Seasons at youth

When does the age of awareness kick in. I know there are large swathes of being a kid that seem gone from my memory but if I sit back and let the mind wander, it is astounding what pops up. In an era when there wasn't a TV or radio in every room and tech gadgets were something you found listed under 'the future' in our 1964 edition of the World Book Encyclopaedia, your imagination and motivation was often all you had to work with. And if I was home from school ill, I was sent to bed until better. But sometimes a song would echo off in the distance on the radio downstairs in the kitchen, or the sitting room, and because it was radio, if you heard something you liked you had to pay attention right at that moment.

Laying in bed all day is not a lot of fun even with a few books, the odd comic book and several stuffed bears who spoke loud enough for only me to hear. I clearly remember lying in bed, bored, watching the curtains; they were white with blue spacemen, Apollo modules and satellites, with the odd star dotted here and there, Mom had made them for me. When I was ill (or whenever in bed unable to sleep and bored) I would stare at the curtains for long periods of time until this strange feeling in my head started to play with my spacial distance and the curtain would zoom in close and then shoot away, and then zoom in again and shoot away. It wouldn't happen if you tried to make it happen, it would only happen out the corner of my eye. The characters on the curtain would move in opposite directions, zooming in and out, and create the feeling I was floating in space and couldn't tell which way was up or down. . . . . one of many indicators that imply you are likely to become a musician, Your curtains tend to float around the room zooming in and out and you have difficulty pointing to the sky without falling over. . . .  It would be years yet before I made those experiences more real and persistent.I could also hear everything. I could hear my friends in the school-yard at break time playing and running around, That made me lonely. I could hear Mom working around the house doing different tasks and wishing she would come and play with me, I could hear the birds and dogs outside, sometimes the wind, and often the sound of a distant TV or radio.

Off in the distance the music that sticks in my mind here is the gut wrenching, totally seventies (because it was the seventies), 'Seasons in the Sun' by Terry Jacks. I must have been about 9 or 10 when hearing this song on the radio, perhaps a sister had the single and played it on her suitcase record player, or maybe on TV, it was a hit around then. The guitar lick at the beginning was like an alarm bell to me. I didn't know what an electric guitar was and the song started with this strange guitar lick which announced the arrival of the song. Seasons in the Sun comes in to play at an age where I was becoming aware, starting to perceive and experiencing strong emotions. A song that suggests it is hard to die when the sun shines and birds sing, spring comes and there are friends and family around, captures the imagination and starts your romantic thinking and feeling, testing out the theory, 'what if it were to happen to me?' . . .  and so the journey goes.  Feeling things that deeply was maybe a little rare in my childhood so when it came along I would grab it and hang on. Later, these sensations would trigger my own need to write and express images and feelings.

Melancholy is such a weapon(tool!) of creativity and inspiration to the songwriter/artist that can also be a debilitating crutch when left to run rampant in the mind. Having a focus for melancholy means you can revel in it, explore its outer reaches and try it on like a coat and see if it matches your hat and gloves. For a kid loving music, this is a way to entertain dark thoughts and troubling times as the hormones change your childhood, swimming within the security blanket of a song and exploring all the corners, humming the verses, singing the chorus, making noise through the guitar riff.

True melancholy signals an end of something, a grief for loss, freedom childhood ebbing away, the moment where mortality becomes real. The person in the song is going to die and it is no different than me not knowing my own fate. It can be poetic and surprising, ultimately sad and perhaps untimely, but very real and very personal. And the feeling in the gut, the muscle cramp, demands reality in a depth that is new to the youngster.

I am not 9 or 10 any longer and my powers of description have grown and my life is something I could never have imagined, but this song is still so powerful it can, in an instant, trigger all the same feelings in my gut and my heart. I return immediately to my parents house, sitting at the top steps in the hallway looking out the window to the front street, watching for cars or people and this song on the old radio in the sitting room floating up the stairs; there is the tummy ache, the muscle cramp and the hunger so fierce you don't dare eat, and the curtains begin to zoom in and out. I feel dizzy and safe.

A Bungalow.

When I was a kid, my parents started my older sister and I playing violin through the Suzuki method from the age of 3. I don't remember much about it. Twinkle twinkle little star and masking tape markings on the bow showing me where to aim. I think it can't be very pleasant listening to a 3 year old play violin. I played through the first eight books of Suzuki before leaving that program for other worlds, but what really stuck in my memory were the flexible translucent green plastic 33rpm records published in each suzuki volume with examples of all the songs in the book. The records were stapled into the back of the book. The Suzuki motto is 'listen and play'. I don't recall every listening to the green records because we could never get them to work properly, and when they did the sound was pretty terrible, and it was probably 1972 or there abouts (the grammar is a hint to where I done growed up). But my sister was 5 years older than me and I got to hear her play everything before it was my turn. Turns out I was very good at learning from listening.

