We Have a Groovy Thing Going Baby

Once a week, Rebecca drinks a different type of alcohol and writes a rough draft – she edits sober. Last week was Red Wine. This week is Gin.

Oh, I know how obnoxiously hip it is to spend an hour on the floor listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence on vinyl. But I want to get this right. I’ve been dropping the needle on this record for too long, searching for the lyric “Hello darkness my old friend” and ending up in the middle of Kathy’s Song.

Gin makes my body feel like a limp, dirty sponge. I lay myself out to dry on the porch. I can only write about music in a linear, blow-by-blow fashion, following sounds – drip, splatter, I’m climbing a mountain of furry, musical chocolate. All the describing leads to nothing.

Can’t I be Nick Hornby, or Stephanie Barber? She turned a song’s YouTube commentary into a book. Now that’s brilliant.

I live with musicians. Music is a religion here. Crates of records frame my living room floor. I’ve watched fingers run along those titles every day for a year.

Still, it takes time to figure out that the needle on a record player works its way from the outside of the vinyl to the center.The physicality of it all is pretty remarkable. A needle mows over these etchings. Those are vibrations from sound cut into vinyl. The purest recorded music. Eventually, I get it started on A-rkness my old friend. 

One song is someone carefully walking down a staircase and the next is sprinting up to the roof. The bumps and scratches from the needle cover that song-staircase with the sound of dead leaves crinkling.

Music is silencing. It’s unspoken communication. Total faith. I’m still trying to write about it.

Stay tuned for next week.