My Summer of Music

Trying to get back on track with my blogging, both here and at the PMDD site, where I haven't posted in over two months. As my last post says, I'm taking time out to pursue more research on the subject. And I am. I've enlisted the help of a friend from my Qigong class, and, I hope to have more good information to share over there in the fall.

As for what's going on here, I'm still as busy as ever, now getting ready for out of town family to visit. Until then, I will be cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, and that includes clearing my desk of anything that doesn't need to be there, because when they come, I will take the entire week off from the computer. Tonight another friend and I will be shampooing the carpet, so after I finish this post, it's off to move furniture in preparation for that.

Earlier this week, I attended the U2 concert in Pittsburgh with my son and friends. The U2 360 tour was the largest, and largest grossing rock concert tour ever, with a road crew of around 400 and a stage that takes 120 eighteen wheeler trucks to transport. (From a lookout point on one of the stadium ramps, I counted 30 of them lined up in rows of two, big, bright, shiny, new-looking tractor-trailers, just waiting to be loaded up again.)

The stage took four days to set up (in the broiling heat) at Heinz Field, and 60,000 people were expected to attend. The show we went saw was the last American tour date of the tour, which started in 2009. Only one more concert after ours, and the tour is over. I bet that road crew is happy. One of the statistics posted on the jumbotron that blasted images from the center of the stage said that during the tour 17 children had been born to crew members.

In all, the trip took 13 1/2 hours, 7 of them spent at the stadium. And only 20 minutes spent in traffic, Thank you God. We stopped and had a nice dinner (grilled trout and veggies for me) on the way, and arrived at the stadium around 5:00 p.m. The show began at 7:00 and U2 came on at 9:00. They played for nearly three hours to a crowd that was standing and swaying and singing for almost every song. (including me, of course....how I wished I'd had a tambourine along...I had to settle for clapping my hands or banging on my binoculars :)).

The weather was perfect, with a cool breeze wafting in after dark. The open air format made the sound level more than bearable. Of course it was loud. At least I didn't have any hearing problems afterward :). At times the concert felt like a spiritual experience, which I am sure is what the band intended. The positive energy in the stadium had my hands practically vibrating. (We've been learning all about energy fields in Qigong.) The band came back for three or four encores, the last of which was the best of all, an impromptu song (and one of my favorites) inspired by a friend who lives in Pittsburgh and was at the concert--see the video below.

What can I say, other than it was one of the many highlights of a stellar summer so far. Well worth the time and effort and wait and expense. Of the tickets. Not all the add on "convenience" fees, and the extravagant mark ups for food and drink and souvenirs at the stadium. Can't say I was shocked, because I do get out enough that I've seen prices rise steadily, but this was an orgy of greed going on. They even had announcements that you were not to bring in things like Tylenol, chap stick, and sun screen, because they had them available there for your "convenience."

Yes, and if the food and drink prices were anything to go by, that "convenience" would have cost me dearly.

But the concert itself was awesome, and I'm already scouting around for my next one. This, for me, has turned into the Summer of Music, between the Fourth of July party jam sessions, and the CDs my son has been bringing me for my car. (Taking a break from listening to all those motivational CDs :)) The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Adele...

Yes, Adele. For once I am actually current with something that's going on in the world of pop culture, and it feels good :)

The National Music Museum, A National Treasure Indeed

It’s hard to believe that three weeks ago today was our first full day in South Dakota. It seems so long ago. Last week was a blur of constant motion, getting back into the swing of things, unpacking and doing laundry and grocery shopping and catching up on emails and blogs and friends here locally. Now I have to think back to all we saw and did…

I usually do a day-by-day accounting of my trips, but today I just want to write about the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD, on the campus of the University of South Dakota.

We visited two college campuses while on the trip, which reminded me that I love the whole college campus atmosphere. The buildings, the houses, the green lawns and sidewalks and sculptures and flowers and benches and overall look and feel of the place. They took me right back to the memories of my own.

They also reminded me that my son will be going off to school in the next few years, and for the first time, I was actually comfortable with the idea. I can picture him living in that kind of setting and atmosphere, and I think with his love of learning, he will thrive.

My son, in fact, was the reason we went to the National Music Museum. For our itinerary, I chose only places I thought would interest him, because I don’t care…I’ll go to museums of any kind.

We arrived just before noon and had a picnic of peanut butter sandwiches, assorted fruits and vegetables, and grandma’s home made chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies in the shade under a tree just outside the building before going inside. The building itself is not overly large or imposing, not like the national museums in Washington DC, just your basic stone museum-type building--so I didn’t expect much from the inside. Figured we’d be through it in an hour or two, ho hum, been there, done that.

