Inspiration

So this week, I’m embarking on a new musical journey in an attempt to yield some written fruit of the blogger variety. My posts lately on this blog have dwindled down to a trickle, and I really don’t have much of an explanation for it.

Inspiration has never come easy for me, and as my own worst critic I’ve probably chucked more ideas and first drafts than many bloggers publish. OK, so much of it never really makes it to the page, but I process ideas in my noodle and as they evolve, I convince myself either to keep going or to chuck it off to the side. Lately, it’s been a lot of the latter.

My last post on Love’s “Forever Changes” album was probably hashed and re-hashed in my head for the better part of four months. I knew I wanted to write about it, but all the ideas and approaches I came up with towards it just never made the cut. Nothing I could come up with would do it justice. I’m still not entirely sure what I ended up publishing even did.

Then this past week, I read a sentence on a message board that affected me. It said “A Date With The Everly Brothers is a really great album”. Nothing more, nothing less. I wished I had written it. All the convincing I needed was right there in that one sentence. Everything that I had agonized over trying to sum up “Forever Changes” and dozens of other albums I’ve wrote about and planned to write about was right there. My problem was that my words were getting in the way of my thoughts.

Of course if you’d ask me about Phil and Don Everly , I’d nod in agreement that they are great. To respond otherwise would be like renouncing your heritage. I’ve heard Everly Brothers tunes most of my life. Pretty sure we had some of their 45’s in the house (I specifically remember having “Bird Dog”) and it’s common knowledge that their close harmony vocal styles influenced just about everything that followed it.

They were supposed to play “Devoted To You” at my wedding as the first dance for the bride and groom. The wedding band however, forgot to learn the song so we got another Everly Brothers song instead, probably “All I Have To Do Is Dream”. I’d have to check the video tape of the wedding to be sure. My main point is that although The Everly’s were instilled into my musical lexicon as gospel, I had never bothered to check out an entire LP by them.

So there it was, inspiration in one sentence. Now I’m not going to advocate or take up the practice of composing one sentence blog posts anytime soon, but sometimes it needs to be understood that the conviction of one sentence can be more powerful and more inspiring than an entire page of adjectives. From that one sentence, I used the internet to find out some awesome things about The Everly Brothers.

For one thing, they were really good friends with Buddy Holly. Phil was a pallbearer at his funeral, and Don was too distraught over Holly’s sudden death to even attend the proceedings. Even more incredible was finding out that Buddy Holly and The Crickets had the t-shirt and jeans fashion sense of The Ramones before being exposed to Phil and Don’s well tailored, suit and tie persona. Not a bad cache of additional knowledge culled from about 10 minutes of internet research, inspired once again by a single sentence.

So, how could I NOT want to dive in headfirst into these records? I probably should have started with their first two LP’s on the independent Cadence label. After all, this short period of time was arguably the most fruitful period for them if we’re talking specifically about hits. I already kind of regret it, but I started off with their early ‘60’s output on the Warner Brothers label.

The first 20 seconds of “That’ll Be The Day” off of their 1965 “Rock And Soul” album was all I needed to be convinced. Convinced that I should go back to the Cadence records and start from the beginning, and that I now need to hear practically every note they ever recorded. This 20 second intro was like a light bulb going off, or a match being struck. An instant game changer. This was before the vocals even kick in. I can hear everything they inspired right then and there. Of course, I knew about all that because my history books told me so. But it’s one thing to read it, and an entirely other animal to actually hear it.

Just like that one sentence, that 20 second snippet of music convinced me of what I thought I already knew. Sure, The Everly Brothers were great. But their greatness goes way beyond the hits. Something I always understood but never bothered to confirm to myself prior to reading that one sentence. As a blogger with writers block, it’s going to provide me with some much needed content. More importantly though as a music fan, it’s nothing less than salvation.