I am not a musician, but music is my lifeblood. There have been many, many times that it was only through music that God could reach me. Music is the blanket I wrap around myself when life proves to be cold or frightening. It is the gospel that lights a fire of hope in my chest when I thought the flame went out. It is the candle in the dark, the pillar of fire by night, and the gentle cloud by day that envelopes me with Spirit and Life and Passion. Often it is the scripture that comes to my mind, giving me that mantra, that life verse to sustain me and get my feet moving again.
This is no exaageration. I could not live without music.
I remember hanging out in my brother Don's room up in the attic of our Pennington, NJ home when I was a preschooler. I was immersed in a cloud of music, and to this day, I can sing phrases of the songs that became a part of the air I breathed. I didn't know the names of the groups, but it was in that attic room that I first heard The Byrds, Elvis Presley, Three Dog Night, Creedance Clearwater Revival, the Beatles. And I carried them unknowingly with me when I descended the stairs. As I grew up.
When we lived in Red Bank, NJ, as a middle-schooler the second floor of our house vibrated with the gravely, passionate voice of Joe Cocker, the irreverent Dr. Hook, The Who, Jethro Tull, the Beatles, Jim Stafford, Randy Newman.... and others whose names I can't remember. My brother Stan took it upon himself to try to steer my musical tastes away from the current pre-teen flash-in-the-plan pop stars. Out of Mark's room I heard Linda Ronstadt and Nazareth through the bead curtain through which a purple glow shone with the aroma of incense. Mark also had an electric piano that he played so loudly that the neighbors complained. I did often sneak his Ronstadt albums out of his room when he wasn't around.
When I was 12, Stan introduced me to the music of Neil Diamond, and even sat with me through the Live At The Greek TV special that year. I was entranced by Neil Diamond's passion, intensity, heart and soul. I had no idea what "Holly Holy" meant (who does?) but he sang it with such passion you believed it meant something. Something profound. Song Sung Blue, everybody knows one. I knew even then that that was true. I Am...I Said was my signature song; a pre-teen trying to make the world notice her, to know that I was alive and I had something to say. I suffered from depression for many years, and always, always, music has been my best anti-depressant. Especially Neil. He was serious, intense and passionate-- like me, I thought-- he understood loneliness, longing and sadness.
My parents took me and a friend to a Mac Davis concert that year. When he began his song, "Naughty Girls," he said to the crowd, "are there any naughty girls in the audience??!" and I jumped up screaming... (I was a bit naive). My mother grabbed my shirt and yanked me back down, whispering into my ear what exactly a "naughty girl" was. Oops. But he sang my credo: "I Believe in Music, I Believe in Love..." "Stop and Smell the Roses along the way..." I was hooked.
I did whatever extra chores I could do around the house to earn enough money to walk down to Jack's Music Store on Broad Street to buy another Mac Davis or Neil Diamond album. When he couldn't get rid of me, Stan would play a game with me in his room. He'd play a song and I had to guess the title and if I did, I got to choose a song from his selection to play. I always chose the same one, for some reason, a song called "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette." My mother was appalled. On one of Mac Davis' albums, there was a song called "Two Plus Two" that was about "making love after school." Stan defended me with my mother and assured her that he doubted that I would get pregnant by listening to the song. My mother reluctantly let me keep the album. But when I tried to grow up with David Cassidy in his post-Partridge career and went around the house singing, "Get It Up For Love," Stan thought he better step in. I had no idea what the song was about, and neither did my naive mother. Stan thought it best to tell her, for some reason. She didn't make me get rid of the album, but she expressed that she would appreciate it if I didn't go around the house singing it. It was ok; I was so embarrassed after I learned what it meant that I'd skip over the song on the album. Oops.
In high school, Stan lent me his girlfriend's Dan Fogelberg album, and he became my new main songman. His music was mellow and soothing to my anxious, melancholy teenage soul. Stan and Barb took me to Philadelphia to see Fogelberg in concert. Like Stan, I spent hours in my room listening to all my music as I wrote long letters to friends from camp, wrote poetry and stories, or just hung out. Music was my language. These guys said what I felt but couldn't find the words for. They also helped unleash the poetry in me so I could find my own words.
When I was 16, I got a guitar for Christmas and took lessons. For several years, I tried to sing the songs I listened to, but I was never quite the guitar aficianado, of course, as Neil or Dan. I wanted to be able to play like them, but I never quite did, and so finally it faded. I left the music to the masters.
When I went to college at Messiah, when I had had a particularly rough day, I came back to my room and put on Molly Hatchett's "Flirtin' With Disaster," a musical taste left over from my first heartbreak when I was 15. My Pentecostal roommate leapt off her bed and stared at me in horror. She said it was "druggie" music! In fact, I learned, most of my classmates felt that secular music was of the devil. Huh? This music fed my soul, drew me closer to God as I could allow it to express my soul, and it lifted me up when nothing else could. I learned to play along, so to speak, for four years, and listened to "Christian music," but it never did for me what my music did. My taste in Christian music didn't last long beyond college. To me, there wasn't much of it that had any depth, that dealt with the real angst of life. To me it wasn't honest. But the one exception for me was Michael Card. He brought the words of the Bible to real life and made it into sheer poetry. His music became the soundtrack of my falling in love with my husband Larry, and the main soundtrack of our wedding.
It would take volumes of music to encompass the soundtrack of my life. It would contain jazz, country, pop, rock, rockabilly, classical, "new age," and those that defy categories. I am a hopeless addict or glutton when it comes to music, I can never get enough, and I'm always looking for new tastes, new sounds that speak to my soul and set me to flying. The worst disability in my imagination would be deafness. I need my music, but I suppose if that nightmarish affliction would hit me, I would still have all that music in my head, heart and soul.
Musicians pay a high price to save our souls, as we know all too well from Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, etc. And yet to me it's a miracle that such unearthly beauty and passion can come from such broken souls. They preach good news to us, they walk that lonesome valley, they carry us into the darkness and through it to the light. They stir our hearts alive and may even get our hips to swingin'! They move us to tears, stir us to laughter and joy, and most of the time we never know the cost to their own souls to do what they were born to do. And I am grateful. Last night I watched Neil Diamond be honored at the Kennedy Center and I wanted to stand up with everyone else and applaud him for putting my life to music and giving me a voice. He, after all, reminds me often that good times never seemed so good.
