Memories Are Made Of This
Jun. 28th, 2008 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athersgeoWell. Long time - ok, very long time - and no post. Life's been busy. As in crazybusyohmygodmadpanicargh busy. If anyone's remotely interested, there's a post over on my JF account to bring you up to date. That, though, is not the reason for me putting fingers to keyboard here. Nope. What this is is going to be a little bit of an experiment. In the interests of both getting myself writing and stretching what I write beyond the safe little boundaries I've put around my fiction, I'm going to give some non-fiction/essay stuff a try.
So...
Memories Are Made of This
Funny thing, memory. It can let you remember things with amazing clarity and yet other things that might be closely related get wiped from your mind in an instant.
A case in point would be last Wednesday, when I went to my fifth Bon Jovi concert.
Every previous concert I've come out with my ears ringing, my throat bleeding (for the most part not in the literal sense - but it's certainly been close on a couple of occasions!) and with an absolutely prefect recall of every moment in the concert, from intro to outro and everything in between. Naturally enough, this included a complete recall of the show's running order. In fact, concert at no.4 (two years ago) I managed to extend that perfect recall to the support act (Nickelback) as well.
This time, though, while I could recall every song they played (and with a back catalogue like Bon Jovi's, that's probably not a bad feat in and of itself), I couldn't for the life of me put them into the final set list.
They opened with Lost Highway and followed with Born To Be My Baby. But then what? Blaze of Glory was preceded by a chunk of Knockin' On Heaven's Door and was backed by Captain Crash - but what linked them to the intro? What came next? When did they shoe-horn in Keep The Faith and It's My Life? What about Runaway or Sleep When I'm Dead?
Fortunately for my sanity, the BJ website put me out of my misery with an officially posted set list. The thing is, though, even allowing for my prior abilities in this area, I can actually understand why I might have difficulty working out the order the songs came up in. After all, a concert is, by definition, a one-off event that you only get to listen to once. Where my memory's fickle recall really gets my goat is with another set list.
This one was one of my own making - a mix tape I made by recording songs from the radio - which I played to the point of wearing the tape out. For a period of about two years it was the soundtrack to my life (this was the period of time when my Walkman was almost surgically attached to my hip, even in lessons in school, and this was the tape I had playing, nine times out of ten) and I was rather upset when the tape finally gave up the ghost. (What can I say; mid-teens is always a good age for irrational rage!) As a result, though, I must have heard both side A and side B hundreds of times each.
So why is it that I can perfectly recall every song on the B side of the cassette, in their "correct" order, yet all I can recall from side A is snippets?
Actually snippets is perhaps the wrong word. I'm reasonably sure that I've recalled all the songs featured. My trouble is that, just like the BJ set list, I can't assemble them in the correct order. I know the opener was Toto's Africa. I know the last full song was Jukebox Hero by Forigner. The seven or eight other songs between that, however, could almost be any order - except that I know THAT one was early and THAT one was late. That one might have corresponded with Blaze of Glory on side B, so that puts it in the middle, and did I really have two versions of Genesis' Invisible Touch, or could one of them have been Turn It On Again?
I'm aware it's irrational to be obsessing over a fifteen year old cassette, but at the same time, I can't let it go. Not until I've solved the puzzle at least, and unlike a BJ set list, I can't just go and look it up online. So if, the next time you see me, I'm mumbling about whether Meat Loaf came before Madonna, or if Debby Harry was followed by the Four Tops, you'll know that I'm still working on it!
These are likely to roll around roughly once a week; might be a bit more often if I get particularly inspired. Equally, I'm open to requests (which, natch, does include requests for me to stop!), if there's a topic you want to know my views on - though I would say that I may or may not touch political and religious topics.
So...
Memories Are Made of This
Funny thing, memory. It can let you remember things with amazing clarity and yet other things that might be closely related get wiped from your mind in an instant.
A case in point would be last Wednesday, when I went to my fifth Bon Jovi concert.
Every previous concert I've come out with my ears ringing, my throat bleeding (for the most part not in the literal sense - but it's certainly been close on a couple of occasions!) and with an absolutely prefect recall of every moment in the concert, from intro to outro and everything in between. Naturally enough, this included a complete recall of the show's running order. In fact, concert at no.4 (two years ago) I managed to extend that perfect recall to the support act (Nickelback) as well.
This time, though, while I could recall every song they played (and with a back catalogue like Bon Jovi's, that's probably not a bad feat in and of itself), I couldn't for the life of me put them into the final set list.
They opened with Lost Highway and followed with Born To Be My Baby. But then what? Blaze of Glory was preceded by a chunk of Knockin' On Heaven's Door and was backed by Captain Crash - but what linked them to the intro? What came next? When did they shoe-horn in Keep The Faith and It's My Life? What about Runaway or Sleep When I'm Dead?
Fortunately for my sanity, the BJ website put me out of my misery with an officially posted set list. The thing is, though, even allowing for my prior abilities in this area, I can actually understand why I might have difficulty working out the order the songs came up in. After all, a concert is, by definition, a one-off event that you only get to listen to once. Where my memory's fickle recall really gets my goat is with another set list.
This one was one of my own making - a mix tape I made by recording songs from the radio - which I played to the point of wearing the tape out. For a period of about two years it was the soundtrack to my life (this was the period of time when my Walkman was almost surgically attached to my hip, even in lessons in school, and this was the tape I had playing, nine times out of ten) and I was rather upset when the tape finally gave up the ghost. (What can I say; mid-teens is always a good age for irrational rage!) As a result, though, I must have heard both side A and side B hundreds of times each.
So why is it that I can perfectly recall every song on the B side of the cassette, in their "correct" order, yet all I can recall from side A is snippets?
Actually snippets is perhaps the wrong word. I'm reasonably sure that I've recalled all the songs featured. My trouble is that, just like the BJ set list, I can't assemble them in the correct order. I know the opener was Toto's Africa. I know the last full song was Jukebox Hero by Forigner. The seven or eight other songs between that, however, could almost be any order - except that I know THAT one was early and THAT one was late. That one might have corresponded with Blaze of Glory on side B, so that puts it in the middle, and did I really have two versions of Genesis' Invisible Touch, or could one of them have been Turn It On Again?
I'm aware it's irrational to be obsessing over a fifteen year old cassette, but at the same time, I can't let it go. Not until I've solved the puzzle at least, and unlike a BJ set list, I can't just go and look it up online. So if, the next time you see me, I'm mumbling about whether Meat Loaf came before Madonna, or if Debby Harry was followed by the Four Tops, you'll know that I'm still working on it!
These are likely to roll around roughly once a week; might be a bit more often if I get particularly inspired. Equally, I'm open to requests (which, natch, does include requests for me to stop!), if there's a topic you want to know my views on - though I would say that I may or may not touch political and religious topics.
