Those
who kept at their music sounded better than some of the others who like me at
around age twenty drove home after a gig one night and put away my keyboard, only occasionally picking up an instrument for
another forty years. There sure wasn’t
much time for making music after our jobs and wives brought responsibilities
and babies … and then teenagers and bills and all the flotsam of life that we thought
we loved so much.
But
the soul never quits. And it shows in
the sound we’ll never see with our eyes.
We’re so used to viewing good looking young people paired with good
music in our modern media that it’s a
shock to see a guy who looks like Mr. Whipple playing some pretty fine guitar licks instead of squeezing
the Charmin. Standing there waiting for
the downbeat in his Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts … not the stylish baggy
shorts of the young … you’d expect he was about to lead a bunch of old ladies
in a few stanzas of Kum Ba Yah. Instead
he breaks into an intro with a 12 bar blues style and starts wailing into the
microphone as if he’s Little Richard.
And he’s good! Damned good!
Later
on the fellow who’s been sitting with his wife at the next table stands up,
runs his hands back over his $200 haircut and smoothes down his executive cut
sweat shirt and tailored shorts. Then he
heads for the stage. You’d think he was
someone’s business agent or a successful stockbroker. That may be, but he’s also the lead singer in
a group that has remained together … most of the time … for the past 40 years. Tonight they will reprise a list of songs
that made the hearts of a thousand young
women throb as the girls danced to the music and sang out the pounding refrains
in one last shriek of post-pubescent abandon before settling down to choose
husbands and make babies. Quite a few of
those women are back here tonight almost fifty years later dancing down by the
stage.
Unique
about the music we grew up with is it being our
music and it doesn’t matter if we’re playing it or dancing to it or just
sitting there tapping our feet. The music is from somewhere in our soul. That’s where it lives.
See also: Not So Famous - My Short Life As A Musician
See also: Not So Famous - My Short Life As A Musician
and
First Gig
David Griffin copyright 2010
