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| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | Re: Morning song |
| Date | Fri, 18 Apr 2003 03:11:15 -0500 |
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> Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 14:25:25 +0000
> From: Mike Vancha <mikevancha@sk.sympatico.ca>
> To: audities@smoe.org
> Subject: Morning song
> Message-ID: <BAC469D4.13781%mikevancha@sk.sympatico.ca>
>
> Hi Arthur,
>
> I'm thinking all the people on this list wake up with music in their
> heads-
> songs of others or even their own music! The subconscious mind is a
> creative
> mind so when you are asleep or close to it, music can be on the mind. This
> is a very common phenomenon,as I've heard about it time and time again.
>
I don't wake up with the songs of others playing on the ol' cranial
jukebox, but I do dream new songs or song fragments. I've often thought that
this must be some sort of wonderful gift bestowed upon me by the muse
Euterpe, and I've even awakened myself in the middle of the night in order
to hum a melody or a riff into a tape recorder. However, like most people
who sense some sort of somnolent creativity going on in their slumbering
heads, the results are typically more banal than inspired when studied in
the clear light of day. I've long since given up on the conceit that I might
have the same sort of experience as Keith Richards when he awoke in a Tampa
hotel room in 1965 with the deathless riff that would later become "(I Can't
Get No) Satisfaction" running through his head.
Rather than waking up with old AM radio hits or carpet-store jingles
in my noggin, what I'm prone to suffer is the onset of a song that plays in
my head by dint of subliminal inspiration. It's rarely as overt as having
some mischievous Kelly Cronin type come up to me and start singing George M.
Cohan's "You're a Grand Old Flag" in the hopes of plaguing me with it for
the rest of the day. It's usually very subtle, subconsciously self-induced,
and it often drives me to distraction trying to figure out from whence it
came. For example, when I first started working downtown here in Chicago
about seven years ago, I noticed that the irritating 1984 Rockwell hit
"Somebody's Watching Me" kept playing in my head during my ride on the el
train back and forth from my job. It took me a couple of days to figure out
that the reason why was because there's a stop on the Brown Line el at
Rockwell Avenue. Sometimes it's easier to figure out the connection. A
picture of a trilobite in one of my four-year-old nephew's dinosaur books
once set off "Proto-Pretty" by the Wondermints in my head. Chicago Bears CEO
emeritus Ed McCaskey died last week, and one of the items noted in his
various obituaries was the fact that his great-grandfather wrote the
now-public-domain Christmas ditty "Jolly Old St. Nicholas". Guess what
seasonally-inappropriate song would begin bouncing around in my skull every
time that someone mentioned Ed McCaskey over the next few days? Not even the
inevitable replays of TV clips of McCaskey singing the team's hugely-catchy
fight song, "Bear Down, Chicago Bears", could drive the Yuletide away for
me.
My most embarrassing experience in this vein took place on a date
about a dozen years ago. All throughout the evening the Little Feat song
"Willin'" kept running through my head. I wracked my brain trying to figure
out why. I hadn't listened to any Little Feat songs at all that day, much
less "Willin'", nor had I heard Little Feat on the radio in what must've
been months. Had I seen a truck driver hauling a semi somewhere that day?
Did my date remind me of a girl named Alice? Was my date from Dallas? Was
there something in her demeanor that led me to believe that she had recently
ingested/inhaled either weed, whites, and/or wine? I put on a good show by
hiding my mental consternation, and managed to be every bit the attentive
dining companion.
Suddenly, in the middle of dinner, it struck me that while I had
been watching a college basketball game early that afternoon a profile
graphic of one of the players had flashed on the screen -- height, weight,
position, scoring and rebounding averages, year, academic major, etc. It had
identified his hometown as Tonopah, Nevada. I remembered that at the time it
had occurred to me for a brief moment that it was an unusual hometown for a
big-time college basketball player. But like some mnemonic sleeper agent the
word "Tonopah" had come back to haunt me hours later by cranking up
"Willin'" on my cranial jukebox. The moment that it came to me in a flash
that the TV graphic was what had launched the endless replay of "Willin'" in
my tortured head, I yelled out, "That's it!" I swear that my date must've
jumped five feet in the air from her sitting position.
Gregory Sager
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