Hello again. You might think I’d forgotten to come back. But that’s
not the case. Like an elephant, I usually don't forget, it just takes a little longer
sometimes. You'll notice too that I've changed the title of this series from "Books and Reading" to "Books and Music". As you'll read in Part Four, I realized that Books and Reading are somewhat the same thing but Music, a very different art form, was and still is, no less influential or inspiring to me.
When we last spoke, I talked about Thor Heyerdahl’s great sea
adventure and how his book, Kontiki,
inspired one of my first short stories for school.
Another reading for pleasure hiatus followed as most of my reading was for school—reading was work, homework and questions; what fun was that?
But that period didn’t last long and seemed to build into two avalanches that mowed
down pretty much anything that was in their path. Not together in timeframe but in
retrospect seemingly very close were the discoveries of Rush and the books of a certain author whose name I shall save for a future article.
I discovered the band Rush in tenth grade. I had started a band
and after one of our jams, found their album A Farewell to Kings in the basement we were practicing in. I didn’t
know much about them. For instance, I didn’t link the album title to
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The
album art was fascinating; a marionette or puppet king lying across an apparent
throne in the remains of a demolished castle, a gold crown on the ground beside
him—the king had lost his kingdom—a symbol of the album title.
The liner notes—lost in today’s music streaming and
downloads (I sound like an old person)—had the album lyrics and a picture of the trio, guys much older than me with long hair;
one with a long, handle-bar mustache, one with his leg hanging over the arm of
a chair wearing white-leather high-cuts and a third standing majestically to
the right of the other two in a dark blazer.
From the time I heard the first song—the title track “A Farewell To
Kings”—I would never hear music the same way again. I remember playing the album
(yes, it was vinyl) on my friend’s turntable and, believe it or not, decided to trade my less-prized Bruce Springsteen album Darkness on the Edge of Town (I’d bought from the Columbia
House Record Club) to get it.
Albums were scarce at that time, as was money to buy them, so trades were commonplace and often the only means of getting what you wanted. I
played that album like no other on my father's turntable. I couldn’t get enough and have
awaited each subsequent album with great anticipation. I've only felt that way about a few albums, Korn most recently. Interestingly, the same person who co-produced the
last two Rush albums Snakes and Arrows
and Clockwork Angels, Nick
Raskulinecz, produced Korn’s last album The
Serenity of Suffering.
Rush has continued to be a favourite through their extensive catalogue of nineteen
studio albums, experimenting and growing their craft with each new release—for over
forty years.
But as important as the music was on A Farewell To Kings, I was captivated by the lyrics and the stories
they told in songs like the title track, “Closer To The Heart” and
“Cinderella Man”.
I was further intrigued by the art of writing itself. I loved to
read but writing puzzled me with its sentence structure and rules of subject
and predicate without a discernable formula or pattern so common to mathematics
and science that I already had a propensity for. It was through the lyrics of Rush’s
songs that I found a new voice and route to writing; a form that I could follow
and work to without the regimented sentence structure I so struggled with. In
writing a lyric, I didn’t have to worry about forming the subject and
predicate, words became like strokes of a paintbrush. I picked up rhyming
conventions like Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and Dr. Seuss’s anapestic tetrameter, putting words to the music I wrote, that at the time, fascinated me more than writing. I had written off writing (no pun
intended) and my ability to write, in elementary school, but I loved putting
music to words that others had written.
As music remained at the forefront of my teenage world, and thinking
I could never write anything outside of lyrics and poetry, I will leave you to wait and wonder until next time on how my transition to short story
and novel writing transpired. So until my next installment of Books and Music …
If you haven’t yet read my books The
Actor or The Drive In, you can
get them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Chapters-Indigo or pretty much
wherever you find books.
