Green Hell : Croonin' Tunes Under the Moon in June

Yeah, I know it's July. So what?

Let’s see now. I’ve posted a few observations and anecdotes on gathering information, heartbreak, scanning, cheap spy toys, rifles, books, manipulation, and vegetables. I’ve also rewritten history as audaciously as any public school textbook. As I’ve just increased my own risk of identity theft by complying with section 321 of the perversely misnamed USA PATRIOT act, I was gonna rant and rave about that particular new low-point in America’s steady decline, but I’ll save it for later. I wouldn’t want to be branded a “terrorist” for having the temerity to question the will of the Politburo, after all. Given other provisions of said act, I’m sure as hell glad I never had children, and that’s all I’ll say for now.

Nope, I won’t bitch about Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels having been right on the money, as I’d rather talk about music. Music (often alleged to soothe the savage beast) has a far broader range of emotional effects upon me. It can soothe me, make me yearn, induce nostalgia, tears, “adrenaline dumps” or fits of pensiveness, and lift my spirits to near-euphoric levels.

In a way, I could be said to come from a so-called “musical family”, as my father plays piano, my mother the accordion, I still occasionally (when the tendons in my fretting hand will allow it) play the guitar and tinker around with the Jew’s Harp, and my brother dabbled in bass guitar for a few years.

This “hands on” connection with music deepened my appreciation for what it actually takes to play it, and can be said to have broadened my horizons to a certain extent. I am actually capable of recognizing and appreciating the technical skill of players whose choice of genre may not “do much for me”, a fact I attribute to the twenty or so years I spent playing guitar “seriously” and to the fact that I still “pick’n’grin” on occasion. Now if only I could figure out a way to keep those boogers off my lower lip…

As I hung around with a Hard Rock/Metal/Thrash/Punk crowd during my teens and twenties, I found that I could almost pick out the gents who played from those who didn’t by the judgments they passed on various musicians. Anyone, for example, who opined that country player Jerry Reed “sucked”, after hearing “Lightning Rod”, obviously didn’t know his way around the neck of a guitar very well.

I still remember seeing Mr. Reed during my teens, on an episode of Hee Haw or Austin City Limits (I can’t remember which, only that I was over at a friend’s place, watching it on AFNTV), and being completely slack-jawed at the way in which he burned up the fretboard. This coming from a guy whose own taste in guitarists ran more towards Tony Iommi and Randy Rhoads at the time…

My musical tastes are and always have been fairly eclectic, owing to the circumstances of my upbringing and my own personality. As a young child, I was exposed to children’s songs, traditional and religious music, my mother’s Show-tunes and Beatles records, and my father’s extensive collection of classical music and “oldies” from the 1950s. During the 1970s and 80s, while bouncing back and forth between Europe and the Southern US, I was exposed to a myriad of styles on AFN, and then later, more specialized forms of country and popular music on the radio and on the numerous variety shows that permeated (and often contaminated) the airwaves in those days. I still shudder every time I see an Osmond…

At any rate, I’m actually somewhat burned out on writing “heavy” stuff. Composing two of the last few posts really took a hell of a toll on me, and I need a bit of “downtime”. Owing to this, I’m just going to list a few of my favorite songs and a brief note on why I like each of them. Feel free to list a few of your own in the “comments” section, should the mood strike you. Should some dude or chick in black leather strike you, I really don’t want to hear about it.

Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple). What can I say about this one? What can I not say about it? I’ve heard it referred to as “the riff that conquered America”, and am inclined to agree with that assessment. There was almost a certain genius thereunto: it was idiot-simple, but powerful in its sheer, brash crudity. There was no way not to start slow-motion head banging and foot stomping when hearing it. In any music store in which teenage boys were checking out guitars, or in any garage/basement in which said boys assembled (including my own), one was sure to hear played it as often as -- if not more often than – Sunshine of Your Love or More Than a Feeling. Beyond this, it was the “get-high-as-a-kite-and-start-‘air’-‘guitaring’-down-by-the-river-in-your-buddy’s-beat-up-Econoline” anthem of an entire generation.

Ride of the Valkyries (Richard Wagner). The first time I heard this one, it was in the form of a warped parody delivered by Elmer Fudd, in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (“Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit…”), and never really registered with me. The second time I heard it, it left an indelible impression. I was thirteen years old, and my father, my brother and I were in the 130th Station Hospital movie theater, munching popcorn and taking a “celluloid vacation”. In case you haven’t guessed, I’m referring to the now infamous air assault scene from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in which the Air Cav reduce a village to smoking ruins. I’ve seen the opera Die Walkuere since then, and can almost say that the sheer ferocity of the composition fits Coppola’s movie even better than it does Wagner’s own stage-vision.

It was a perfect blending of visual and musical elements – I knew that what was transpiring on the screen was an atrocity of sorts, but didn’t care. I was on the side of the door-gunner, blazing away at any target he could spot. I was on the side of the snarling pilot as he motioned for a rocket to be launched; on the side of “Kilgore” (Robert Duvall) as he casually sipped his coffee and rained death on his enemies. It was the same feeling I’d later experience; taking a swing at a guy who probably didn’t deserve it, kicking a downed adversary and moving on, hurling an empty whiskey bottle at a group of scumbags before charging with my hunting knife – eighteen years old, eight cylinders firing booze, rage, pain, and loss, not giving a shit that I was outnumbered -- and just enjoying the confrontation itself, not caring about the moral or legal ramifications of my actions. The awful pride and sense of complete victory when they fled. It’s a dangerous little tune, that one. It’s the musical equivalent of a Viking strandhogg, or a border raid straight out of Fraser’s Steel Bonnets.

