Notes on Music….
My sister Jessie Cole has written beautifully about our family's trauma. One book directly and a few others indirectly through fiction and memoir.
Music has always been my thing, but I’ll try some words.
I was always the quietest kid in the room, still am mostly now.
I stumbled through the first couple of years of guitar lessons. My lost sister had left a nylon string guitar at the house when she had left for overseas. At some point I discovered quite a deep collection of mostly cassette tapes of blues and blues based music, a lot of which I'd heard around the house, but a lot which seems inexplicably just sort of waiting for me to discover and that's when things changed. Ry Cooder, Roy Buchanan, Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin. Sometimes these tapes had been transferred from the record collection, or from friends and sometimes they seemed like bootleg versions from trips to Asia.
In hindsight I can see now that my parents had (in my opinion) exceptionally good taste in music, but as a child it was just the music that was on all the time, often in the background, but often loud and present. I still have a sense of how it sounded and felt before I had any knowledge of music. So deep and wild and vivid and like a kind of conjuring.
To me there were two Bob Dylans, the young man version and the “grown man”, that's how it felt to me.
I was most drawn to the grown man version, the deeper voice that sounded like it had really lived some life, from Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Street Legal, Slow train Coming. These albums sounded full of wisdom, melancholy, and depth. This is what is meant to be really alive, and to be a man. They still sound that way to me. Sometimes we will listen to Dylan at home and my wife will playfully mimic his unique drawl, and part of me wants to clarify that this is the deepest thing ever made. Joan Baez gets it when she says there is something in Dylan’s music that goes “to the core of people”; there are those, she acknowledges, who are simply “not interested—but if you’re interested, he goes way, way deep.”
Dylan, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Neil Young, CNSY, Joe Cocker, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Bruce Springsteen, Billie Holiday, Early pre disco Bee Gees, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Early Paul Kelly, Paul Simon, Judy Garland, John Lennon, along with some 80’s Classics like Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Sade and Sting were all in high rotation.
When I met my now partner of 13 years Lilli, I saw how she responded to music and art. That she went all in, and it could be a life altering thing, engaging with a song or an image. I felt like she ‘got it’ in a way that some musicians I had played with over the years had not. She had also had an extensive history of trauma.
Music was and is linked with trauma and grief and life and death for me as well as being a deep well of joy and wonder.
When I think of Prince’s Purple Rain I can picture my older teenage sister, full of life in the lounge room playing it loud. Me who as a pre-teen didn’t have access to the internet, or anything except for the arthouse movies my parents introduced us to, sensed this was part of the adult world which seemed so distant and deep to a 10 year old. My sister committed suicide at 18 years old. Just a child. I was 11 and felt confused, scared, unable to access my emotions, detached, but I knew that the way our life had been was over.
My father turned deeply to music during the next few years. From grief, to depression to mania there was a soundtrack to all of this. John Lennon's words “God is a concept, by which we measure our pain” were scarred into my body from hearing it on full volume from the kitchen accompanied by red wine, while my sister and I sat in the lounge, the comfort and numbing of the TV and the escape of the guitar in hand. Our loving mother, full of sadness and worry and often being my fathers captive audience, was there and always deeply kind, but our family felt like an unsteady ship my father was steering into oblivion.
At some point here around 12 years old (it’s all a big blur to be honest), I went deep into being transfixed by the guitar, and spent countless hours trying to work out what the masters were doing. The absolute thrill of being able to play something I had heard on an album never ceased to amaze me. Feeling your ability grow over weeks, months and years has always had an almost addictive quality, like it's the sensation of growing and morphing that is the drug.
Meanwhile my Dad was on his own journey with music. Obsessing over The Supremes, The Clash, the Bee Gees (once again, pre Disco), Judy Garland Live at Carnegie Hall, Joe Cocker and John Lennon. Yes, mix tapes ensued. At the height of his mania my father broke into a random house and started playing their records which led to a brief stay in the local psyche ward. My father committed suicide when I was 16.
My obsession with music goes deep and sometimes I scare myself with how deeply I respond to certain things, mostly this same music. I'm sure that's trauma, but it also feels like an alarm bell. This is in you too, or could be if you let it overcome you and just see where it takes you. I avoided some of the most potent of this music for about a decade before slowly becoming curious of its power over me. Curious about certain song's abilities to bring me back to that time in such a visceral way, even though so many years have passed.
I’ve been playing in bands for years and it delights me when occasionally a group of people (the musicians and hopefully the crowd too) in a room can all feel so deeply connected through music that it creates a vivid magic that I can’t describe in words. They are the moments I live for, something like tapping into the feeling music gave me as a small child.
Even as I write this, part of me says leave the past alone, but 30 years later it’s just in my body every day, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes not, even if I push it out of my mind, so maybe sharing things is a way I haven't before might help me or someone else.
photo by Ursula Woods