A Tribute

This is not one of my regular posts, obviously. It's just a tribute to things gone past.
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I’m going to be totally honest. I do not remember the first time I heard Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. That’s not because it didn’t make an impact. It’s because it did.

I don’t know the exact date, but I know the where and how. My earliest exposure to rock music outside The Beatles, to stuff like Radiohead, the Rolling Stones, or Led Zepplin, was always, always, ALWAYS in the car, our old blue mini-van with my dad and my brother. Technically, we were running errands, but there was more to it than that. Dave, my brother, went because it was a chance for him and Dad to have another of their epic discussions on music, epic discussions that would eventually lead to a train trip across the country, a visit to family in Oregon, and an in-depth assessment of the best 100 albums of all time, at least for them. I went, frankly, because I was a young kid, six-seven-eight, sharing a room with his brother, who I was sure was a perfect being, and who wanted to spend as much time with his brother and father as possible.

Dad worked from home in those days. He was always the one waiting for us as we got home from school, the one waking us up in the morning, the singing us lullabies at night. Dave has always been into music, and always will be. He’s the ultimate source for anything involving a beat and harmony. He still has encyclopedias of music stacked in his room by the window, but now-a-days they’re covered in dust and un-used. He just simply knows everything they have to say. He and Dad always got along perfectly well, at least as far as my eyes saw. And my eyes saw them best running errands in our blue van, heading to Kinko’s with a side trip to the adjacent Blockbuster.

There was always music playing. Who’s Next, The Wall, OK Computer, McCartney. That was the sound track to my childhood. As I sat in the back seat, looking out the window at the old, familiar sights along the highway, I would let the music wash over me in waves, never really comprehending the subtleties, the themes, the things my brother and father saw in them, but I loved it anyway. It was happiness. It was that old blue van, listening to endless debates over the merits of whatever musical phase my brother was going through. It was all that was right with the world.

That world is gone now, and yet, not. No more watching old Godzilla movies endlessly with my brother. No more squirt guns with Dad in the yard. My dad still works from home, he’s re-married and living out in Worchester. My brother is going to college, and he’s cracking into the musical journalism industry. He and my dad had a falling out when he hit high school and was never around anymore. The only thing they seem to agree on anymore is music. Me, I lost the musical thread for a while. I could no longer let it wash over me, but at the same time, I still couldn’t quite get the little nuances they always got. Then I got it. I just got it. It all came to me, and Pink Floyd and Led Zepplin and Paul McCartney started flowing back onto my iPod, kicking out the Weird Al and the show tunes I had turned to for simplicity. That’s where I am now. Where my brother was at age 10. I’m not jealous, though. To each his own.

This morning I woke up, and as I got dressed, something just kinda told me it would be a good day to wear my Pink Floyd shirt. Then, later, I read the news as I was checking my email. Richard Wright died today. The keyboardist for Pink Floyd. Had you asked me who he was a year ago, I wouldn’t have known. But now I do. Now I realize that you may not be able to go back in time, and capture the feeling of the past, that each day may only make us “shorter of breath/ and one day closer to death,” but that’s part of the beauty of it all, and we can’t let the passage of time, the constant of the present, ruin our past, and our future.