Living The Time of Music Legends

I’ve had this thought creep into my noodle a few times over the years, and every time it sets me pondering on the shear infancy of popular music as we know and love it today.

I feel so lucky to be living in a time when I have walked the earth the same time as musical revolutionaries such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Bob Marley just to name a few. We live in such an extraordinary time! Things have progressed so quickly it’s hard to believe that only as late as December 1952 people were getting down to a song called “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”  Selling over 2 million copies and reaching number 1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in 1953. We have come a long way folks in a very short period of time. Don’t you think?

The 1920’s was considered the birth of modern popular music, developments in recording equipment now allowed sounds and songs that had been cultivating in the backwaters to be captured and to spread around the world like sand in a desert storm. This was a sound that was of the average man, music such as country, blues, hillbilly music, gospel and folk.  This quickly over the next few decades spawned all the modern musical genres we find escape in today. So being alive at the same time as some of these musical innovators is a humbling thought.

To put this in some kind of perspective, music may have been in existence for at least 55,000 years some anthropologists say. Starting in Africa with our early ancestors and evolving to become something that is fundamental to our humanity today. This is why it is so fucking cool, it has gone from tribal chants and clap sticks, to Bob Dylan playing guitar and singing

“Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know too soon, there is no sense in trying”

I got to see Bob Dylan perform this song in London in 2003 what an amazing time to be alive, it’s mind blowing! We live in this time now with the people who kicked off the whole damn thing. I think 100 years from now people will still be listening to these musical legends and enjoying the raw honesty and passion of these pioneers. It’s something cool to think about.

This is what makes the whole creation of music so exciting for me, it can really go anywhere you dare to take it, because it is an evolving thing forever changing. Every time someone new decides to write a song, and if that song influences one other person who then decides to write a song, this song will be mixed with that song plus all his other influences to continue to make other song babies, and this will continue infinitely or until we do something stupid to end our time here on earth.

Something worth being grateful about I reckon.