Jimi and perfect blue buildings
This 13-year old friend of mine, who is cool beyond her years, asked me awhile ago if I had ever heard of the band Greenday. She is totally into them right now and listens to them all the time. Although Greenday has been around longer than she has, they are new to her. I understand how she must feel because when I was 12, I ‘discovered’ Jimi Hendrix and felt like I was literally the first person on the planet to ever meet him. This irritated my sister who was much sooner up on music history than me. You are not the first person to like Jimi Hendrix, she would say, but I would always kind of act like I was. I talked about him as if I were his personal promoter.I had this one friend back then that would entertain my Jimi discovery because I entertained her Doors discovery and we became groupies for every middle school rock band we could find, with our parents driving us to shows. Then on Friday nights she would come along with my family to watch these coffee-house musicians and we would drink mochas because we thought we were cool, and we would sit outside in the metal chairs and listen for hours to U2 and Van Morrison, and Oasis sometimes if we were lucky, and anything else that the older high school boys wanted to play. After shows, we would lay on the floor at one of our houses and contemplate the music that we believed could read our minds, that was saying just what we needed to hear about ourselves. Music seemed to give us answers. We were starting to figure out who we wanted to be and how music could help us get there.
But once we got to where we were going, we went separate ways, with her getting more into pop music and moving to LA and although I don’t see her anymore, I love that we found those new worlds together. Sometimes we run into each other and the only thing we have in common anymore is the way that that music once made us feel.
I first fell in love when I was 17 with this boy who is still one of my best friends. The two years we were together were Counting Crows years for me, and because we were together all the time, they were Counting Crows years for him too. Everything of this relationship can come back to this band in one way or another, for they were always in the background. My relationship was punctuated by concepts of perfect blue buildings and recovering satellites and these long Decembers and secrets of someone else’s life, and the assumptions and the mystery of certain people that I will never know, like Mr. Jones, Mrs. Potter, Amy, Anna and of course Maria, lovely, broken-hearted Maria.
Somehow these people and places that are sung about have come to be the songs of my life too, and like that early love for my Jimi, I have made them my own. I have had my own long Decembers and long Januarys too and perfect blue buildings turned out to be conversations cast in perfect blue TV light. Maria is about loss to me now and about the end of loving someone in the way that I once did. Now, I have my own mysteries and my own broken hearts. And I have recovered my own satellites, those things that somehow seemed too far away to ever come back to me again.
I love the advice in Almost Famous about being lonely and going to the record store and visiting your friends. How true that is, for music is something that is there for us even when others aren’t. Music is about where we are and where we have been. And in love, life and music, there are certain friends that always remind us of where we are going and how we are going to get there.
posted by Mary @ 9:57 PM
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