There's a blue moon tonight. I saw it hanging over the Cape Cod bay like a giant, illuminated baseball, just daring us to take a swing.
It reminded me of the band Cowboy Junkies and their version of the song "Blue Moon" on the Trinity Sessions album released in the 1980s. I remember hearing it at a party, played by some of the cooler people from the church we belonged to at the time, a group that included one of the young, female associate pastors who was married to a young corporate lawyer from my alma mater. Like his wife, he had a Harvard Divinity degree and preferred classical music but was intrigued by these strange new sounds. And that memory reminded me of a night in the early 80s when I hung out with some law school friends who lived in Boston at the time, and one of them brought a copy of Julia Fordham's first album, and as it played he danced by himself in some bizarre but innocent way. These are the things I remember, quiet but edgy music played at night in dimly lit, small apartments among close friends when we were young enough to get away with just listening.
And going back further, I remember the Turning Point album by John Mayall, released in 1969 and breaking ground by ditching the drums. It was a brilliant sound, a drum-less blues with woodwinds, acoustic guitar and bass, and of course Mayall on harp and vocals. Some friends and I saw him in concert in Rochester, New York around that time, though we were still kids in our mid-teens. It was probably at the University of Rochester, and as the lights went down the joints were lit (we didn't smoke them but we were impressed that others did) and the music demanded our attention. It was impossible to turn away.
I have to wonder what Mick Fleetwood thought of Mayall's abandonment of drums (he played with Mayall's Bluesbreakers as a lad), or Ginger Baker or Levon Helm or any of that select group of drummers who gained fame in the 60s and lived to tell about it. All I know is I was introduced to the album by my fellow musical conspirator, Bob, who was among my friends at the Mayall concert. It was Bob who introduced me to Dylan and Cream and The Band and later Tom Waits, and probably several other performers I'm forgetting. We'd listen to the albums on the stereo in his room, during breaks from playing our acoustic guitars, with his parents no doubt listening from the other room and his mother asking us to play for her and bribing us with food.
These are the things I remember, the once-new, now-old, still-inspiring sounds of my youth, no longer played on record players but through computers, accessible instantaneously for a few dollars, but reminding me always of the respite they brought from the chaos outside. As they still do. Once in a blue moon.
It reminded me of the band Cowboy Junkies and their version of the song "Blue Moon" on the Trinity Sessions album released in the 1980s. I remember hearing it at a party, played by some of the cooler people from the church we belonged to at the time, a group that included one of the young, female associate pastors who was married to a young corporate lawyer from my alma mater. Like his wife, he had a Harvard Divinity degree and preferred classical music but was intrigued by these strange new sounds. And that memory reminded me of a night in the early 80s when I hung out with some law school friends who lived in Boston at the time, and one of them brought a copy of Julia Fordham's first album, and as it played he danced by himself in some bizarre but innocent way. These are the things I remember, quiet but edgy music played at night in dimly lit, small apartments among close friends when we were young enough to get away with just listening.
And going back further, I remember the Turning Point album by John Mayall, released in 1969 and breaking ground by ditching the drums. It was a brilliant sound, a drum-less blues with woodwinds, acoustic guitar and bass, and of course Mayall on harp and vocals. Some friends and I saw him in concert in Rochester, New York around that time, though we were still kids in our mid-teens. It was probably at the University of Rochester, and as the lights went down the joints were lit (we didn't smoke them but we were impressed that others did) and the music demanded our attention. It was impossible to turn away.
I have to wonder what Mick Fleetwood thought of Mayall's abandonment of drums (he played with Mayall's Bluesbreakers as a lad), or Ginger Baker or Levon Helm or any of that select group of drummers who gained fame in the 60s and lived to tell about it. All I know is I was introduced to the album by my fellow musical conspirator, Bob, who was among my friends at the Mayall concert. It was Bob who introduced me to Dylan and Cream and The Band and later Tom Waits, and probably several other performers I'm forgetting. We'd listen to the albums on the stereo in his room, during breaks from playing our acoustic guitars, with his parents no doubt listening from the other room and his mother asking us to play for her and bribing us with food.
These are the things I remember, the once-new, now-old, still-inspiring sounds of my youth, no longer played on record players but through computers, accessible instantaneously for a few dollars, but reminding me always of the respite they brought from the chaos outside. As they still do. Once in a blue moon.
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