A few bad bones...

Wednesday 22 July 2004

I feel obsolete. Obsolete. How do you weigh a word like that? How do you weigh words? Do I feel as obsolete as some members of the audience of a Neil Young bootleg I've been listening to (Young's Greendale tour, UK, circa 2003)? They begin to clap in time (just about) during the opening few bars of 'The Needle and the Damage Done' and then cease a few bars later. Why did they stop? Did they realise how inappropriate it was? That can't be it. Sure, it's possible some of them felt as though they were contributing to the warm-natured feel of the evening (Young seemed in particularly high spirits) and then the song's content became apparent and they stopped. I can't figure what goes through the head of someone who appreciates Young and his history and yet feels that clapping to a song that has never featured any timekeeping in any form (not even a tambourine) would somehow be the correct course of action. Every audience member there must have had a handle on who Young is; tickets were around £40/£50 if my memory serves me as it should. They sold out quickly. Only true, authentic Youngites were present. Fact.

Of course, most of the clappers quickly became aware that the majority of the audience were not going to participate in the clapping. That would immediately cause most clappers to stop. On this evening it evidently did, buI'm'm sure we have all been present at some event where clappers tirelessly pursue their cause until the last few notes of the song die out. Perhaps, the moment would have been less excrutiating if the clappers had continued to the brutal end. We will never know.......

(I think I will soon write about whistlers. I don't feel comfortable, presently, about writing negatively about a group of people of which my father is a member)

It can sometimes happen. 'The Needle....' may have had its original emotional power drained from it. That goes for the writer and performer as well as the listener. A song that you love with all your heart; a song that unashamedly made every hair on your body stand to attention; a song that brought a salty discharge to the edge of your eye; a song that helped you through that two week period of dark thoughts and low feelings; a song that you had on 'repeat' for hours at a time; but now......many moments, many years, many loves, many books later, the song can no longer bring emotion to you. No matter how hard you try. That tends to produce a unfavourable mixed and nervous feeling within me. 'Aire and Calder' - Ultrasound. 'Sparky's Dream' - Teenage Fanclub. 'Dolphins' - Tim Buckley version. 'I want you' - Elvis Costello. 'My Blue Wave' - Lambchop. 'Alabama' - John Coltrane. The air of melancholy that these songs contain is enough to weep anyhow, but for them to become redundant to me can be devastating. An exaggeration, perhaps. Hard to explain, I guess......