“For the music is your special friend. Dance on fires, it intends. Music is your only friend. Until the end.”
The Doors
“When the Music’s Over”
Thanks to Steve Taylor, for a conversation over dinner that planted this idea in my mind.
I am a Baby Boomer. During my formative years, arts and entertainment underwent huge changes in content, form, and message. Recorded music formed the spearhead of those changes, as electronic improvements in the integrity of sound made audio communication easily recognizable, transferable, and available. Meanwhile, TV took theatrical entertainment from radio, which thereafter played records. From the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, peaking in the late sixties, popular music helped change the world. The leading music makers became familiar to us listeners—friends we would probably never meet. Now, music makers and fans alike are aging and dying, not from life in the fast lane, but from old age. News about the passing of that time’s musical greats remind me of the obvious: a lifetime has indeed passed. Have we learned anything?
The popular music of our time resulted from crossbreeding of musical genres from various ethnic sources: folk, jazz, gospel, country, blues, classical—and others. Music is amazingly fecund; melodies readily spawn with one another, and instant electronic communication brought all genres together at once, just as it brought the world’s people together. Not everyone was happy about the togetherness, and great music was created before and after those times. But amplified music did get the world’s attention. Its creators were rewarded with unbelievable wealth and adulation, while still quite young, which forced them to contend with enormous mental, emotional, and physical challenges. Each one handled those challenges differently, but no one was immune.
Since we who heard the music connected psychically with the music makers, most of us naturally wished them well—beyond wealth and renown, the same fulfillment of living which we sought for ourselves. The overriding message we heard in the music was simple: ease up, and treat each other kindly, because contrary to what we had been taught in our early years, life means more than competing to get jobs and raise “ideal” families in comfortable houses. We wondered if the idyllic, halcyon life we had been promised by contemporary society came with a too-high price. Our refusal to enthusiastically accept the offer confused our elders, who had sacrificed quite heavily through depression and war to reach those life goals. The misunderstandings caused widespread social strife, and deep generational rifts, which society’s rulers were only too happy to exploit, to keep us divided.
Over time, we accepted reality and played the hand we had been dealt, as did our parents, grandparents, and all our ancestors. Being human, we began raising families. Families need food, shelter, and other things, so we got jobs. Life on the outside varied little from earlier times. The same was apparently true for the musical guides of our youth. Those celebrities had better paying, more enjoyable jobs than most of us had, but they too had to accept routines, doing what big money people wanted them to do.
Fortune and fame, it seems, shields no one from life’s challenges. The entertainment business is at least as mean, greedy, and dishonest as any other. Add disillusionment with wealth and celebrity; add the widespread use of alcohol and drugs that lubricate the business; and chances for self-destruction, chicanery, and misunderstanding are…amplified. In our world of instant mass communication, where everyone knows everyone else quite well, the music makers’ personal lives were common knowledge. We who dwell in the everyday world may find a bit of privacy simply because nobody pays attention to what we do, but celebrities have nowhere to hide.
Throughout these exciting times it has become obvious that our musical guides are human, with desires, needs, and faults no different from our own. Life’s struggles in that rarified atmosphere of fame and fortune are as difficult as the ones we face here on Planet Earth. Some, like Jim Morrison, author of the opening quote in this story, were overwhelmed by the chaos, and died young. As day followed day, those who survived the thrills of over-stimulated youth moved as well as they could through middle age, and now are elderly, with all the challenges that entails. Now they are doing what old folks have always done: dying of old age.
As people who created that world-changing music pass from the scene, some of us who remain are realizing that the lessons of now are the same lessons we learned decades ago. The truth remains that life is precious; meant to be lived fully and shared with others. Sex, drugs, and rock’n roll were mistakenly perceived as means to that end, but ultimately the end stands for itself, without fast living: personal satisfaction from a lifetime well-lived, mainly by adhering to the timeless Golden Rule. Against that goal the world, peopled by struggling, searching, often fearful human beings just like us, builds many obstacles. Still, we must all play our hand, regardless of wealth or acclaim.
My own experience teaches me over and again that when I treat others the way I like to be treated, I live a satisfactory life. When I do not, I must expend huge amounts of energy trying to justify why the SOB had it coming. The Golden Rule always seems corny when I am in a cynical mood. Since our parents and grandparents lived in an intensely cynical age, it is understandable that many of them bitterly opposed our attempts to follow that Rule when it was revived in the 1960’s by our musical spiritual guides, among others. Current times are still cynical. Though the Rule is hard to follow, we humans love being treated like humans. And life is brief.
After people die, we remember their good qualities, while overlooking or forgetting their defects and shortcomings. So, why can’t we all treat each other like the good people we know we are, while we live? Again, this question is more easily asked than answered, because life, which everyone must learn from scratch, is short and tough. Life’s uncertainties tempt us all—not just superstars—to occasionally seek false solace from those seven deadly sins: pride, greed, anger, lust, envy, sloth, and gluttony. Still, we can only conclude, as we watch those musical superstars slip their mortal coils—along with our friends and relatives, as eventually, we all will do—that while we cannot know with certainty what happens after we die, the departed are no longer concerned with how many toys they posses. Wealth, fame, and power are not carried beyond these three dimensions. Are they worthwhile goals here and now?
Some people are blessed with not only the talent to produce otherworldly beauty in our world, but the opportunity to display it for the world. The beauty they create and show us is what endures, regardless of the personalities of those who create it. As the creators of the music we love pass on, as we will too, the music remains. The fascination with audial amplification has lessened somewhat, but new creators constantly emerge. To my reckoning, music is wondrously timeless, as are the essential entities of human beings who make it, and who hear it. The music remains, for us and for those who will follow, a reminder that something within us all transfigures the banal perceptions of reality we perceive here on this mundane planet.
What have I learned? Relax, and listen.