Tag: When "I Can Hear Music," it wields a "Strange Magic" over this "Rock and Roll Girl"
No matter how sick I am, one thing makes me feel better.
Music.
One of my first clear memories is waking up from a nap and hearing a radio playing "Wake Up Little Susie" by the Everly Brothers.
I remember getting my first record player when I was five and the records that came with it.
I started playing the flute when I started junior high school and moved to piccolo shortly after. I could play all the required school music as well as every flute part from every rock song of the era, and the theme song from "Laurel and Hardy."
I started taping my own cassettes of tunes from FM radio in the late 1960s and kept it up until CDs took over. I probably have 100 tapes custom made by me.
I've never not listened to music and it paid off big time. I've had two jobs where knowledge of the music business was essential.
I worked as an event coordinator at a convention center and worked every concert they had. I knew so much about the bands that other managers started asking my advice on whether to book a band into their arena. Once, I was only one person off of an attendance estimate I made. It was bliss.
The second was becoming a music critic for a daily newspaper. I got paid to listen to all kinds of music and write about it. I talked to performers, promoters, publicists.
For a brief time, I had a writing assignment from Rolling Stone Magazine to write about the Oklahoma City area music scene. The federal building bombing stopped that story and they never called me again.
Computers changed the way we all listen to tunes. The only thing I cared about when I updated my phone was how music sounded on it.
One website, blip.fm, allows anyone to be their own DJ and play songs for everyone else on the site at that time. It's so much fun to do and something I can do regardless of how sick I am, how much the pain is nagging or when sleepless nights attack.
No matter how bad I feel, I can always manage to lie down with a set of headphones and my massive music library on my computer set on shuffle and let the hours go by.
My daily newspaper pays me to write for them again on a freelance basis and a few weeks ago I got to relive my glory days by reviewing an Eric Clapton concert with the Wallflowers as an opening act.
There's nothing better than sitting in free seats, taking notes about the music and the audience reactions and crafting that into a review that others will read the next day. I try to bring the concert to them, and I love doing it.
I spent the next two days after that show pretty much in my pajamas and sleeping off and on, but it was so worth it.
My love of music has passed to my youngest nephew, who is a music composition major at a big university. Though most students his age would prefer a gift card for music downloads, we buy him classic rock we think he'd like. For instance, he got "Bridge Over Troubled Water," by Simon and Garfunkle, "The Whole Story" by Kate Bush and "Classic Yes" by Yes for his birthday, a Todd Rundgren compilation for Christmas.
It's wonderful to share music that has gotten me through all kinds of times. He introduces me to music he likes, and best of all I get to hear the music he is creating.
Best of all though, my husband is a musician. Occasionally I get a private concert of tunes he's written over the years, including a few written just for me.
There's no medicine better than that.
