Let’s Dance on the Wild Side

I have a pretty big music collection. Mind you, I am not saying this as a brag. It’s more that I needed a line to open with and it seemed appropriate. See, sometimes when I am looking for something to listen to I end up listening to the same thing I did the last time I looked for something to listen to. Or from another direction, this mass of music has gotten so large that there are times when I forget what I have available for listening. I don’t use any of the different music services because, well, my collection has pretty much grown to the size of a music service.

With that said and out of the way, let’s delve into the thoughts today. Does that sound weird? Yeah, forget I said it because it might get weirder. I thought of naming this thought today “Playing with Dead Men.” But the spin from that, you see the directions it could be taken right?

But that’s what I’ve been doing over the past week or so. I expanded my collection of David Bowie and Lou Reed music. If I was a completionist, I still wouldn’t be there, but I went from a decent amount to an “are you serious?!” amount. And this while looking at the rest of the collection is a bit of…

I don’t have the words…

As I was going through stuff over the past week, I am looking at songs and collections and thinking to myself, “I didn’t know about that one. Oh wow, they put out some great music I never even knew about.” It’s all these new moments of discovery. Some of the music is stuff we have heard before but never realized it because it all becomes this background noise while we are doing other things.

And it’s crazy because I am sitting here looking at the life of both of these guys. I mean, I have some Velvet Underground stuff and quite a bit of the Lou Reed stuff, it goes back to the late 60s. Not to mention the old Ziggy Stardust stuff. Sadly, I don’t have anything from Reed when he sang Doowop. I should remedy that at some point. But I digress…

To give you an idea of what is happening with this, it’s about three weeks of listening to the albums nonstop from both artists combined. And this isn’t everything. But that is essentially their entire lives condensed to roughly three weeks. It’s one of those things that takes a minute to wrap your head around. That thought just ripped through my brain and made me pause as I tried to grasp it.

And you know I had to look. It’s one of those moments where they have been a part of my life for so long now, I mean their music careers lasted longer than I have been alive at this point. In my mind they only died in the last year. But I checked, and it has been longer. They’re still with me, hell, they are still with a lot of people. It feels like we lost them only yesterday.

I didn’t expect this, but as I sit here thinking about it and writing this, the weight of it all hits me again. I don’t really pay much attention to the comings and goings of most of the musical world or the entertainment industry as a whole. But there were a few that hit me when they died. These two were some of the bigger hits and then when Jim Henson died (long before either of these two). I remember the moments.

We all have memory triggers, those things our minds use to connect memories. Most of mine come from music. In the catalog mess of my brain, I have songs associated with people and songs associated with places. Sometimes I think that I might actually have background music playing while I am out in the world doing normal people stuff.

Anyway, I think I derailed myself a bit. Or maybe, I had no real clue what it was I was getting into when I opened my thoughts to this. I guess it’s a bit of sharing the strangeness that wanders through my mind at times. Which gives us a tidbit. You find the right combination of music and we could be friends. Because that has always been the best bonding moments in my life. Those times when we connect on a song or two, usually unexpected songs.

I have tried on several occasions to learn other languages and failed to glean anything worth a damn. But I have always been able to communicate through memories of song. When you get to someone like Bowie or Reed, you find a completely different language to share with others that know it. Sometimes, sometimes, it’s as simple as a single song that sparks a whole conversation.

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