Music is the glue that holds everything together for me. That’s not some mystical trope, it’s an absolute fact. However, and this may sound strange coming from me, it’s not the most important thing in my life. But it makes the most important things in my life make sense. If that makes any sense.
I’ve been playing music in some form or other for most of my life. I’m told that when I was two years old my parents would stand me up on a table at family get togethers and have me sing ‘O Canada’ to the delight of everyone present. I have no memory of this of course, but I’ve heard the story from pretty much the entire extended family so many times I have to assume it’s true.
It didn’t stop there. I have an uncle who studied music at conservatories in New York and Rome and at one point played with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Among my earliest memories is an evening where we were visiting him – I must have been around 4 – and he handed me one of those Fisher-Price xylophones to occupy me while they watched a movie. It was The Sound of Music. The details are sketchy, mostly from my parents retelling the story many times over the years, but I remember recognizing the scale in that ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer…’ song from the movie and trying to find the notes on the toy xylophone. As luck would have it the song is (obviously) in the key of C major. I don’t really know how long it took me but according to my parents and my uncle I had apparently figured it out before the song was over and played the last chorus along with the movie in real time. They might be exaggerating, or they might not be, I can’t really know. But I do know that to this day I can just remember melodies after hearing them only once or twice. Some people have photographic memories. I seem to have a phonographic one.
For the rest of my pre-teen years music wasn’t really something I paid much attention to. I was still able to remember most of the music I heard. Mostly Elvis and Johnny Cash – my mom and dad’s favourites respectively – but nothing more. When I was twelve I was given a cheap acoustic guitar for my birthday and everything changed. I could make my own noise, just like with the toy xylophone. My musician uncle taught me the basics of harmony and a few basic chords and I was literally off and running. The following year I got two albums: AC/DC’s Back in Black and Rush’s Moving Pictures. We’ll come back to those two albums in just a bit…
Another year or so went by and the first of many high school bands I would be in started forming. I remember this one time we were in my friend’s garage and there was a drummer and three guitarists. Apparently someone had to play bass but no one had one. The gears in my head started turning. The following week my dad lost his job, and my plan to beg for a bass went up in smoke. But then something happened that I never expected. With his first unemployment cheque my dad bought me a Vantage electric bass and a cheap little amp (I don’t even remember the brand). Once again everything changed.
So back to those two albums. No one I knew, knew anything about bass. I was on my own. I could barely hear the bass on my mom’s Elvis records so they weren’t any help, but those two albums I had gotten for my birthday the year before…they made the room shake when I turned it up loud enough and I slowly but surely figured out which parts were the bass and I started trying to learn the songs. Needless to say it was hell at first, but I’m a stubborn mule and soon enough the AC/DC parts were (mostly) under my fingers. Moving Pictures was, of course, an entirely different story but I was able to get little bits and pieces here and there. You see, I didn’t know enough to know that the material was way, way beyond my abilities. I thought that was just ‘normal’ bass. I thought everyone played like that. So I plodded on.
To this day I will always maintain that the AC/DC stuff is as challenging to play correctly as the Rush stuff. I learned early on that it’s a lot harder to play eighth notes consistently and evenly than one might imagine at first. When you play fast the next note comes before your brain has had time to figure out if the previous one was long or short enough. You end up measuring tempo using the entire line as a block. But when you’re pumping eighth notes you’re measuring the tempo with each and every note. It’s a distinction I found not many other players made at that time. It was the sort of detail my phonographic memory paid attention to.
But I digress. The point I was trying to make was that I always tended to mark the moments that mattered to me in my life with what music was playing at the time. Learning bass? Moving Pictures and Back in Black. My first kiss? Boston’s More than a Feeling. Finding out I was accepted to the Applied Science program at Vanier College? Mediterranean Sundance from ‘A Night in San Fransisco’ with Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin and Paco deLucia. Meeting the woman I would end up marrying? Guns & Roses November Rain (Louise and I still refer to that as ‘our song!). My daughter getting diagnosed with Severe Aplastic Anemia at the age of six? Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day. Learning that she was in full remission two years later? Adelaide by Anberlin. The list goes on and on.
Music isn’t the most important thing in life. It’s more than that. It marks what the most important things are and provides the kind of perspective that simple words will never be able to do. And in that sense, I suppose maybe it is, in fact, the most important thing.
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Thanks for reading.
BOB ROSS.ROCKS 