now do you believe in rock and roll

can music save your mortal soul
and can you teach me how to dance real slow?

* * *

I got a guitar for a graduation present, a really beautiful thing it is. I need to name it (her), but not yet. Soon.

I'm good at becoming proficient at instruments (as with everything, my personality profile explains), but not far beyond. That's fine with me. I want to be able to say "I play the guitar" and mostly mean it.

I've fooled around with a lot of instruments in my life--played flute, sax, drums; feet are resting on a clarinet case; have fiddled with piano--but nothing quite stirs me like the instrument in my lap right now. Woodwinds can be beautiful haunting melodies or swinging jazz riffs, drums are instinctive and driving, piano is versatile; but nothing is like this.

Every chord I strike seems to ring pure and true right out of my childhood, vibrate out my fondest memories, the warm hum of bedtimes and lullabies, the soft low murmur of my father's voice.

Everything I pick up--bar chords, notes, melodies, harmonics, new songs, even just tuning the guitar--jostles me gently back into younger days, days when I would sit in bed and lie quite still, letting the notes and music wash over me, sometimes tearing up though I didn't know why, and thinking all the while that some day, I must learn how to do that, how to make those sounds. To play them for my children. Although my scratchy alto will never be my dad's soft baritone, I suppose.

I was a pensive, forward-thinking child, and now I'm a pensive, nostalgic teenager, so perhaps it's not that unusual for my past and future selves to meet each other, going opposite directions. Still, it's always a little odd when, guitars in hand, you make eye contact with yourself, nod, and walk on.

* * *

Go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can't you hear the steel rails hummin'
That's the hobo's lullaby

* * *

I may be sappy over certain tunes, but my music tastes are still as offbeat as the rest of me. My iTunes is stuffed full of The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Madeleine Peyroux, John Coltrane, and so on and so forth. More jazz than is probably normal. More Ani Difranco than is probably healthy. I create playlists not based on band or album, but by what goes together; what I like to listen to together.

One playlist is entitled Sad and is just for when I'm in those melancholy moods. It contains wailing blues, soft Brubeck tunes, Janis Joplin, and Death Cab for Cutie. It made sense at the time. And when the melancholy feeling comes, it makes sense again.

Another playlist is called House, the character, not the noun. It holds Miles Davis, the Raconteurs, the Who, and others. Songs about House, songs that House would listen to, songs that other folks suggested in their House fanmixes. "Tender to the Blues," "Devastation," "James!," "Desperado."

I dunno why I bother with these playlists, even, because more often than not when I get out Shelley, my iPod, I know exactly what song I want to listen to. I keep it on single-repeat because I like to hear the same song over and over again. I want to breathe in a song a dozen times, listen to each individual instrument, each little phrase. Catch the things that I've missed. Memorize the interplay between melodies and harmonies. Discover what the words say, and then what they mean. And then what they mean.

When I get a song stuck in my head, I don't just have the melody dancing in and out, one phrase over and over. I can hear everything from the soaring vocal line to the gently tapping cymbal, skipping again and again like a record. I have to carefully pick up the needle of my mind and set it at the beginning of the song, let it play all the way through, everything.

Singing aloud with music is intrinsically unsatisfactory, because with rare exception you can only sing one note at a time. (In my case, usually not even that.) I like singing along anyway.

* * *

dance me to the wedding, now, dance me on and on
dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
we're both of us beneath our love; we're both of us above
dance me to the end of love
dance me to the end of love

* * *

I'm not a terribly sad person, but my taste in music does tend to be a little doleful. Dunno why. Maybe rebelling against all the horrifically cheery tunes and Sousa marches they put you through in band?

I didn't even really know until one Mother's Day a couple years back; I was recording a few flute duets (with myself, haha) as my present and very frustrated with the recording equipment. My dad was slipping in and out of the garage, helping me and listening.

I hit the play button and let him hear my four tunes, the first three moderate-to-slow minor pieces, the last one a livelier, upbeat tune. "Oh, I like that one," he said, "the happy one. That's great, they're all great."

"I don't like the last one," I frowned, "it's hard; I keep messing it up."

He reassured me. "You can't tell. It's my favorite."

"You don't like the minor ones?" I asked, only half-seriously.

"I like them. They're very minor. Sad, you know."

