One day, almost exactly 4 years ago, Alan did one of those Facebook things where you hit shuffle on your playlist and post what songs come up. I present his playlist below, with our comments from Facebook, but no other commentary.
1. It Aint' Me Babe (Dylan)
2. Street Walkin' (Auerbach)
3. I Can't Help It (Williams)
4. Shitbox (Noisia)
5. Chain That Door (Mudhoney)
6. Queen Jane Approximately (Dylan)
7. The Last Time (Cash)
8. Spaceships (Jeremiah Nelson and The Achilles Heel)
9. Little Red-Haired Girl (Ezra Furman and The Harpoons)
10. If Not For You (Dylan)
11. Pour Me Another (Atmosphere)
12. Crumb Begging Baghead (Babyshambles)
13. Most Likely You Go Your Way (Dylan)
14. Sky Pager (A Tribe Called Quest)
15. Attention (The Raconteurs)
Me: So, I decided to do this, and discovered some artists I had forgotten about. Just to give you an idea, 5 classical, 5 jazz, 4 contemporary, 1 video game music.
There are very few times I am ahead of the curve when it comes to music. Alan definitely had the hipster "before it was cool" thing going on. When I did catch something early on, it was from nerdy sources like NPR or Youtube videos of British TV.
There was the whole Gnarls Barkley thing, which hit the UK first:
And there was Adele, whom nobody had heard of in the US yet when I started listening. By the summer, she was THE artist. One of her early UK hits was a Dylan cover, Make You Feel My Love.
There are several other versions of this song, but Alan found one of Dylan singing it himself.
We listened to this in the car on the way to (or was it from?) a special dinner at the Edgewater in Madison. The highlights of the evening included the waitstaff making a flaming Irish coffee for dessert at table side. Personally, I don't like the Dylan version. His voice is gravelly and low with age, but still has his signature whine.
Listening back on these now, I realize I can't listen to breakup songs the same any more. Sure, my heart has been broken before, but never like this. The desperation to have things back the way they were, the longing to be with someone who chose not to stay with you, it all has a totally different gravity now. Did Alan know how many hearts he would break by leaving us?
Alan recently told me that he had a theme song. It had been proposed to him by a friend. I present that last today, but I think his theme song probably changed over the years, so here are some candidates that came to mind.
Let It Be
This is the first song he started to sing repeatedly, playing the chords on his guitar.
It wouldn't have been so bad if he could hit the top note. Imagine, "let it be, let it [insert noise vaguely resembling the sound of a dial-up modem connecting]..."
Paul described this song being inspired by a dream of his mother, who had died when he was young, telling him that things would be okay.
After Alan died, Mary Bennett, a good family friend, and Alan's surrogate Iowa mom, hugged me, with sad eyes but a comforting smile, and told me, "there will be answers, not now, but some day." Don't call her mother Mary, though. She doesn't go for that.
I Shall Be Released
As we enter into Alan's Bob Dylan phase, this was the song that he seemed to prefer the most. At the piano or with his guitar, we got to hear this one quite a bit, too. The way Alan sang it, the phrasing was more reminiscent of the the Joe Cocker version than The Band or Dylan himself, though I think it was actually a Dylan version he heard first.
I remember telling Alan that he had the whole teen angst thing going pretty well. He denied it, but then admitted that if you are 1) a teenager and 2) angsty, you might have teen angst. This is also around the time he started smoking. In the beginning, he knew I wouldn't approve, my being a doctor and all. He tried to hide it, but he was so bad at it. I caught him the very first time he tried to smoke a cigarette when I was visiting Mom's Madison condo.
I had gone into the bathroom, and when I came out, he was rushing back in from her porch stinking of smoke. "Dang, I thought you wouldn't notice," he said.
A couple weeks before he died, we were at Walgreen's, and Alan was working on an assignment for a rhetoric class. He had to tell a short personal story. He decided on the story of why he decided to smoke. He had been watching an old war movie with Dad and noticed that the soldiers were always smoking. He asked Dad why, and he said something about having so few of the comforts of home, and that being one thing they could have. Alan thought, "Wow, you can inhale comfort. I want that." Already, in the early years of high school, he had lost that sense of well-being at baseline that he strove to attain for his whole life.
All Along the Watchtower
Near the end of high school, Alan was playing in a band on his electric organ. One of their signature songs was All Along the Watchtower, and just like the other songs, we as a family got very intimate with the same damn chords over and over again. The song had made a resurgence, maybe because of its use in Battlestar Galactica.
Of course, he also like the Hendrix version:
Uncle Steve gave Alan a CD, A Nod to Bob, which had covers of many of Dylan's iconic songs. One that caught both our ears was a version of this song by The Paperboys that has Musical Priest, an Irish reel, in the background. It sounded like we were playing together, but couldn't decide on what to play. Had trouble finding one with good sound quality, sorry.
Take On Me
At some point, Alan's musical taste started veering from the 60s and 70s to the 80s and 90s. There was something about the aesthetic that spoke to him. It was weird to hear the music I grew up around, but never really listened to, become Alan's music of choice.
Of course, there's also this Family Guy bit:
And this:
Can't Take My Eyes Off You
This was officially Alan's theme song. Does it fit? Depending on how you see it, it's either just hauntingly beautiful and sweet, or a little creepy and desperate.
I'm not sure who made the call, one of his Iowa City friends I think. What song meant Alan to you? Is it on this list? It's hard to pin someone down with just one song.