Tunhuang (Kitaro) The diametric opposite of the last selection. Gentle, contemplative and uplifting. The melody is gentle, beautiful, and builds to a climax without ever becoming violent. It induces the serenity of a saint or Bodhisattva, and its very notes convey a sense of timelessness. The sun rising – or setting – in a crystal clear, blue sky. Wind whispering through sandstone cliffs and gullies, and ever-shifting, undulating waves of sand.

Somebody Told Me (The Killers) Good beat. Good melody. The lifestyle and mindset the lyrics relate disgust me, however.

Mr. Bright Side (The Killers) Damn, but do I know those feelings all too well. Don’t it turn my grey eyes green and leave me with white knuckles and bleeding palms, muttering the Sixth Commandment like a mantra?

Symphony No. 4, Op. 36 “1812 Overture” (Tchaikovsky). See selection #2. The version I have was performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Valley Forge Military Academy Band. When the bells peal and the cannon kick in during the final movement, I’m a goner. I flash back to the photograph my father took of me, standing before a heap of Napoleon’s confiscated artillery in Red Square, shortly after my fourteenth birthday. Grandiose ambitions reduced to a logpile of metal. A lesson never learned – the message of Ozymandias, forever unheeded. Besides, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Ivan and his minions, and this tune brings out the “love” side. I like Russian women, Russian music, Russian vodka, Russian “grit”, Russian tomato cultivars, and Russian hardware. I just can’t stand anything else about the bastards.

Slavonic Dance No. 1 in C Major, Op. 46 (Dvorak) Two songs at once. It’s quiet at times (when it’s trying to catch its breath), fierce and animated at others. Listening to it, one determines that the composer was clearly excited about something, for all that it’s difficult to figure out what. Not that it matters. If a person is that keyed-up over anything, it usually merits further investigation. This one reminds me of a woman I dated a few years ago. She was of Slavic descent. She had a perfect balance of raw-boned solidity combined with a lovely face (both delicate and almost vulpine), a broad smile –filled with white and perfect teeth -- that lit the room up when she chose to display it, a luxuriant mane of mahogany hair, and eyes so dark brown that they became black and depthless pools when she stood before me in the moonlight.

She was beautiful. She was intelligent. She was inquisitive. She had chutzpah. She’d endured hardships that would have put certain other women of my acquaintance into a mental institution, and had borne them with Aurelian stoicism. On our second date, we told each other things we’d never have told anyone but our closest friends, and accepted each other. There was empathy, respect, and attraction, but alas, no love, for all that we both wanted and needed it. We held hands, we held each other, and we talked as we watched Foe Killer creek crawl by us into the Chattahoochee River in the deepening darkness. We spoke quietly of many things, and then ran and laughed when we found ourselves swatting mosquitoes. We were both young, we were both wounded, we were both Southern, and we were both too “hard” for one another, as we later discovered. Flint and steel. There were sparks, but we scratched and chipped each other in subtle, but abrasive ways.

We drove to the northern bank of the river-proper, where the water flowed more swiftly, and the mosquitoes were less inclined to breed or congregate. It was there that I gathered her to me and kissed her upturned face for the first time -- tentatively, for all that I was almost shocked by my own boldness. Our eyes closed, our lips met, and I suppose we both tried to heal and to forget for a few months.

She looked like a princess from a fairy-tale, had a contagious laugh, and like me, was an unusual mix of the sentimental and the callous; the “proper” and the wild. We were both dating two people (for all that we were seeing only one another), and I suppose we both knew it. We communicated, but didn’t “click”, and we trusted, but didn’t love. We argued often, but never fought, and I suppose we ultimately bored the piss out of each other. When we parted, she noted that we were “a lot alike, but a lot different.” Truer words were never spoken. I think of her every time I hear this tune, and wish only that I could have loved her as she deserved.

Finnegan’s Wake (Traditional). This one puts a grin on my face every time I hear it. It’s hilarious. The very notion of a wake degenerating into a drunken brawl is funny (and true) enough, but the idea of a hurled bottle of whiskey (uisge beatha, after all) drenching and resurrecting a corpse makes for a damned good pun. I understand that Joyce swiped the title of his own identically named novel from this one.

Hate Me (Blue October) One of the most poignant, painful songs I’ve heard in ages. When first I heard it, I was returning from a grocery-shopping foray down on Buford Highway, where I go to save money and to get ingredients unavailable in other parts of town. It brought back a flood of memories. Pardon the lapse into outright Southern, but hearing it “like to tore me up.” Hauling ass down Jimmy Carter Boulevard at 50+ mph is not a good activity in which to be engaged when a crying jag kicks in. I’ll leave it at that.

I Saw the Light (Hank Williams). Quintessentially Southern, when one takes the late Mr. Williams’s life into consideration. His name might have been Welsh, but his behavior was pure Scots-Irish. How could a man, who drank himself to death at the age of twenty-nine, produce such a raw, heartfelt spiritual? See David Hackett Fischer, James Webb, or Jim Goad for further clarification.

And that’s all I care to write for now. Go peddle yer papers.