Music brings us together just long enough to remember “Oh yeah, that guy’s human too – he knows the words to this song too.” There’s a great video circulating on Facebook of an entire Green Day crowd waiting for the show to start, singing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody together. 65,000 of them. A stunning video – this is the power of music and why some of us devote our lives to serving its happening. It’s a far more precarious trek through the human journey to define each other by our differences rather than have them be a footnote and some color in with our dealings and workings together. Music tilts things back in that proper perspective for a while. If these people matter to each other a little more after the music stops, then all those involved in the making of and bringing to that moment those people and that music – whatever else may factor in – are a part of some seed of solution in a world awash in its troubled gardens.
I remember years ago I stopped to ask about an old converted school bus in a yard with a for sale sign on it. The door was answered by a young guy my age. He had hair like mine. He had a Fender Stratocaster on the couch. It quickly became apparent he was visiting from points far south of Texas or Mexico, so we had no common language to get in the way. But there were two guitars, and we jammed like members of the same band. The bus was cool, but I was a broke-ass musician young & hungry, living the dream, renting a room, writing my future verses by bare bulb on the tricky side of town. So I didn’t buy it and I don’t know if this guy’s sister is still with the hip cat that owned it and traveled in it now 28 years later, and I don’t know what became of Jorge Quintana. But it was one more lesson the music taught me along the path between finding that John Lee Hooker record in the basement as a kid and “being here now.”
These thoughts were written while the song “Four Cornered Room” off of an old album by a great band called War played in the background. The three somehow tie together through harmony of notes and hearts and the threads of lives taking their paths through each other winding together like some kind of tapestry being woven of us as we go.
Listening to: Steppenwolf Monster; War The World Is a Ghetto; Donny Hathaway Extension Of a Man; Don Felder autobiography audiobook; dub reggae compilation CDs.