I knew. But for the life of me I couldn't imagine why anyone would prefer the cheerful dueling flutes to the soft sad duets. They told a story in mournful vibrato (or they should have, I don't give my playing that much credit), while short and simple. How shallow major keys seemed in comparison! How mindlessly happy!

Then, probably, I gave too little credit to music's joyous romps. But even that playfulness wants a little dissonance. Sometimes.

* * *

i was standing on a noisy corner
waiting for the walking green
across the street he stood
and he played real good
on his clarinet, for free

* * *

Music theory was, without a doubt, the coolest part of jazz band (except for the improv, of course). Chord progressions and arpeggios and blue notes; lydian and mixolydian and dorian scales; minors and majors and dominant sevenths. I like knowing how things work, and my mind already liked breaking down music, so this came as quick and natural as a 12-bar blues.

It also helped, I think, that I'd been tapping out tsss-tkuh-tsss on a drumset, tap-dancing to Sinatra and his hep cat ilk, and humming along with 94.7 The Waaaaave's smooth jazz for as long as I could recall. Rhythm--or at least Western rhythm, or at least jazz rhythm--is in my blood and my toes and my head, so while some of my fellows were struggling with how to get eighth notes to syncopate I was trying to get them to swing.

As my dad will tell you, me playing an instrument without sheet music in front of me is rather notable. But I want to! Actually getting the technical skill down took a while, and I still haven't caught up, really. My mind is tired of waiting for my fingers to find the requisite speed for the licks I want to play. In my head I'm John Coltrane, Lester Young, oh why won't my fingers catch up?


* * *

i believe in harmony
i believe in christmas eve
free for all the happiness
and no one's living on their wits

* * *

I am a singularly annoying individual, when I'm listening to the radio, or my iPod, or a CD. Normally, I have the ability to multitask passably well (although my sister would put in that I can still be oblivious to her), but when I'm listening to music I'm absolutely idiotically single-minded. I cannot think of anything else. I am chagrined that I cannot put on tunes while doing my homework, or reading, or even now, writing this, but I can't unless it's the most boring elevator music ever. And what's the point in that?

The few times I've tried, recently, have been quite disastrous for whatever poor soul I was conversing with on AIM at the time:

Me: well, I'm listening to the same classic rock station I have since I was about 6, and I can recognize 90% of the songs
A: hahahahahah
Me: As I explained to Louise, I was listening to the greatest rock song ever written about chess
Me: and then i realized I knew that fact
Me: and sort of wondered what that meant.
A: that u know the greatest rock song ever?
Me: No, right now I'm listening to the greatest rock song ever
A: i really wouldnt know
Me: i want you to joiiiiiiiiiiiiiin together with the baaaaaaaand
Me: I saw this song in concert

There's a lot more, but then he started talking about Pokémon, which was fair, because I e-sang everything from the Rolling Stones to the Clash to Eric Clapton and back again. The chess song I was talking about was Your Move, by Yes, should anyone care--I've known the basic melody and the chorus for some time, but only when my dad called it "the greatest rock song ever written about chess" did it register that it was about chess.

All rock and roll was sort of like that, for me, only it usually wasn't about chess. It's most about sex and drugs and...well, rock and roll. The sudden flash of comprehension when you understand a song you've remembered from those early times; well, it's quite unique. Most rock doesn't have the complex harmonies that draw me in, or the enigmatic and linguistically clever lyrics which I seek out now. But those driving three-chord melodies still hit me in a simple place, an instinctive place, when the car speakers rattled and the wind whistled by and my dad sang along.

"How do you always know all the words?" I would ask, incredulously, as every song came up on that same radio station.

"I've just heard most of these songs many times," he would shrug, and smile, and sing.

Sometimes, when I knew the chorus, I'd raise my shrill little voice and sing along, probably massacring most of the lyrics dreadfully. Now, I've painstakingly looked up most lyrics I'm unsure about, and can guess or remember most of the rest. My voice is as shrill and enthusiastic as ever, though.

* * *

you don't have to play
you can follow or lead the way
won't you join together with the band
we don't know where we're going
but the season's right for knowing
won't you join together with the band

everybody join together
won't you join together
come on and join together with the band
everybody join together
won't you join together
come on and join together with the band.