The Moldau, The Message And The End Of Civilization As We Know It...

True to my name, this morning I picked up a CD for a buck, a budget-line Best Of of Al Green. It isn't much of a best of, more a case of a record company having the rights to a couple of purple period tunes of a star and desperately scrambling to put together a package that can be called a best of without totally lying. In this case, even for a slim 11-track package Universal scrambled, licensing four genuine hits from other labels and then filled up the disc with collaborations and cameo spots by Green. One such collaboration? His appearance on Arthur Baker and The Backstreet Disciples' "Love Is The Message". A song that I hadn't thought of - or heard - in more than thirty years, probably. Which got me to reminiscing... 

When I entered high school we had the wildest, weirdest bunch of teachers, the last generation of don't-give-a-fuck-about-conventions types. From a geography teacher who would give out an assignment, then hide the entire lesson behind his spread-out morning paper to the biology teacher who also was an avid bird watcher (or maybe he really was an ornithologist moonlighting as a biology teacher?) and would interrupt himself at the slightest hint of a bird call outside, rip the windows wide open to listen and then explain what bird we had possible just heard. Mr. R, our music teacher, wasn't weird like those guys. He also wasn't a music teacher by trade. He was a piano player and somewhat of a prodigy when he was young. But life's great injustices sometimes serve themselves up with vicious irony. It would suck big time for anyone to lose use of their hands due to som weird radiation accident, but for a man whose life was classical piano? Double suck, triple suck, you name it. 

I could never quite get the back story from my dad who had probably also only heard rumours, but Mr. R was also the first clear-cut handicapped person I've seen up close. His hands were forever fixed in a cramped up, fingers clutched position and the radiation had done a number on them. They were bright red and didn't look like human skin, rather like someone had attached some life-size plastic imitations to the end of his arms. He managed to manipulate a bunch of stuff with his arms and his mouth and would occasionally ask a student to help with giving out papers and the like. 'What the fuck does that have to do with Al Green?' I hear you ask. We'll get to that...

So Mr. R, as you would have guessed by now, was a big classical music guy. I seem to remember that the list ofacceptable artists in pop music began and ended with The Beatles for him. But hey, I did get introduced to classical music, including his personal favorite, Fréderic Smetana's "Vltava" ("The Moldau"), indeed a beautifully flowing piece lasting for about 13 minutes during which Mr. R would get lost in the music, slightly closing his eyes while intently listening, maybe dreaming himself back to a time when it was his fingers flying across the key, bringing Smetana or Ravel to life.

Someone had told him, he told us, that there is a song out there by someone named Arthur Baker which spends its entire running time repeating te sentence "Love is the message and the message is love". He would enunciate the words with a clear air of disgust. Such banalities! His phrasing was so portentous, you would have thought that what he described was akin to the end of civilization as we know it. He was of course totally wrong. Those words are, like, a quarter of the chorus, and there's verses and everything. Sure, the song is a tad repetitive, but nothing like the sign of doom Mr. R seemingly saw in it. Then again, he never heard it, I guess so, it's almost normal that he didn't get the message...(and the message is love!).

So, little did Mr. R know that we were just on the edge of being submerged by a wave of eurodance and techno songs which really did only consist of a line or two that were stupidly, mind-numbingly repeated over incessant beats. The end may have been nigh, but it hadn't been brought forth by Arthur Baker and his Four Horsemen Backstreet Disciples or Al Green. If he wanted to decry the state of modern pop music he was completely barking up the wrong tree. Then again, classical trained pianist -whaddayaexpect, right. 

The harbinger of doom (according to Mr. R)

So, uh, that's it. A childhood memory from a long time ago, brought up randomly by a track on a randomly picked up CD today. There is no specific point to the anecdote, its just that - an anecdote. But if you made it this far, I'lll throw in some Al Green anyway to sweeten the deal. You get that famous CD that started it all and since that isn't really the best of Al Green for reasons stated above I'll throw in his Greatest Hits (2004 edition) that really gives you Green's biggest songs. Equipped with both you really do have the basics of the Green discography. 

And remember, folks, as the Greenster said: Love is the message and the message is love, from the streets to the mountains to the heavens above. Tell everybody what you're dreaming of: That love is the message and the message is love...

PS.: Listen to "Vltava" up there, it's a really sweet piece...