Falling in and Out of Love with Music
By
Glenn Peppers
Inspired by Larry DiTommaso
Ah Music, isn't it quite the roller coaster love affair? There was a time I hadn't touched my guitar in eons, letting it gather dust as the strings rusted and loosened out of tune. Life ever moving as friends and family and loved ones passed on, causing me to drift into despair and depression because they were either close family, band mates and/or mentors. All intricate soul-pieces of myself that made me who and what I am. After a time, my keyboard skills dropped badly (and still aren't what they could be) because of lethargic, apathetic nights and days, being mad at life, myself, and mad at music. Yet through it all, I remained singing. Be it out and about, or here at home. The gift of song has always been my orange juice!
More than I have in years, I’ve begun picking up my various axes and fumbling with them, if not but for a moment or two, even if I have to play something simple in order to warm up. I’ll stroke a string or tap a key. Sure I find myself at first playing with all the noises and polyphonic sounds on the keyboard before I'd finally breakdown and actually play a song... all the way through...! I call this my making up time with music; getting back in her good graces so to speak. I am forever in a love hate, cantankerous state of mind when it comes to music and song because I love it so well. Its built into my bitchy hormonal DNA strand; and in my middle years, I am on a chronic musical PMS cycle like never before! As angry as I can get when I search for the words to express myself, and can’t, music helps me find the way. That’s one of the reasons I love music so; as do you! It is apart of us. Aside from the energy source that secretly powers our bodies and spins the earth, music “is” also an energy that is apart of all our lives.
As a Musician, it is our gift, our frustration as well as the background soundtrack to all our lives. Music becomes an extra special part of your life if your are a singer, a musician or a writer of song and tone. Music fuels your ideas. You hear everything in time signatures although you may not be able to read a stitch of sheet music. Music lets me release, and gets me to smile, and it moves me to tears as well! Oh God, what is this thing you bestowed upon me, that I feel I will never see or hear the end of its linear tonalic beauty? If you write music, music becomes an ever on discovery of feelings and emotions, and newfound expressions all wrapped up into a ball of Vibrational Melodic Creation. One that becomes apart of the universe. Music is Forever!
Try as I may, I'll walk back and forth by my guitar all day long, trying not to look at it, but I know its there. Its constantly calling me! Music is calling you too! You don’t have to be a musician to hear every nuance of sound and trackage in every song that comes within earshot of you. You know and feel the arrangements! If you play and record music, you not only know the arrangements. You even know how they fashioned the volume levels, set the studio baffles, set the EQ and filtering modulations, delay, echo and the reverb, on the overdubs. If music has a hold of you, you know the framework, the blueprint and the building materials to sound and acoustics. I've known and heard them echoing inside my head since I was but an infant lying in my mothers top drawer and clothes basket baby cribs she made for me, cribs that sat near the radio which sat on the top of her chester drawers, across the room.
Yes, being apart of the construct of music, and being human, I am always falling in and out of love with music. Doggone it music, you captured my soul at an early age, and demanded its full attention; and for a lifetime, I feel that there were times I loved you more than life itself. As a young man, I learned and understood early why and how Wes Montgomery played rich jazz guitar octaves and strummed his guitar to taste. Jazz oozing in wet colors, yet always tinted in indigo. Making a mellow salve to rub on my learned young musical soul. I also understood as a young man why Jimi Hendrix so loved and caressed his Fender Stratocaster Guitar, with its sleek contours and inviting maple neck. Only a true rock guitarist will know the feeling of how to get an axe to talk to you by pulling on her tremolo arm or whammy bar as sound rushes through your fingertips, onto the fret board. Jimi knew! For his stratocaster was what he called his lady! A lady that surely must be stroked and strummed as to derive sound from her. I instantly knew where Jimi was coming from, riding the waves of distortion and feedback to sound and tonality. You haven’t lived until you’ve plugged up your axe and surfed a wave of sound on a guitar hooked up to a crop of effects pedals that lead out to a Marshall Stack, or a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. Back in the day when I played often and much better than I do now, I was Stone Free, as Hendrix put it in a song. How did it feel to play, freely running loose and riding sound and electronic frequency like a stallion across an open plain? It was and is the closest thing I can describe to Zero Gravity!
Where words failed me in life, music helped me to express my inner thoughts, perfectly. When a lifelong speech impediment made me stammer, it was speaking in Rhythmic Musical Tones like actor James Earl Jones and actress Eve Arden that lead me through to a decent speaking voice. When I am overcome, and so grieved that I cannot cry, music helps me to release those flood gates of tears and emotion. Yes dear heart, if you love music as I do, and you sing it, play it and live it. No matter what our personal standing is within ourselves and our lives, music will always be there. Its a part of heaven bestowed upon humanity that is a gift we share with the angels. Even if its only in your hearts, we’ll always have music. I am a musician who is always falling in and out of love with music, again and again; I love it! Just as in love, they say that the making up part is always the best. Creatively, I found that this too is how music remains fresh and anew to us so called creative types. For there is always a discovery. Always a new frontier!
God Bless!
Glenn Peppers May 20, 2011
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