A Friendly Collection of Strangers

Sometimes strangers you meet in the street help you. These people you meet for one brief moment in your lives, but who could potentially change your lives forever. Take a minute and think about that.

There are strangers and then there are people who are strange when you’re a stranger and women who seem wicked when you’re alone. Yes, I just paraphrased Jim Morrison there because this is a post about strangers and rock and roll.

AC/DC’s sleeper hit Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution springs to mind as this writeup takes form. I always liked that title more than I liked the song. It was funny and I remember laughing when my friend told me such a song existed. I also remember the first time a song made me cry. The song in question was Goodbye Blue Sky, whose artist needs no introduction, and certainly none that an amateur like me can adequately provide.

I have never met Jim Morrison or Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix or for that matter Bryan Adams and Jon Bon Jovi. I have never known what it is like to compose, or to write chord sequences and to put ideas to tunes and tunes to lyrics to create the perfect melody. The list goes on. Freddie Mercury, Pete Townshend, John Lennon. These people are all strangers.

So why do I love them so much? What is it about these strangers, whose existence makes them my friends? What is it about their work that makes them so dear?

I have no idea.

Now you’re starting to get slightly impatient or perhaps you’re confused. What is this guy trying to say here? I guess I am just trying to tell you about music as I see it, or rather as I live and breathe it. Music has power. It can transport you, just like reading a book can. Some songs are even used in therapy sessions for mental patients. I know because I’ve sought comfort from my demons via music countless times. Music can also make a boy in India exactly the same as a 14 year old in America and give them the foundation to build a lasting friendship on. Music is and has always been more than just words and notations on a page. It is a living entity, which speaks to us in the form of pulses.

Over the course of the past nine years I have listened to music. I have heard legends talk politics, love, sex, drugs, heartache, loss, death and even just going for a jog through music.  Music is transcendental and for me the most important thing about music is the fact that it is adaptable.

There are days when I don’t want the sun to shine, or Mario to rescue Princess Peach. I don’t want everything to be right in the world. Then again, there are days when I am so deliciously, deliriously happy that I just want to dance or lose my mind and randomly jump up and down. Once again, I find that music supplies me with happy endings, but more importantly values the importance of sad endings too. I’ll be honest. Sometimes a song makes more sense than a wise human being does! Sometimes, you just need to shut the world out and lose yourself in a song, or a piece of instrumental magic. Music understands this need to escape and it provides what you’re looking for.

And your mother told you that talking to strangers was bad...well maybe she too talks to the same strange voices on cassette tapes and compressed in mp3 format files or stored on vinyl record that I do now.

The people told us rock and roll was bad for us. They felt we idolized junkies and people always high on pot, or immoral people, sinners even. To those people, I would say- you guys missed out on so much. David Bowie, Lou Reed, The Who, Cream and in later years Nirvana, The Foo Fighters and Paulie’s comeback!

You’ve missed it all, mate.

But I have not. 

I have swum in it and drowned in it and it has spoken back to me. Sometimes it has told me what I did not want to hear, sometimes it has been wrong but music listened to me just as I was listening to it.

That is a quality you’ll find in very few people these days! Now, someone put that record on!

The Bilge Master