY DAMN FISH OR PEOPLE EATING CHEETOS ON THEIR YACHTS FOR US TO HAVE A DECENTLY FULL BELLY, MAYBE WE SHOULD GO BACK TO WHERE EVER IT IS WE HANG OUT FROM DECEMBER TO MARCH (USUALLY). BUT IT'S NOT COLD SO I DON'T KNOW WHA-AT THE HELL I AM DOING. WHA-AT?
Also, I love that, as Andy Partridge describes, the song's peculiar keyboard progression originated on a Mellotron he dragged up some stairs at home and noodled out some three-finger chords he thought sounded "like the seaside."
Or like the lake when freaked-out gulls are circling over it and happy, just slightly freaked-out people are wending around it on dusty bikes and last year's shoes.
