Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Musical Rescue

I was way up in the sky on the man lift working on a cursed set screw for an LED light fixture that required me to drill it out with zip ties holding my fear in check...and I was pondering at the same time which musician I'd go back in time to save because I was so high I could almost see the airport where the plane carrying Jim Croce hit a pecan tree and ended the life of a musician about to enter his prime years of production. Or more correctly, if I could go back in time only once with the mission to save a musician, which would I choose? And while I would recommend anyone with this mission to please go back and save Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and The Big Bopper from getting on that plane in Iowa, I feel that I'd have to go back in time to save John Lennon. I don't know if I can morally quantify Lennon's value over the three lost in Iowa, or why not save the three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd who died in a plane crash? Well, I had to limit myself in my frivolous daydreams and my reasons are my own.

And with drug overdoses and general misbehavior and suicides of musicians I feel these are not preventable...you'd only postpone the inevitable. Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Brian Jones, Cobain were living right on the edge and that was part of their personality and fed their talent. It's a price of fame that some can only tolerate it for so long before they step over the line into oblivion. If you make a woman like Janis Joplin play by the rules and eat her vegetables then you won't get another Crystal Gayle...no. I don't know what you'll get but it won't be Janis Joplin and that's life. And Robert Johnson, for instance, was probably murdered a year after recording the foundations of modern blues but the life he led basically guaranteed an early death. Nothing short of shadowing Johnson as his personal body guard for the remainder of his life would prolong his career. But John Lennon wasn't living on the edge and I think he had much more to contribute to the world. It's a morbid poll but I thought it would engage me for a minute and would give me an idea of the musical ethics of my audience.


What Musical Tragedy Would You Prevent?
  
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.