Violin got sidetracked by soccer and ice hockey but it never ceased. At 12 I started playing sax and flute while banging away on the piano at home. My main music influences were coming from television in the form of The Ed Sullivan show, Tommy Hunter(epic Canadian country music hero), Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, Rocket Robin Hood, etc etc. Also riding around in the car with the radio playing was an unexpected source. My folks listen mostly to classical and opera, and as kids we played violin in the Edmonton youth orchestra, several quartets, a string orchestras and a few small ensembles (which would travel around to retirement homes performing Greensleeves and Silent Night with two violins, flute and a voice, to a room full of potential cheek tweakers and me being probably 10yrs with buck teeth, giant ears, fly away blond hair and the inability to handle tricky social situations being confronted and cornered by the elderly residents who talked and liked to tweak your cheek, it was back then ya know).

Riding in the back seat of the car (there were three of us and it was before seat belts - ooooh and it was a 1966 Pontiac Parisienne) we could occasionally get the radio turned to something non-classical. My first memory is 'Bungalow Bill' and singing along with it at the top of our lungs. I never knew what it was about, but there were kids in it, and I loved the way the song would switch back and forth from the two different parts(and I guarantee I was singing 'Buffalo Bill' because that was something I knew about and I would have sung before really listening). I still don't know what its about. I just searched it on wiki and as I started reading I immediately stopped. I don't want to know. I want to hear it (cue youtube and multiple browser tabs). And hear it I have.

Bungalow Bill is an interesting first Magpie Moment. It contains a few things which were to become very ingrained in my musical psyche and very much a theme for what really turns me on in a moment of music. The chorus, the Hey Bungalow Bill bit is a very rollicking play play of harmony between major and minor modes which may or may not be interesting, but what it does is toy with your musical emotions. As westerners we are very trained and in tune with the emotional extortion-ism and, might I add, terrorism, of the minor versus major, the Happy-Sad conundrum. Which is over simplifying but raises the issue of simplicity to which we will return later on. Bungalow Bill's chorus goes back and forth from happy to terrifying (remember I am 10) and the joyful crying out is tempered by asking 'what did you kill?', which to me I thought I must be hearing it wrong because a song couldn't be about killing things, . . . or so I thought at the time.

I could never remember the verse, slow bits, and so I never learned the story, but I could sing the chorus anytime, anywhere, I still can, and I absolutely love the way the chords play out with the melody. Its deep in my heart. I have to confess I didn't know who the beatles were either. This was a song on the radio and that is the only place I ever heard it.

I had not yet made the connection that playing music on my violin had any relation to the music I heard on radio and television. I didn't realise I too was making music. It may seem odd and I can't explain why, but that connection would come some years later.

So go and listen to Bungalow Bill and sing along. It will make your heart feel a little bit lighter and provide a musical bug in the ear for the rest of the day. Or at lest until you hear something you like better.

TL

The Introduction

I love and consume music; it is a sustenance, it is a guide, it feeds me and it sustains me, I play it and it plays me, I am a musician too. Just in the last week it dawned on me I am like a musical magpie. For all the copious amounts of music I consume and as much as I love vast quantities of it for so many different reasons, I am also prone to focusing in or being attracted by the 'big shiny bits that are really really fantastic' . . . to me.

Someone suggested I write about these moments and so this blog starts. The beginning is bound to be convoluted so bear with me while I get sorted out. I have to introduce a few historical facts to set the scene and as a disclaimer I must add that all opinions are valid at the moment I write or remember them and that I will be happily distracted by anything that attracts my ears and my thoughts along the way, so there may occasional incomplete thoughts and feelings. I encourage my own contradictions, confutations, contraventions, disputes and inconsistencies. Because music is like that. We are passengers to our own emotional journey and if we are to be honest, then we must accept the wide range of change experienced every day. In my world that can be pursued hotly by a musical soundtrack that can often stem from very strange places and have a surprising amount of influence.

I think I must also say there is no agenda here. This is a purely an indulgence to pursue the moments of musical magic and mayhem that have made footprints on my mind. This has contributed to the development of me as a musician and contributes to (because it happens to me every day) to the choices and decisions I make as a performing and composing musician.

A little bit about me: My name is Tom Lyne and I am a professional jazz bassist living near Edinburgh, Scotland. I've been a working bassist since high school (1982-ish) in Edmonton Canada and have been in music since the age of 3.

Nurture: What we know comes out as what we are. Which is a little like, you are what you eat. And that is possibly rooted in, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if that last one is not right, then it should connect because there is nothing better than music that makes my insides writhe and wriggle, and that is what I aim to do with the music I make.

TL