Alan had a brief obsession with the song, Goodbye Horses. He would play it for me. He would describe its disgusting use in Silence of the Lambs and Clerks II. "Did you know the singer is a woman?" he would ask.
I never paid him much mind about this. The song is creepy and dated. Now, I wish I had. In the song, one man describes his hopes crushed, and states, "All things pass into the night." The singer disagrees. The symbolism of the horses reportedly comes from the Bhagavad Gita, which Alan would have been quite familiar with, having read it for class, a copy still on his bookshelf.
In its allegory, the person as a whole is represented by a group of people on a chariot pulled by a team of horses. Two armies represent good and evil on either side of the path as the charioteer guides the reins of the mind through life. Alan's chariot, he felt, had veered off course. His digressions had set him up for mugshot extortion websites, and there, displayed for everyone, was the death of his dignity.
He probably felt that it was long past due to leave the chariot of his body and the horses of his senses behind. I hope now that he now knows some peace away from those things -- that his dashed hopes and dreams no longer haunt him, that he is flying over us, released.
Alan liked to listen to the song, Every Breath You Take, but he liked to change the words up. The wackier, the better. It became a bit of a game.
Every drain you snake,
Every leaf you rake,
Every vamp you stake,
Every bread you bake,
I'll be watching you.
Every wind you break,
Every death you fake,
Every earth you quake,
Every frost you flake,
I'll be watching you.
I guess this fit with his 80s obsession. It used to crack him up how many people would play this song at their wedding, given the clearly pathologic stalker vibe it gave off.
I wonder now if he is watching us. Part of me hopes he is. Part of me finds that creepy.
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.