Three hours later I still hadn’t seen everything, but was dead on my feet and hungry, in need of both a place to sit and something to boost my blood sugar.

That is one place I am going back to, first chance I get. And one place I would love to endow, should I be blessed enough to become anyone’s benefactor.

Call me cloistered, but they had the most amazing setup I have come across in a museum. They had nine galleries, full of instruments spanning five centuries from the Renaissance to Rock and Roll. Stradivarius violins, mandolins, and cellos, harpsichords, lutes, lyres, Civil War and slave instruments, banjos, fiddles, brass instruments, wind and reed instruments, guitars, organs of every shape and size, player pianos, a Nickelodeon.

They had instruments that were invented, but never took off, or fell into disuse when something better came along, and instruments owned by famous people or used in movies. There was a room of non-western music, with instruments and drums from places like India, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Africa, Iraq, the Pacific islands, and so forth. That room alone took ages to get through…

Why? Because in most galleries I’ve been in, you look at the object on display, read the accompanying plaque, and move on. But here, upon paying the $7 admission fee, ($3 for students) each of us was given an iPhone type device with headphones. It had a pointer, but your finger worked just as well. You tapped on what gallery you were in, and a screen opened with pictures of the numbered exhibits. You tapped on the picture of, say, a harpsichord, and a voice told you the story of that harpsichord.

Your next option was to tap on the word music, which allowed you to hear what the instrument sounded like. A full song. So walking between exhibits, you could listen to music. And you could play it over and over again, as many times as you liked.

Each person in there was on their own personal tour, at some different point in the tour or room, listening to what interested them. It was quiet, peaceful and totally full of music. (They even have virtual tours. Check it out!) If you need to research anything musical, this is one place you want to contact.

Like I said, three hours later I still hadn’t listened to everything. The one thing I would recommend—but where would they find the space?—are benches like you find in art galleries in ALL the galleries, so that visitors can sit and rest their feet as they listen to all the different instruments. Walking for three hours is hard enough—standing for that length of time when you’re not used to it gets wearing. We had to leave the museum long before any of us were finished experiencing all the exhibits.

And where did we go? To a restored drug store soda fountain a few miles down the road, where each of us ordered something different, made the old-fashioned way. I had a chocolate ice cream soda, my son a cream soda float, grandma a miniature banana split, and grandpa a sundae. A nice way to cap off an afternoon of pure musical enjoyment.

Sunday's Inspirational Quote

Yesterday we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland—and yes, my car got us there and back again with nary a hiccup :). It was amazing. (The museum--not the car trip. That, thank God, was blessedly uneventful.) Because I am a writer, I could relate to a lot of what those musicians went through. Not all, but a lot, since writing is a solitary endeavor, and creating music is not—not if you want anybody to hear it. But the part about "I play music because I can't not play it," oh, yes, I could relate to that. How it rises up from the soul and just won't go away until it is released...

A familiar theme I read about over and over again.

What amazed me the most was how so many of them gave up everything for their art. And how many of them were social outcasts before they became rock stars. As Bono said at one point in a taped interview, something to the effect of, We’re just doing what we’d be doing anyway, what we’d be doing for free, but now we’re getting ridiculously overpaid for it. The stories were countless about people sleeping in their cars, facing eviction, and just scrambling to make ends meet so they could continue to play. So they could continue to grace us with their gifts of inner knowledge and self-expression.

For them, it was all about the music. For me, it’s all about the words. So it comes as no surprise that my favorite parts of the tour were the handwritten pages of lyrics for songs I’ve listened to through the years. To see them written on their legal pads and spiral notebook pages, scrawled all around the page, words scratched out, paragraphs scratched out, new words written in…alternate words listed to the side…to witness that creative process, to know that a song that touched millions of lives started as just scribblings on a piece of paper…I looked at those, and thought, “That’s how I start my books!” and was inspired.

So this morning I’ve found a few quotes from Hall of Fame Inductees you might enjoy. None truly captures what I want to say, but they’re all good in their own way.

Have a blessed week.

Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.' Elvis Presley

Without a song, each day would be a century. Mahalia Jackson

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa. Gregg Allman

Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier. Bruce Springsteen

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people. Stevie Nicks

When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues. Little Richard

If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time. Janis Joplin

I just managed to convince my grandmother that it was a worth while that was something to do, you know, and when I did finally get the guitar, it didn't seem that difficult to me, to be able to make a good noise out of it. Eric Clapton

I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising. Jimmy Page

When I'm dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance. Freddie Mercury