In the wee, small hours of the last morning of the year 2010, I stumbled upon some old music videos and watched the legendary rock group Chicago play through their anthem-like power ballad, "Stay The Night." The 70's vintage Dodge in it reminded me of the example of the muscle car era with which I was personally acquainted, the 1968 Chevrolet Malibu my parents bought new. I only got to drive the car once, nearly fifteen years later, as a teenager under the watchful eye of my father. No, my memories of that car and its 327 hp V-8 engine were as a small child in the days long before seatbelt laws, and apparently before parents truly loved their little ones, because I recall crawling all over the vehicle: lying with my ear pressed to the floor to listen to hear the gears shift, crawling up into the space behind the back seats and under the rear window, or sitting on the storage compartment between the front bucket seats, begging my dad to let me shift the gears.
But it isn't much of a leap to go from thoughts of the Malibu to the jet black 1977 Camaro LT Dad bought later. It had a great "modern" feature, a built in cassette player! No doubt this car heard all of Chicago's old tunes on its radio as they were newly released. It also heard its share of Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Maynard Ferguson and Doc Severinsen and the other jazz I was just getting into when the car was purchased, to be sure, but by the time I got to drive this little black car with its bright red interior and molded fin myself, I had expanded my tastes to include the popular music of the day, especially Chicago because they had a horn section.
I'm sorry to say that I destroyed this car by driving it off the side of the road one night during my senior year of high school. But before it's untimely demise, there were a few wonderful memories associated with the car, not the least of these are the ones that revolved around my first official girlfriend, a dear young lady who lived on my street, who rode with me to band practice every morning, and who I saw in church every Sunday.
And thinking of her leads me to a memory of a specific moment with her, of sitting in that Camaro outside Fred Morgan's music instrument repair shop, and joking with her that if I could eat an entire Snickers bar in one bite, she'd have to marry me. This little moment, terribly funny to a couple of lovelorn teenagers, was also romantic enough in our own innocent way that she turned it into a poem, which I later put to music. Funnily enough, this song was just recently rediscovered, and by that I mean the original piece of sheet music I wrote it on in pencil. I've been reorganizing, repacking, and removing old boxes of music, scores, notes, method books etc., that have been languishing in cardboard boxes since our move over three months ago.
And I had a funny thought when I discovered it, sang through it for the first time in, well, decades. It wasn't all that great a song, not very dynamic. More of a still life than a street scene. But what it represented was a number of near-firsts for me, all rolled into one. It was probably one of the first times I tried to write something like a pop ballad. One of the first times I'd written something specifically for another person. Oe of the first times I'd written lyrics!
And did I say it wasn't very good? No, not really. Sweet, maybe. Simple, definitely. But not that great a song. Nonetheless, and this is is a key "nonetheless," at the same time I realized that, I also remembered how I felt around the writing of that song. I felt wonderful, that wordless, indescribable wonderful that you feel when you happily do something for someone else, when you get out of your own interior life and dedicate yourself to someone else's.
And you know what? I miss that feeling. I am - hopefully - a better writer of music now. But in choosing not to do as much writing, I have made myself go without that feeling, that feeling of being dedicated to making something artistic, something personal, something I know how to do, something useful, and, probably most significantly, something for someone else.
Which leads me to the specific case in point: it is time to bring those feelings back. There's a lot more to it than that, most assuredly, but at the same time, every enacted plan begins with a thought. And so it goes.
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